SEO for photographers – Part 4
seo for photographers – long tail keywords
In part 4 of SEO for photographers we are going to look at keywords and how they are used in your blog post or page. In an earlier article I mentioned the term stop words such as in, for, the etc. so you might ask why I am using the for in “SEO for photographers” – the truth is that I have identified the complete term as a commonly entered search in Google.
Now if you have got this far I am obviously doing something right. I do not ask for money, although I would never say no. If I was doing this as a business I would have long ago asked you to sign up for an email newsletter called SEO for photographers – there is a good idea for you. I might have even promised you a free e-book for signing up – actually you can have all the SEO for photographers content for free. I would simply like you to go to the DorsetPhotoEvent Facebook page and like me. You should be getting your potential clients to do the same on your page. Build an audience to market to.
A common used SEO term is “long tailed keyword phrases” for which there are many meanings however we have “A term used to describe less searched for words but whose combined search volumes may outweigh those of the top ten keywords. As a concept, optimising a website for long tail keywords may prove extremely successful by essentially taking a big piece of a small pie.” from http://www.web-design-directory-uk.co.uk/jargon-buster.htm
What I understand this to mean is that we are typically looking to optimise for a 3 – 5 word long phrase that is not commonly searched for and from these 3 – 5 words we can also make a number of other search phrases i.e. search phrases within keyword phrases. The idea behind this was for Google adwords and allowing partial matches.
As an example if I were a Dorset based wedding photographer then “Wedding Photographer Dorset” might be a relatively common search term. “Contemporary Wedding Photographer Dorset” however has a much lower search volume. By using the Google adwords tool I can see that there are 1900 searches per month for the first and not enough data for the second to give a figure. Wedding Photographer has about 368,000 searches per month.
I use this idea to generate titles for posts. You can see the title not on the page but in the tab above. A normal web page has a head section that is not seen on the page but is used to bring in other code and spread other info. This is put into the head of the page in the title tag and for this page you would have “<title>SEO for Photographers Part 4 Keywords & Long Tail Phrases</title>” – right click on this page and view source and you should see it. Also included in the head is a meta description and meta keywords.
There are some recognised limits, the title should be between 40 and 67 (possibly 70) characters. The Description should be no longer than 156 characters and use at least 120 if you can. Do not just repeat the title but mix it up a bit. Lastly the keywords. It has been said that these are no longer used by search engines, however there is no reason not to use them. Just make sure that the keywords are in the body text, you could get penalised if they are not.
SEO for Photographers is what I am saying
The focus of these articles has been “SEO for photographers” so you will find that at the start of my title, the start of my description and in my keywords. You will also see it in big bold letters at the start of the page and again towards the start of the first sentence. Remember the Duck principle, I am taking every opportunity to say to Google Look here is a Duck. In my case I am saying this is about SEO for Photographers.
There is a big advantage to using all of these long tail phrases and that is that they contain many 2 and 3 keyword phrases that I want to rank for. It is very unlikely that I will get to the top if I concentrate on “Wedding Photographer” but I will creep up the rankings for it as a side effect of these long tail keywords.
There is a further point that is important. Many state that Google now feeds you results based upon what it knows about you. The first 3 or 4 results you see are believed to be selected based purely on rankings, but what follows is as much about the searcher as it is about the search. Think then what sorts of things your potential clients may be looking at and searching for on the Internet. Include those ideas in your pages and blog posts.
SEO for Photographers Part 3 SEO for Photographers Part 5