5 Ways to Get Noticed as a Travel Photographer (Part 4/5)
In an era where everyone with a phone and a backpack can take photos of their travels and post them online, it can be very difficult to stand out as a Travel Photographer. This video series will go into 5 ways to get noticed and stand out from the crowd.
In part four I discuss some tips and tricks you can use to increase your SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your site through strategies that improve its rank in search results. SEO can be as easy or complicated as you would like. There are some easier strategies you can use to help increase your search engine ranking, but it can also get really complex. Search engines want to ensure that users have a great experience. Therefore, websites that rank highly on search results must provide good quality content that provides users with the information they are looking for in a clear efficient manner.
Search engines do not publish their algorithms and are constantly evolving. So, the information you find on SEO is from trial and error and may have to be altered as time goes on. The main thing you need to know is that in order for you to rank high in search results, your website must provide a good user experience which includes providing the content that you advertise (no clickbait!!).
The following are some fairly simple strategies you can use to help increase your SEO.
Image Optimization: Part of a great user experience is a fast website! As a Travel Photographer you will have lots of images on your site. The bigger the image, the longer the image will take to load. Keep your images to less than 500 KB. First, try to adjust the image length and width so that the longest side is about 1500 px. If the image is still too large, you can use something like jpegmini to compress the image.
Names, Tags, and Descriptions: In order to a search engine to know what your website it about it looks at names of images, tags, image and page descriptions, headers, etc. Use these to your advantage. Come up with a list of keywords that match the content of your site. What words would someone search if they were trying to find the service you provide? Then put these keywords into image and page names, tags, descriptions, body text, urls, titles, etc. Make sure that you use them in an authentic way such as within a sentence not just as a list.
SEO Tab: Squarespace has added an SEO tab in the settings of a page. In Pages, Click on the gear icon beside each page and go to the SEO tab. Make sure to provide a name and description of the page that uses as many keywords as you can in an authentic way. No clickbait titles!!
Mobile Friendly: Search engines like websites that provide a great user experience regardless of which device they are using. Plus, if you are using Instagram as a Travel Photographer, you may have a lot of visitors that are coming to your site on a mobile device. This means you need to make sure your site works great on any screen, not just a desktop.
SSL Certificate: Search engines rank secure sites higher than non-secure sites. An SSL Certificate makes your site secure. As a Squarespace user, this is already done for you. All you have to do is make sure you have the setting turned on by going to Settings -> Advanced -> SSL.
404 Page: Another aspect of a great user experience is an error page that redirects visitors to the correct area of your site. Make sure you have a 404 page that helps your users find the place they were looking for with a search bar or a list of links to popular pages.
Low Bounce Rate: If a user searches using some keywords, finds your site, clicks on your site, and then quickly clicks back to the search engine, this increases your bounce rate. In other words, it tells the search engine that your site was not a good match for those keywords which will hurt your ranking. There are a couple ways you can help decrease your bounce rate. First, make sure your titles and page descriptions are not misleading so that they accurately describe your content. Second, make sure your site is clearly laid out with a navigation that is easy to understand. Lastly, make sure all your content (especially within a blog) is of high quality and has enough to keep the user on the page for several minutes.
Google: Verify your site with google and provide a site map to ensure that there are no crawl errors. You can find more information about that here.
All in all, if you want to rank high in search results, make sure that your website provides good quality content and a great user experience. There are a ton more resources out there for someone who really wants to dig into this topic. You can also hire someone to increase your SEO. For more information on SEO check out these resources.
