Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any website but it’s especially important for photographers wanting to draw the right audience to their website. For example as a Portland event photographer, I want local people to come to my site, learn about my services, and contact me so that I can hopefully work for them.
When it comes to good SEO practices, it helps to have a website with some good site design and structure (if you use WordPress, some popular themes with great SEO features include those by StudioPress, and Thesis). More importantly, it’s important to write content that optimized for SEO. This includes keyword use, keyword density, article length, and other factors. For the past few months I’ve been using the Scribe SEO WordPress plugin for testing and verifying the search-friendliness of my articles. It’s worked really well.
Scribe is a subscription-based service – you sign up for Scribe SEO and pay on a monthly basis based on the number of articles you need to test and optimize. After installing the plugin, you’ll see a new panel on the WordPress post creation screen. A short checklist of important items (such as a search-friendly title and excerpt) will change from red to green as you prepare your article, and when you think you’re ready you can press a button to have your article analyzed by the Scribe SEO service.
One component of the analysis is keyword research – both comparative research as well as analyzing your writing to identify your keywords. Based on the keywords you’re using, Scribe SEO can suggest alternative keywords that might draw additional traffic. Another major component of the analysis is a 15-part breakdown of how to best tweak your content for search engines; topics include article length, keyword placement, hyperlinks, and more. Lastly, a link building component helps identify potential sources for backlinks from other sites.
I’ve talked about the WordPress plugin, but Scribe SEO is also available for Joomla, Drupal, and as a standalone service used directly on the web. If you’re looking to check your SEO skills, I’d recommend doing what I did and subscribe to Scribe SEO for a few months and see what your results are showing. I found that it helped me improve the search-friendliness of my blog posts, drawing new visitors to my website to check out my photos and photography services.
I’m an affiliate for Scribe; if you use one of my links to purchase the service I’ll receive a small commission that helps fund this site.
