If you’re like most people, you’ve heard the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) before.  You can’t really escape it – the importance of a good SEO strategy as part of your overall marketing plan is seemingly on everyone’s lips (and websites) these days.  In this new feature we’ll look at what SEO is and then cover how you can make SEO work for you with your PhotoBiz site.

“White Hat” SEO = Good

As we discussed last time, there are generally two types of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat. Black Hat SEO utilizes unethical methods to artificially inflate search engine placement. While White Hat SEO on the other hand, involves ethical techniques which conform to a search engine provider’s guidelines with no deceptions.  We are first going to focus in a little more on the White Hat techniques…

There is no specific ruleset for good SEO. The general guideline is this: the more accessible and readable your website would be to a live human being, the better it will rank on a search engine. Search engines specifically want to catalog pages that humans will use. The best thing you can do, therefore, is to make your content clear, accessible, easy to find, relevant and up to date.

Let’s look at some other things you can do to improve your searchability.

Links

One of the best things you can do for your site’s rank is to have a lot of good quality pages linking back to you. Keep in mind what the search engines consider “good quality”. Links from real sites are quality. Links from legitimate social media pages are good, too. read full blog entry…

Meta Tags for Photographers

There’s a lot of debate in the SEO community about the effectiveness of the Meta fields. In this SEO Corner, we’ll take a look at Meta tags and what they can and can’t do for your PhotoBiz site. We’ll also look at ways to maximize your Meta Tag effectiveness.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, generally after the title tag. The purpose of the tag is to provide information for programs such as browsers or search engine crawlers to interpret about your website. PhotoBiz natively supports three types of Meta tag in the Search Engine Optimization section: Meta Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords.

There are two places in your PhotoBiz site where you can build Meta information: Globally, and per page. Global meta tags can be found in your Flash/HTML Control Panel by clicking on the Search Engines icon. Meta information you add in these fields will become the default Metas for your entire site. You can also configure Meta Description and Keywords for individual pages, including your Splash Intro. These can be found generally on the Details tab of any page in your site, under Search Engine Optimization.

You do not need to fill this information out for every page of your site. If you leave these fields blank, they will use the default Meta Tag information you have set up in your Search Engines section. However, if you want to have different keywords or descriptions on specific individual pages, this is where you set them up.

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What is It?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic”) search results as opposed to paid search engine placement.

There are a number of factors that impact search engine optimization.  The most key thing to remember is that the search engines want pages with useful, relevant content that will be easy for a human reader to use.  You may have read some books or attended a seminar about SEO and heard about different things you can do to increase your page ranking.  We want to help you develop a good SEO Strategy – and equally important, avoid a bad one.
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