With thousands of people using search engines to find a photographer every day, it makes sense to do every thing you can to ensure that these potential customers find your website. This article will give you some simple and effective tips that can dramatically increase your search engine rankings.

Use Meaningful Title Bars.
The title bar is the section up the very top left of your Internet browser (see below).

Example of Title Bar Displayed in Internet Browser

The text that you display in the title bar is important for two main reasons. Firstly, search engines (like Google) look for keywords in the title bar. Secondly, when you are listed in Google, the text in the title bar is what is displayed for potential customers to see. This means that the text you put in the title bar must have keywords in it (for the search engines to find), and must also encourage potential customers to want to visit your site from seeing the text in the search engine results. See below for an example of the title bar text being displayed in Google search engine results.

Example of Title Bar Text in Google Search Results

Use Keywords in your Text.
Search engines much prefer keywords that are used in sentences rather than just comma separated lists of keywords. For example, if you are a wedding photographer, make sure you use the words "wedding photographer" where ever possible throughout your website. It is also a very good idea to include your location in the text. For example, "John Smith is an award winning wedding photographer based in New York City".

Get Other Sites to Link to Your Website
Search engines figure that if a lot of other highly ranked websites are linking to yours, then your site must also deserve a high ranking. Well that could be a slight simplification, but the basic principle is true.

The first step to do this is to ask any friends or business contacts to place a link on their website to your website. In return, you could offer them a link back from your website to their website (possibly on a "Links" page).

It also helps if websites linking to yours use keywords in the actual link that points your website.

An example of a good use of keywords in link text:

• Wedding Photographer in New York City

Examples of bad use of keywords in link textinstead of a link like this:

• Click Here for a Wedding Photographer in New York City
• www.yoursite.com (notice that just the URL is used with no keywords)

List Your Website in Internet Directories
Listing your website in internet directories not only lets Google know about your website, it also improves your search rankings. This is because Google (and other search engines) give higher rankings to websites that have many other websites linking to them.

There are thousands of internet directories available that you can list your website in for free. When deciding which internet directories to list your site in, try to choose directories that are highly ranked by Google themselves.

You can view a list of internet directories sorted by their Google page ranking at the following URL (the "PR" column is the "Google Page Ranking" - the higher the ranking the better):

http://www.web-site-search-engine-optimization.com/directorylist.php?list=free&orderby=pr&order=desc&page=1

Make Sure Your Menu is Search Engine Friendly
Now this is where it gets a little technical, but try to bear with us! The best kind of links to use in your menu are standard HTML links. The types of menus to be weary of are "Flash" menus and "Javascript" menus (not to say that all Javascript menus are bad, but a large proportion of them are not very search engine friendly).

If you are unsure if the menu on your website is search engine friendly, feel free to contact us and we will be able to help you out.

Include a Site Map on Your Website
A site map is a page that lists links to all the pages on your website. Make sure the links on your site map page are standard HTML links, and not Flash or Javascript.

Submit Your Website to Search Engines
To let the search engines know your website exists, you can "submit your website" to them. After you submit your website, the search engines will "crawl" your website and include it in their listings. It can take some time for this to happen, so you will need to be patient. Here are some links where you can submit your site:

• Google - http://www.google.com/addurl
• MSN - http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Google also has a "Sitemaps" feature where you are able to submit all the pages on your website to Google with one file. To find out more, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html

Regularly Update Your Website
Search engines like to see that the content on your pages is up to date. One mechanism they use to determine if your website is up to date is by monitoring how regularly content is added or modified.

Updating your website may be a problem if you are not familiar with web page design, so it can be a good idea to use a website content management system. If you do decide to use a website content management system, make sure it is search engine friendly. Again, feel free to contact us if you are unsure and we will be able to give you a hand.

Correct Use of <h1> and <h2> Tags
If you are familiar with these HTML tags, then it is a good idea to use them for headings thoughout your page. Search engines will pay particular attention to keywords within these tags.

Correct Use of Meta Tags
Meta tags on your website are used to list kewords, but are invisible to your website visitors. Be sure only to use meta keywords and descriptions that are relevant to the visible content on your website.