It's What I Do...: SEO for Photographers: Al Payne, Architectural Photographer

I just finished reworking Al Payne's website to be more effective in the search engines. I will note immediately that I did not do the design of the site, it was handled inhouse. I took their previous design and modified it so that it would be more acceptable to search engines and to help them design an effective online marketing campaign. You cannot effectively market your website if you cannot leverage the tools used by the internet community.

I cannot go into what was done to the site, but I can tell you some overall changes. The original site was all graphics, with nonsensical image names and file names. The site had metatags, but they weren't used effectively. I removed over 300 graphic items and replaced them with less than a dozen without effectively changing the design. We brought in simple CSS driven code, and added a cool Javascript portfolio area that will allow for very easy updating of the portfolio images. We found ways to present dynamic content without a drain on Al's staff, and will soon start on an active project to move the site up the listings.

Effective? Well, when I started the project www.paynephotographic.com had a page rank of 2. Backward links in Google showed no inbound links. The site was totally graphical so Google had given up on the site. We fixed that, tweaked the details and prepared the site for going live. We launched last evening at 4pm.

This morning at 8 am I visited Al's site to make sure everything was still up and going well. His page rank is now a 4, and the backward links page in Google has 2 full pages. Simply changing the home page to a non-graphic page, adding text and correct metatags... in other words, careful attention to detail made a huge difference in his page rank... overnight! See last graphic.