If you haven’t already figured it out I love photography, but with years of design and SEO experience under my belt I feel like it is time to share some wealth with the community. Photography is a tough business to get into simply because any little town or suburb is saturated with “Photographers”. This is a follow up post in our Photography Business Series. If you haven’t read the first post on why you need a photography blog for your business, check it out here.
What I want to do today is give you a couple quick actionable tips to help get your website noticed. After all one of the biggest misconceptions out there is that if you build this super duper awesome website that people are automatically going to see it. Last thing you want to do is spend thousands of dollars creating this amazing website and have get ZERO traffic to it.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are the sometimes referred to incoming links. Links pointing to your website. Backlinks are essential for your photography website. Backlinks are permanent links to your site that is on another website. Like for example when you wrote that post about your friends business and put a link to their website in the post. That is a permanent link back to their website; a backlink. When someone clicks on that link they are directed back to the linked website. If you want to learn more on backlinks check this out. Beginners Guide to Backlinks
Relationship between Google and Backlinks
Don’t believe what you read out there that states you can rank your photography website with zero backlinks, they are essential to creating a solid foundation for your business in google. Google has researched millions of websites and millions of keywords to come up with a special way to compare them all and rank accordingly.
Google has their own secret algorithm that they use to rank websites or rather keywords. That’s right, keywords. Keywords are the terms that people search for in Google. For example, wedding photographer near me or best wedding photographer in destin, fl. Your website can rank for several keywords at once, we will get into how to do that in another post. I just want to introduce you to the basics of backlinks and how to get a few of them for next to nothing.
Are Backlinks Necessary?
As mentioned before google has an algorithm that they use to rank keywords and they look heavily at backlinks. Google treats backlinks like references you have on your resume. The stronger the reference the more likely you are to get a job. The stronger the backlink the more likely you are to get ranked higher. So if you have a friend with a great blog with lots of traffic and you are able to get a backlink from their site that is like getting a golden ticket. One of the easiest way to do that is with guest posting. Which we will get into a little later on, point being backlinks are essential for your SEO success for your photography blog.
How do you get Backlinks
There are several ways to get backlinks for your photography blog. My intent here is to just touch the surface on the ways you can do so, a view from above not a step by step guide. I will include some links to resources I have personally used before that are very successful. Some of these links maybe affiliate links that pay us a commission if you click them.
Guest Posting
Guest Posting is where you write a blog post for someone else’s website or blog with the intent to get a backlink back to your blog. Pretty simple right; wrong! Guest Posting is one of the hardest techniques to master among the listed link types. Because of that I have linked to an awesome guide on how to make sure your guest post gets seen an approved! The following is an excerpt from the resource:
The benefits of guest blogging are clear:
1. You land backlinks from authority sites.
2. People look up to you as an expert.
3. Targeted referral traffic floods to your site.
Amazing, right?
The only question is:
How can you get BETTER results from guest posting?
The rest of the article can be found Here: Guide to Guest Posts
Citations
Just as backlinks are super important to your photography business and blog so are citations. Citations are mentions of your business name and address on other websites even if there is no link back to your website. The most important thing about citations is to make sure they are all accurate and that they all match. Moz.com has a great definition on citations.
Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google and Bing. Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.
Citations from well-established and well-indexed portals (i.e., Superpages.com) help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business’s contact information and categorization.
Head over Here for more on citations.
If you would like to have a company build some backlinks/citations for you I can personally recommend Citations Ninja. Great service at a great price.
Broken Link Building
Broken Link Building is just what it sounds like. You search for broken links, or links that linked out to a previous website that is no longer in existence. For example if you wrote an awesome guide on how to photography seniors and I linked out to it on my blog, but then you went out of business or took your blog down I would have a broken link. If someone else found that broken link and contacted me with another resource just as good or better I would more than likely replace that broken link with their link because they were kind enough to point that out for me.
Below is an excerpt from The Broken Link Building Bible
As a link building tactic, broken link building is an effective, white-hat, scalable, content-focused link building strategy that builds links through finding broken links, recreating that broken content, and helping webmasters replace broken links with your corrected link.
Broken link building may perhaps be the most effective, white-hat link building strategy in years. In particular, broken link building is appealing because the success of the campaign is directly proportional to how much good you do for the web.
The full Broken Link Building Bible can be found Here.
Web 2.0s
What is a web 2.0? Lets turn to our friends at Wikipedia for that.
A Web 2.0 site may allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites and social media sites (e.g., Facebook), blogs, wikis, folksonomies (“tagging” of websites and links), video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), hosted services, Web applications (“apps”), collaborative consumption platforms, and mashups.
Some popular web 2.0s we use all the time are wordpress.com, weebly.com, tumblr.com, twitter.com, facebook.com, medium.com, reddit.com etc. The great thing about web 2.0’s is that they are free. You don’t have to pay to get them, just simply register to the respected website with your email address and you are good to go.
An extra bonus if you would like to have them built for you. Head over to this Huge time saver
Syndication with IFTTT
IFTTT is If this then that or IFTTT. You can create several recipes from several different resources. Her is what Wikipedia describes it as
IFTTT is a free web-based service that allows users to create chains of simple conditional statements, called “recipes”, which are triggered based on changes to other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.[4] IFTTT is an abbreviation of “If This Then That”.
An example “recipe” might consist of sending an e-mail message if the IFTTT user tweets using a certain hashtag. Or, if the user is tagged by someone on Facebook, then that photo will be added to the user’s cloud-based photo archive.
One of the many ways you can utilize IFTTT for backlinks is to connect your web 2.0 accounts to IFTTT and then link them to your blogs RSS feed. So every time you post a new article on your photography blog it is then syndicated to your web 2.0s automatically creating a backlink to your blog or website.
Forum Profiles
Do you belong to any photography forums? I’m sure you do and if you do you will want to make sure that you have your website url posted in your profile page. Why? Because this is an easy way to get a relevant backlink to y9our photography website. If you don’t belong to any photography forums just head over to google and search for a few, register for them, and then put your website url in your profile page. Simple easy way to get some highly relevant backlinks to your website.
We hope you have found this article helpful if you have we would appreciate it if you would share it on social media or with your fellow photographers. Feel free to leave us a comment below with your favorite backlink tactic.
Here are some more helpful link building strategies
http://backlinko.com/seo-techniques
source http://photographicblog.com/how-i-doubled-traffic-to-my-photography-blog-with-backlinks/