Lara Swanson

There are a lot of great website data solutions out there. Depending upon what you want to find in your visitor statistics, StatCounter or Google Analytics may be the best solution for you!

Seeing Who’s Visiting Right Now

Winner: StatCounter

If you want a precise look at each visitor as they come through your site, StatCounter is going to be way more helpful to you than Google Analytics. It’s fun to look through logs and see each person’s location, what they clicked on, and how many times they’ve returned. Google Analytics isn’t built to showcase this level of granularity – while it’s possible to find it using GA, it’s not what GA’s purpose is.

StatCounter has a couple of tools perfect for this: (more…)

SEO for Photographers Part I covered a lot of the basics, and how to work with what you’ve got. In terms of SEO, I am focused not on how to cram keywords into your page so that you rank high for them, but to help you understand what users are looking for and to figure out how to hit your end goal: getting users to your site.

Content first, SEO second

Always, ALWAYS think about the end user and how he or she wants to look at your site. The search engine should never be your number one audience. Sure, the search engine can help you get to that end user, but what happens when that user gets to your page? Will he or she be driven away by the unreadable content? By the obvious keyword stuffing? By the lack of good navigation?

Search engines are getting smarter, and this means that they’re being taught to think like a user. Websites that are usable and accessible are being rewarded with higher ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages). If you use header and subheader (H1, H2, H3) tags on your website and blog, you’re showing the search engine that you are trying to organize your content in a way that’s helpful to the user. That’s why these sorts of things are factored into SE’s algorithms – good titles, alternative text on images for screen readers, and other techniques that improve usability and accessibility will also be the places that you’ve heard you should place key words and phrases.

So what does that mean? Don’t focus on key words? Not at all – (more…)

Part of the joy of wearing many hats is acquiring a broad range of knowledge in different areas. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Tweaking your photography website, especially your blog, to make each accessible to search engines and to help them rank really high, will help you get more readers and drive more potential clients to your site. I’ve written up a couple of tips for wedding photographers on how they can improve their blogs to meet both of these goals.

Title of your blog

I used to read hundreds (yes, hundreds) of photographers’ blogs each day. It’s really sad to see that so many of them are named something like “Journal”. The title of your blog may not seem to have a huge effect on those reading it, but it definitely has effects outside of looking at your physical blog. The title of your blog weighs heavily in how you rank for search engines. Do you want to rank among those searching for “Journal”? Or do you want to rank among those searching for “Seattle wedding photographer”? When somebody stumbles across your page in search results, the first thing that they’ll see is your title – make sure that it describes you and what you’re about. A great example is Washington D.C., Virginia, & Maryland Wedding Photographer – Armin DeFiesta. However, be aware that most search engines will not index past the first 70 characters.

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