Web site optimisation for Photographers and Artists

There have been a number of instances recently where I have looked at improving the number of visitors to very visual sites - typically for an Artist or Photographer. I'm lucky enough to have a few good friends that are really excellent photographers, so its a personal interest of mine to make sure they do well!

However there always seems to be the same essential mismatch between what the photographer / artist does, and the requirements of good search engine marketing.

Lets start with their site. Typically this has been made by a designer - a really funky designer who the artist thinks is going to portray their really delightful works of art in the most favourable and appropriate light. As they would. However the first mistake is right there, as the web designer uses Flash to display the images - Flash being a bit of a search marketing No-No before you go any further.

Next the front page of the site may well be a splash page - "click here to enter", meaning that the most important page of the site contains no words at all.

And thirdly the sparse-yet-beautiful designer layout may omit one important thing from the entire web site - you've guessed it: words.

So why would our visual artist require words on their web site, when their images are quite beautiful enough to do the talking?

Well this brings us on to search engine marketing, and the one thing that search engines can actually read - words.

So the artists site is essentially invisible. No words - no search visitors. If I were optimising the site I might be looking to have pages optimised for phrases like "Cornish alternative Art", or "London Magazine photographer", or one of the phrases that people are actually searching for. Once this is done properly the web site will start to attract significant visitor numbers - yes you've guessed it - the people who are actually looking for the "Alternative Artist in Cornwall", or the "London Magazine Photographer".

Instead the site is only visible for the few words it contains - which might be "JohnSmithPhotographer.com", or something similarly unlikely to attract any searchers who didn't already know the photographer any way.

So what strategies could be put in place to make this image-rich site into one that is actually capable of attracting visitors through search, who want what my friend does, but don't know him yet.

(Remember with most sites 60% - 95% of all new visitors will come through search)

Let's list a few....
1. The site needs some words. Its no point putting them on the flash pages as they won't really count there, and every time you change them it will cost a fortune to pay the designer. You need words you can add and change, and the best way to do that is with a blog. The blog can be added within the same domain (like this one for example), but be completely separate from the structure of the Flash site. Each can link to the other, and the blog will have regular posts designed not only to use a variety of texts and pictures to inform the visitor what it is that my artist friend is all about, but also to attract the search engines for those target phrases we listed earlier: "Magazine Photographer in London", or "Alternative Artist in Cornwall".

2. So over time the blog will begin to make up the dearth of words on the site, and give the search engines something to get their teeth into. Luckily almost all photographers and artist sites make exactly the same mistakes, so my artist friend is already starting to get an edge over their competitors' web sites. You just need to keep blogging those words (and images of course) - "here are the latest photos from the shoot I did of the new BMW XYZ 123" etc.

3. However to rank highly for competitive phrases ("london photographer" returns 4.8 million results on google.co.uk today for example) the site will also need some links pointing to it. These links tell search engines that the site is considered important, and to rank it more highly. Normally we get these links from other texty web sites, and the content of those texty web sites should be relevant to ours: kodak.com would be a great place for my photographer to get a link from, for example. So we have to write more words, and post them elsewhere on the web. Press releases, directory listings, articles etc are all popular ways of achieving this. But what about the images, mu artist friend squirms?

4. Well you can get links with images, and it relies on an extent to giving some of them away, or giving them away a little bit. What you do it make a low resolution version of your piece of art, or photograph, and make that available on the web. You can do this via:

- Google Image search. Using "Google Webmaster Tools" you just tell Google that its OK to index the images on your site (make sure you really do own the copyright on them before you even put them on the site of course). Then you make sure every image has a really descriptive alt and title tags to make it clear what they are about, and Google will list them all in images.

- Flickr is another place to post some of your images, and each one of these too can contain a link back to your site.

- Panoramio is a Google property that allows you to post images with high quality back links to your site, and it has the added advantage of an integration with Google Maps, so you can locate exactly where the image was taken, painted, or what it represents. Again more good links back to your site.

- Scribd is another site where you can post all types of documents, images included, or perhaps a PDF containing your images, as well as a description of what you are all about (and containing your main keywords), with a link back to your site.

Other sites: There are a pile of other places where you can list your images and other graphical works, while they contribute to the search rankings of your site. Remember however that people can steal them - so you may not want to use everything you've ever produced in this way. You can water mark images, however making them that much less attractive to view may not help you too much. Remember that you are only ever putting a low resolution version on the web, so people will at worst be able to use them on their mobile phone's screen saver, or perhaps their web site. If they want a good quality version, they still have to come to you.

Remember also that you need words in your links to your site, just like you need them on your site. So it really pays to have a lot of links that say "Alternative Art Cornwall" or "London Photographer" in the anchor text, to make it perfectly clear that is what the link is about.

At the end of the day you may be perfectly happy to use your web site as a kind of portfolio for people who already know you to look at your word, and if that is the case then your Flash site will do just fine without any further help.

But if you want the site to bring you new customers that don't already know you, particularly in these difficult economic times, then you should consider doing some of the things listed here: and you need WORDS!