The seventh part of SEO for photographers looks at some other factors that could improve the search engine optimisation for your website. One of the factors that will deter users and possibly search engines is speed. The time it takes to load your website is critical. As I have previously said you need people to stay on your site. Google has a factor called bounce rate which is how many get to a page of your site and then leave for another site without navigating to another page on your website. So somebody leaving before the page loads is bad news.
SEO for Photographers Useful Tools
There are a number of tools that can check your load time but GTmetrix combines the results from 2 of them and shows what you can do to improve.
SEO for Photographers – gtmetrix
It has taken a lot of fiddling to get my site a double A rating and it is not realistic for my site to implement the recommended improvements.
So how do you get to this sort of rating? The truth is that you have to look at every aspect of the page and see what you can combine, you can compress or you can remove. Much of this can be done with the addition of plugins such as W3 Total Cache. This gives a fantastic page reduction and adds such things as telling browsers to cache images and compressing whatever it can. Images can also be an issue and again another plugin called Smush it solves the problem.
Other SEO for Photographers
So your website is loading fast but have we perfected our SEO for photographers? Well one further thing that we should check is the validity of our code at the W3C Validator. There are many search engine optimisation software packages that you can find as well as many online suites of tests that you can use. I would always say if they are free then have a look, you never know if you will find another tweak or error to correct. I have certainly found my fair share.
SEO for Photographers Part 6 SEO for Photographers Part 8