So much has happened in a year’s time in the way businesses are approaching SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google has done a fabulous job interjecting SEO into our culture with phrases such as: keywords, metadata tags, page ranking, and 301 redirect. Our lives revolve around The Search . . . not the yellow or white page kind, dropped off at the end of our driveways, but the search through the incredible amount of information at our fingertips provided by the internet. This weekend I was watching the Vikings/Packers game and I asked which college Adrian Peterson had attended. My son was at the computer and did a quick search for the answer-– 15 seconds later: University of Oklahoma.

There is an endless amount of material describing SEO and why and how to incorporate it into your business. The new marketing approach, using SEO, is titled, “Inbound Marketing” versus the marketing we grew up with which is “Outbound Marketing.” Outbound Marketing is a “push” approach using print ads, marketing calls, email blasts, trade shows and mailings. Inbound Marketing is a “pull” approach based on good rich content provided by your website, blog, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter and landing pages.

As a photographer, the amount of time and effort you put into your website, blog, and podcasts can result in significant long-term dividends. Over 90% of the brides searching for a wedding photographer on a non-referral basis will use a search engine to put together a short list of wedding photographers in her area. Whether or not you will be on the short list is largely determined by SEO. It’s very important to be on the first page of any search because it’s rare that the reader will go to the 2nd or 3rd page.

One of the key ingredients to ensure that your business shows up on the first page is to analyze your site to determine whether or not it’s being favorably viewed by the search engines. There are many free tools out there to analyze, diagnose, and improve your website.

The tool I’ve found to be most useful is Hubspot’s Website Grader. Hubspot is a marketing consulting firm that is working with small to medium-sized companies to reengineer their approach to marketing. They have put together several “Graders” to assist their clients in measuring the effectiveness of websites, Facebook, Twitter, press releases and blogging. The Website Grader asks for your URL address and then analyzes your website using many of the metrics devised by Google to crawl your website for SEO purposes. Although Website Grader isn’t perfect, it’s a pretty effective check to see what’s working and what isn’t. Then you can get with your webmaster and refine your website and rerun the site through Website Grader to measure the various improvements.

Check to see what your Website Grade is today with an eye on improving your SEO.

The reality is it’s not a perfect world and every website should be constantly checked.  It should be checked on different computers as well.  I recently had a great suggestion from an attendee at a  marketing presentation I did at the IPI Summer Convention. 

“We have six people in the company.  Every morning when they boot up, their landing page is a different page on our website.  That’s six different pages that get checked first thing, before we even start the day!”

Years ago there was  a TV campaign that simply had one line:  “It’s 11:00 PM.  Do you know where your kids are?’  Well, it’s time to modify and bring that line into business and 2009…”It’s the start of another business day – do you know if your site’s working?”

Just about every day I find websites that never load or are simply so slow, I lose interest.   So, check out your website every day and whenever you can, check it out on somebody else’s computer.    I recently spoke at IPI’s Summer Workshop and one of the attendees told me that everybody in his office has their computer set up to land on a different page of the website every time they turn on their computer.   It’s a brilliant idea and in this case they have six pairs of eyes checking six different pages/actions to make sure things are working right. 

When checking your website, if nothing else, pay attention to the following:

• Load Time: I know you like the music and ego-driving introductions, but don’t get carried away. If it doesn’t load fast you’ll lose your potential customer.

• Image Quality: I’m amazed to see how many photographers simply load in images to fill up space.  If it’s not your very best work, don’t put it on your site.  If you wouldn’t buy the image yourself, then it’s not your very best work!

• Diversity: You never know who’s going to look at your site. Display images showing your full potential and include a good variety of specialties.  For example: fashion, family, landscape, macro, wedding and portrait.  Also mix up the techniques and show black-and white, color, infrared, cross-processing, etc.

• Contact Information: Give people a way to respond and talk to you live. You’re in a service business and nobody has confidence in an email contact system by itself.  Let people call you! 

• Images: If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then give people images, NOT copy.  Check out websites by people like Yervant, Joe Buissink, Bambi Cantrell and Jerry Ghionis and you’ll see lots of images.  And there’s another common denominator in all four of these websites – they were all built by Bigfolio.   That’s an incredible statement in itself.

There’s a ton of information out there about making your website more effective.  I’ll be the first to admit, it’s hard to practice what I preach, but at the same time, a great website should always be viewed as work in progress.  The expression goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”   Well, it should be “If it ain’t broke you haven’t looked hard enough!”

And if you’re looking for more tips, along with marketing, lighting, SEO/SEM, social media, blogging, fusion technology and album design (just to name a few) - join us August 16 – 19 in Las Vegas for Summer School.  It’s definitely going to be a kick and you’ll leave with new ideas you can start to implement the minute you get back!  It’s 15 different speakers in 2 1/2 days and loaded with great content with a few surprises here and there too!  Hope to see you in Vegas.

In short, Delicious is a way for you to bookmark a site to a central location online, so no matter where you are, so long as you have an internet connection, you can call up that bookmark. Better yet, you can install a Delicious plug-in to our browser so you can access your Delicious bookmarks right from your browser w/o having to go to their site. Here’s how I use it:

Let’s say I’m on a very cool site that I absolutely MUST come back to. Oh, maybe a site like mei500.com/blog.  The guest blog posts are incredible and the content helps me improve my business.  Instead of using my traditional browser bookmarking feature, I’ll click the Delicious “Tag” bookmarking button in my broswer’s nav bar. (see fig 1).

This will then bring up a window where I can enter info about the site and “tag” it. Tagging is just assigning a category to the site. I can add as many tags as I like, separated by spaces. (See Fig 2). Sometimes, depending on the popularity of the site, Delicious will auto-insert some tags for you, as well as give you suggestions for other tags. You can get rid of any tags you don’t want.

Now, let’s say I’m on another computer and want to pull up that site again. If the Delicious plug-in is installed, I can click on the Bookmarks button, bring up the bookmarks list on the left, type either the name of the site or the tag, and it will come up in a list below (see fig 3).

If the browser I’m on doesn’t have the plug in, I’ll just go to delicious.com, log in, and bring up all my bookmarks (see fig 4).

NETWORKING
Another cool feature of Delicious is the ability to build a network of people who share similar interests. From your Delicious home page, you can see how many other people also tagged any page you’ve also tagged. You can also click through to their Delicious home page, thus discovering new sites you may find of interest.

IN SUMMARY
If you’re an internet hound like I am and love to learn, Delicious is an ideal way for you to gather sites, do research, and network with other professionals.

Ron Dawson, Dare Dreamer Media