100Eyes Blog

I am a photographer first, an editor second, a teacher, and these days, like many of us, a web developer. I’d like to share a bit that I have learned about a topic that many of you are interested in, search engines and how they rate your website.

There is a lot of talk about SEO optimization these days. (For those of you who do not know what that means, SEO stands for search engine optimization, or organizing your website in a way that will improve the way that Google and other search engines see it.) Much is written about SEO, and I thought I would break it down for in a way that people can understand and talk about some of the basics that have helped me in improving the results for my pages.

1) Common sense. As photographers we are identified our name. The number one element of SEO optimization is that you have a unique name for your site, so when you create your photographic identity, it makes sense to have a unique one. There are not going to be to many James Nachtwey’s out there, but if your name is Mike Smith, you may have some trouble. So common sense tells you that if you want to create a public identity, its better to be unique so that people can find you easily.

2) The title attribute on your home page is the single most important element in your search ranking. I am going to say that again, the title on your home page is the most important element in your search ranking. Choose your title carefully and once you establish your title, stick with it. You will be penalized if you change your title, whether this be on a website or on a blog. To see the title “tag” on any website, go to “view” on your browser and chose “view source.” Look for the title tag…..

3) The first words in your title count the most. Word your title so that it is interesting but also so that a machine can “understand it.” For example, photo and photography are similar words but a machine does not understand that, so perhaps getting both words into your title makes sense. If you are a corporate photographer, or a wedding photographer, you want to make sure that the words “wedding” or “photographer” are featured in the title. Make sure the description that follows the title reads in an informative and interesting way.

4) Create a website with quality content. Your photo essays may be among the best in the world, but if there is no content aside from images they may not do much for your searh results. Search engines like links in your page that connect to other high density content areas. So in some ways it might make sense for photographers to group together to create sites that are content rich rather than building individual sites, which are unlikely to have enough content to attract visitors. Think about content as something other than just your own photographs……think big.

5) Backlinks and Pagerank. These are truly the twin peaks of SEO, and you must understand what they are. Backlinks are links on other websites that refer to your site. As Google sees it, the more backlinks to your page the more important your page, as long as the page linking to yours has a “page rank” that is higher than yours. The Page Ranks go from 0-10, and you can see them in the Google toolbar if you install it on the Firefox browser. Below it is a pull-down menu to see which sites are linking to yours. These are the backlinks, and you need lots of them. Thousands.

The higher the ranking of pages that link to yours the higher your ranking will be. The higher your rank, the higher the more detailed information in your site, the titles of each individual page, the headers, and your word content will come up in searches.

6) All links are not equal. Many people think that by including their URL in many posts on various blogs, this will improve their Google ranking. Save yourself some time. It won’t. As the “bots” crawl over sites, they have an understanding, through the html and where the links appear on the page, of whether they are important or not…..a link that you enter in the comments section of a blog, has much less value than a link that appears in the context of an article on that blog. And the exact wording of the link text, that is, the highlighted words that feature the link are very important too. If a link to http://www.billsmith.com has the link text Bill Smith photography Google is going to associate that link with photography.

7) Publish, publish publish. Get your name on as many quality websites as you can, especially if they will link back to you. Then if you are careful with your title, you are going to see your rating improve steadily. This is the best way for a photographer to improve the SEO rating of their site.

7) Don’t spend too much time on keywords. Keywords are not factored in strongly to searches because they have been an area of great abuse. Since they are “invisible” on the site, ie, they are not real content, webmasters load them up with irrelevant critereon, and google knows this. Save yourself some time and stick to the basics. Make sure that all of the really important words is in your page title tag.

8) It is unclear to me if keywording each image is a good idea or not, but you should have at least a few jpegs that do reflect the general subject matter for the crawlers to harvest. Crawlers have issues with pictures because they can not verify what the pictures are. Google has actually created a game where viewers identify pictures in keywords, and play against other viewers. The goal of the game is to get people to help verify pictures on the web– without paying them, of course.

9) Have quality internal links in your site– these are the navigational links that move your readers from page to page. If your site is all Flash, it can’t be crawled…. although some have gotten around this limitation by creating html duplicates of Flash site pages. I don’t like all Flash sites….but if you have to use one , make sure that there are html pages that contain the internal navigational links to your pages.

