Simple, Do-It-Yourself Ways to Increase your Visibility Online

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization via Social Media for Professional Photographers (and other small businesses).

This introductory article is intended for independent studio owners and other professional photographers who generally do their own marketing and who don't know a whole lot about utilizing social media for business or seach engine optimization (SEO).

SEO can be thought of as a combination of "on-page" methods--the methods you use on your site--and "off-page" methods which are genrally refered to as link building.

Off-page methods are generally considered to be more "potent" than on-page so we will start there. Additionally, you can probably do these things very easily and inexpensively-these tips only require taking the time to do them.

Search Engines view links as "votes" for pages and sites. If you want a site or page to be more popular, you need to "build" more links to it. One of the easiest ways to do this is social media-especially since most people already have profiles set up.

* You should have a Facebook profile (personal) and page (business). If setting up a page for the firsttime, for a locally-relevant business choose a "local" business page...if yours isn't a local page I wouldn't worry about it.
* Set up a profile and local (or company page depending on the scope of your business) page on Google+. (For what it's worth, I find Google+ easier to use, nicer to look at and less invasive.)
* Set up a profile and page on LinkedIn.
* and, Set up an account on Twitter.

That said, if you will never use a profile/page there isn't much point in setting it up. Social media can be pretty time consuming (most of these services will take 1-2 hours per profile or page to set up correctly). Thus, I only have a Twitter account for my business, not a personal, I allow it to act as both and due to the nature of Twitter (posts are limited to 160 characters) it is fairly impersonal and public-and in my opinion appropriate to use one account as both business and personal.

Ideally you should also have profiles on a couple social bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg.

Next, claim the popular local merchant directory/maps listings. Google Places, Bing/Yahoo! Maps, Yelp, Angie's List, Merchant Circle, City Search/City Grid etc. [Note: many of these companies offer "premium" listings for a fee; I don't purchase premium listings, I really just want their link "voting" for my website.]

Now, and this is CRITICAL, you need to link them all to each other and your website and make sure you fill out the profiles with relevant information. What's relevant? Anything that is a business asset basically...it really doesn't matter if you like to crochet unless it will help your potential customers find you so make sure you fill out descriptions and captions with full sentences that feature keywords (i.e. photography, studio, PhotoShop, weddings) relating to your business and your location. Make sure your hours and address are correct. Upload a picture or two (or ten, especially if you're a photographer-another thing I like about Google+ is that it displays pictures really nicely). And fill in links to everything else everywhere possible.

Make sure you 'like' and 'follow' and 'friend' people and pages. 'Tweet' about, comment on, and '+1' pages, profiles and sites that you like and support. Heck, do me a favor and if you found this article useful, share it with your social network and tell them about it, the original can be found here: Business for Photographers. While a link is basically a "vote" for that page, don't be stingy with them when appropriate and especially when it is to other relevant content...being in the photography business, the most valuable links you can have and give are links to/from other sites about related topics, it helps with 'relevance' and 'authority.' Thus, liking and commenting about and linking to (and everything else you can) related resources is a wise move...But that doesn't mean you should freely link to, or post about, a competitor, after all it is still a "vote."

Keeping the "vote" idea in mind, use that as a vote for a page that will help you somehow. For instance, Twitter only allows you to list one link on your profile, so you should make it your website, not Facebook (that is another thing that, I like about Google+, they prominently feature links and you can separate them by category and level of privacy). Anything that isn't totally public on any of these sites is invisible to search engines, so my recommendation is that you have profiles that you use for business and, if you like social media, that you maintain separate personal profiles, or at least varying degrees of privacy settings. Having multiple profiles is a violation of some of these sites' terms, so take this recommendation with a grain of salt.

Links, to your site and other profiles, should generally be formatted like this:

http://www.your-site.com

or

http://your-site.com

In most cases, using "www" or not is not important, but it is important that you pick one format and stick with it...otherwise search engines will split the weight of your link "votes" amongst the variations and it dilutes the effect of SEO strategies. If you want to err on the side of caution just include "www" every time. Some services automatically insert "http://" at the begining of links, so after you create a link make sure you click on it and double-check that they work and take you where you want to go.

As I write this I realize there is an awful lot of ground to cover here. You can visit the site through the link above and find my continued writings on this and other related topics.