Help People Find You

By Michelle Fontaine

Have you ever wondered how search engines like Google and Yahoo work? Can someone who does not know your URL but is looking for you find you? Do you wonder what happens when someone types in "Photography of Your Name" in the search bar? Try "Photography of Michelle Fontaine". Will they find the website that you have slaved over and are so proud of? If you have prints or photographic items for sale through your site, optimizing your website needs to be part of your marketing efforts! This article demystifies and helps you naturally optimize your own website, at no cost, and without knowing html. Incorporate these good habits into your basic website development knowledge and they will pay off.

There are important things you can do without knowing html, but you should know what html is. It's short for hypertext markup language and it's the code behind the page you see on your monitor. To see html, go to the top of this very page and, from the toolbar, select 'view' and 'source'. That opens a notepad screen with html on it. The html from this page is also pasted here on the right.

If you want to learn how to make html more optimized, I'll steer you to a good article and checklist at the end of this one. For this article, however, we'll work on the WYSIWYG concept. What you see is what you get, or WYSIWYG, is what you're looking at right now, not the code behind it.

html from this page

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<td width="692" colspan="2" height="82"> Have you ever wondered how search engines like Google and Yahoo work? Can someone who does not know your URL but is looking for you find you? Do you wonder what happens when someone types in "Photography of Your Name" in the search bar? Try "Photography of Michelle Fontaine". Will they
find the website that you have slaved over and are so proud of? If you have prints or photographic items for sale through your site, optimizing your website needs to be part of your marketing efforts! This article demystifies and helps you naturally optimize your own website, at no cost, and without knowing html. Incorporate these steps into your basic website development knowledge and they will pay off.

</td>
</tr>

Crawler-based search engines, which include the number one search engine, Google, design algorithms which are the rules their crawler robots follow. The 'bots' or 'spiders' are little programs that crawl around the Internet 24/7 and look for certain things. When they find them, they bring the address back to the Mama Search Engine. These web pages are then indexed and become searchable. What do 'bots' look for? One of the most important things they look for is anything new and relevant that they have not seen before.

Write - 'Bots' love new content. That's why adding articles and text specific to your website objective is so important to a website. Our quality content will have a direct relation to photography. Because we are focusing on the text that shows and not the hidden code, it is very important to have lots of key words in your text. Words like photography, photographs, images, digital, camera, technical terms like focal length, ISO, etc..... you know, the words we photographers just love to talk about ;)

Graphics - As photographers you may add a copyright or title directly to your images or you may prefer very little text on your pages so your images stand out, or you have a logo. I agree with those philosophies but you need to understand that 'bots' don't care about images at all and they can't see text built into the graphics. If your site is too image heavy and contains no substantial text, your site stands little change of being found in a search. Consider adding a descriptive sentence or technical info.

Frames, Flash and Other Dynamic Technology - Do not build your website in frames. When your web pages are within a frame structure, 'bots' get stuck in the frame and normally don't even see the pages themselves. This is probably one of the most basic errors people make when deciding how to create their website. Companies that have frame sites that do well in searches spend huge amounts of money for paid ads and optimization. In Photoshop, you can create web galleries. Be aware that some of them create frames. They look good but you don't help your searchability. My preference is html and adding descriptions. It's your choice.

Sites that use ASP, PERL, Cold Fusion and Flash look great but they are not able to be crawled and indexed. This type of technology often puts '??' in the URLs and many 'bots' cannot see past a '?' in the link. There are ways around this, but this article assumes your website will be basic, photogenic and created and maintained by you. The Golden Rule is 'Basic html is good'.

Page Titles - Give serious thought to what you title each page. It is what people see when they bookmark your site. Each page should have a unique descriptive title and be no more than 5-10 words. Because 'bots' assume your most important keywords will be near the top of the page, some search engines only look at the first few paragraphs of a page. Therefore, provide a one or two sentence summary at the top of each page. You could introduce your galleries on a page with text at the top describing your style.

Linking and Reciprocal Linking - Hyperlinking in a purposeful way increases your chances to achieve a good search engine position. Link to relevant outside sites only. When search engines were in their infancy, people learned how to trick the algorithms and gain high ranking. As SEO (Search Engine Optimization) got more sophisticated, trying to trick the algorithm earned negative points, not positive ones. So, be sure to have a place on your website that links to all your favorite photography sites. If you can get them to link back to your site, you earn bonus points!

Links Should Open in New Window - Writing on the web has so many advantages. I find one of the best ones is that you can link to other sections of your article or pages or other sites to clarify your writing. One technique I strongly recommend is to make the hyperlink open in a New Window. This way the viewer isn't sent to another site but is invited to look at a window within your page. Canceling out of that returns them to your article.

Hyperlink the right words - When you create a hyperlink, the words you use as your link are also important. For example,

GOOD - You can read about website algorithms here.

Not as GOOD - You can read about website algorithms here.

Also link within your site as often as it makes sense to your writing or navigation. The 'bots' love links, internal and external, as long as they are quality links and relevant. In our case, that means relevant to photography.

By choosing New Window, you keep your viewers on your site.

Site Page - Another huge asset to a website is a Site Page or Site Map. This is a page that contains links to every page on your site. Crawlers will find this page and link through every link, reviewing every one of your linked web pages. It's also one of the most useful tools to a human viewer. I certainly appreciate finding one on a sophisticated website. Makes life so much easier.

Footers - A footer is part of a web page that is created once and appears on all designated pages. Have you ever printed off a web page for reference and later tried to find the URL or contact info on it and found they were not there? That happens a lot! The only way to be sure every page someone prints will have your contact info on it is to have a footer which contains that information.

My footer (shown on right on the bottom of the image) contains a copyright notice along with contact info and appears on every page.

A footer should appear on every page

I hope this article has increased your appetite to create a photography website and that it doesn't feel too overwhelming. In a future article, which is underway, I'll take you through a step-by-step tutorial. If you remember anything here, make it this:

Provide quality content, relevant content to photography, refresh often, use text in addition to images and link to relevant sites as well as within your own site. Don't use frames or other fancy dynamic features. Always include a site page and a footer page. If you do these things on the viewable pages, your site will be easier to find.

Now, as promised, if you want to link to a Search Engine Optimization Checklist, you can download it free from www.gotomarketstrategies.com. You will need to provide basic contact info and an email for it to be sent to. I have found their checklist to be very helpful.