10) No one can give you tools that are going to help your search ratings other than an understanding of what is important about getting high ranks in search engines. If you have a high quality website, with content that people want to see, you will get high rankings. If your images are published on websites with a high page ranking and if you are featured on important websites that link to you, you will benefit much more anything that you can do locally on your site.

Want more? Here is a nice case study. Lee Celano is a New Orleans based photographer who works for Reuters and the NY Times and the LA Times among others. Using the terms “photographer” and “New Orleans” Celano’s name would rarely come up in the top thirty two years ago. But Lee’s site has made gradual process and is now consistently on the first page of the search results.
Why?

Although the backlinks shown on the Google toolbar show only five, if you search Lee’s name there are hundreds of listings of photographs credited to Celano, which is itself a very unique name–many of these are high quality sites that have a very high page rank score, for example, the New York Times which carries a score from a 6 to an 8. Lee’s page, although it has only five backlinks, has a page rating of 3. That is very good for an individual photographer’s page! Now look at the title of Lee’s home page…..get it?

I have two photographers call me this week with similar stories. Both had approached a major magazine, or whatever that passes for these days, with a controversial and high profile story, and gotten financial guarantees for their work. Both had visualized the kind of impressive magazine spread that their stories warranted……and now, after a few months, both were disillusioned and a little frustrated.

Plenty of things that can go right when a magazine, editor, or an art director takes interest in your work, but there are also things that can go wrong, and I would like to make some suggestions about ways that you can negotiate the best arrangement with a magazine (or anyone really) that you can.

Here are the some suggestions:

1) Never assume anything. Most photo editors are going to be very enthusiastic, especially if they want something from you. So be certain to listen very carefully to what the person on the other end of the phone or across the table is saying, and make sure that you are not filtering their words with what you would like to hear.

2) Know what they do. You should be familiar enough with the publication to know what the magazine has done in the past, and factor it into your negotiations. If you are dealing with a magazine that never runs a a photo essay without a substantial text, you should understand that when you approach them you are going to need a text. If the magazine that never runs black and white photographs, there is a pretty good chance that the essay you envisioned in black and white will probably have to run in color.

3) Know what you want. Do you think that you your work justifies a ten page layout? Make sure to make that clear to the editor, and don’t just assume that if they show interest in you, this is what they have in mind. They might have an entirely different agenda for your work, read Rule #1.

4) Try and get what you want. Its a your story, your work, its about a subject that is meaningful to you and important. Your subjects deserve it, and you deserve it too. Be polite, but be demanding. Your work is about quality, not compromise, and you expect to be treated with respect as a professional. I am not suggesting that you resort to prima donna antics, but I will say that some of the better photographers are known to pull whatever strings they need to get what they want.

6) Don’t try and be friends. This is a business arrangement, not a social interaction.

7) OK, everything has gone great. The magazine wants to use your work, and you are going to negotiate the terms. Negotiation is in itself, an art. Some are more blessed than others. But these are some of the things that you need to think about.

– Don’t leave your work without getting some commitment. This is exactly what the magazine wants.

– If you make a deal make sure to negotiate how long can the magazine sit on your work without publishing it. That $1000. is not going to feel too good if after 6 months your story has not run. If your work has not been published in that time, then you need to be free to offer it elsewhere– its an important story, you did it right? Start at 30 days.

– If its an exclusive story that the magazine really wants the sky is the limit. If the story is right, you can get what you want, not the typical space rates that they would like to pay. For really exclusive images, the fees can go higher– much higher. In the event that you have an image that the world is really clamoring to see– get a really good boutique agency like Polaris, Redux, or Contact, or whatever the equivalent is in your country, to negotiate for you. You can in turn negotiate an arrangement with them, perhaps 35% commission for them, or maybe 40% under a certain level of sales, and then a sliding figure down to 25% if the sales are over a certain level.

– Don’t leave things hanging. If a period of time passes, call the editor or email before you start to feel uncomfortable.

– Trust your instincts. They rarely fail you. If it looks like a bad deal, then bail out.

Developing a good relation with a magazine or an editor takes a long time, and like any relationship, too much power for one side or another is not a good thing. So make sure to respect yourself and your work, be specific about what you want, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. No one will think less of you for it.