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035: SEO for Photographers with Dylan Howell

January 31, 2018

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SEO for Photographers with Dylan Howell

Are you interested in learning the specifics around SEO for Photographers?  In addition, do you want to use SEO to be found by potential customers online?  Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the term for making sure your website is easily found when someone searches for your speciality online. Making sure your SEO is solid can make the difference between staying busy and hoping for leads. By learning the basics of SEO, you can really help your website climb to the top.

Dylan Howell is an incredible photographer based out of Portland, Oregon. Not only is his work fantastic but his SEO is super strong and he’s sharing the basics with us on this episode The Bearded Tog. 

We talk about keywords, Google Analytics, Squarespace vs WordPress, and the best plugins and apps to setup and track your SEO rankings.

Dylan Howell on the SEO for Photographers

  • The key to ranking well in SEO is to present your information in a way that is best for Google to use. Google wants to provide it’s search users with the content they are looking for, and you must make it easy for the google robots to do that.
  • Do not spam with your keywords. Google will give you negative points for trying to stuff a bunch of words into a page or meta description. 
  • If you are just starting in optimizing your site for SEO, don’t worry about having to do everything at once. Start with yoru home page, and make sure you have written complete sentences about who you are and what you  do on that page. 
  • Google analytics is a great (and free!) tool for seeing how people find your website and what they do once they are on it. 
  • Dylan recommends building websites on WordPress and considers it the best platform for having high ranking pages. 
  • Backlinks are links from other websites you yours, and are useful in showing that you have authority on a topic. To get backlinks, submit your work for publications or offer to write guest posts on others websites. 
  • People aren’t necessarily searching for your name, so making sure you rank for what you do and where you are (for example, “Portland Wedding Photographer”) is important. 
  • Page titles are important in ranking. 
  • An XML site map is a piece of code that you submit to google to tell it’s robots what is on your website,and how often they should check back for updates. Each website hosting platform has a way or plugin for you to get this code. 

Outsourcing Your SEO

  • If you want to hire someone to do your seo for you, be careful.  The seo world has a few good people in it, and also a lot of very sketchy organizations that could do damage to your website. 
  • Consider reaching out to people in a different area or market who have ranked high in search results and asking them if they offer mentoring sessions or tips to help you rank high in your area. 

Connect with Dylan Howell 

Website: https://dylanmhowell.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dylanmhowell/ 

Join Dylan’s Patreon: SEO for Photographers

Dylan’s Favorite Apps

SEO Edge 

Squoosh

Links

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See Adam Mason’s work here: adammason.com

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