SO LONG, SEO-UCKERS!
In April 2010 I wrote a blog article about the frustration caused by photographers who don’t do what I do getting their websites SEOd as if they did. Not only frustrating for me, but also for clients genuinely looking for a corporate, commercial or press photographer in the Bath, Bristol and Somerset areas (see what I did there?).
The majority of perps in the search-engine fraud were wedding photographers fishing for the extra calls, but if a client clicked to their site looking for examples of that type of work, they were often disappointed; galleries entitled Corporate Photography or Press Photography often containing nothing but… wedding images. Something of a waste of time, and I was frustrated by a lack of intelligence on Google’s part to seek out and demote these sites, making search results more relevant.
I’m happy to report that Google do appear to have been reading my blog, and now a search using the terms you would expect a potential client to use to find me sees my website listed top or at least on the first page. Especially pleasing when I’m competing against a glut of photographers in places like Bristol and ranking highly for Somerset.
A press picture for a corporate client, and definitely not a wedding photo
How have I achieved this? Well I stick to using simple, standard terms, and ensuring the images I upload for my clients are properly tagged, captioned, keyworded etc and plugging away at things like this blog.
In other words, my SEO efforts are honest. I don’t WANT to be found under wedding searches, or family portrait searches or plumbing and electrical searches. I want to be found for what I do, and it’s nice to be able to report that I’m getting new clients as a result. I’m not saying I do a perfect job, but I do my best and try to avoid keyword loading.
Hopefully those wedding photographers didn’t spend too much time or pay too much money to SEO ‘experts’ only to have their sites demoted by Google, and I do indeed hope they’re getting top listings for what they actually do.
With the latest digital revolution (the world is once again flat) everyone everywhere is an ‘expert’. In the wedding photography industry some untrained, self-appointed wedding photographer experts are teaching and promoting their artistic ‘style’ as though it is the newest, latest and greatest. Sadly it is based on exploiting the most common pitfalls of consumer-quality equipment, these same issues that have been labeled by experts over the years as bad photography. The uneducated blindly follow with awe and admiration. To the embarrassment of many, it doesn’t take much education to realize that this ‘new art’ is some of the old ‘most common problems’ taught in photography 101 class that are now being glamorized as art. It is almost funny to watch this fad develop among amateur wedding photographers and then see some truly professional wedding photographers with expensive lenses (that are difficult to flare) now using photoshop to add flare, isn’t that backwards? Should I mimic inferior-quality problems because inexperienced wedding photographers have tried to make it a popular wedding photography fad? It has been done before with such effects as adding blur, tinting or harsh-contrast to an image, if done judiciously to create a specific look or to achieve a neat effect is one thing, to be used to hide basic exposure or focus problems is another.