Website SEO Tips From the Trenches

If you’ve visited my website lately, you might have noticed a few changes. You’re not crazy, that’s my new logo! What do you think? I loved the daisy, but it’s a new year and couldn’t we all use a little freshening up?

I met today with a digital marketing consultant named Steven Matt, the owner of TellMeYourGoal.com. I met him through NYC Small Business Services: a fantastic organization that everyone running their own company needs to know about. The group has free classes (Quicken, how to write your own business plan, and social media marketing to name a few), and a wealth of consultants, like Steven, who graciously donate their time to help small business owners like myself.

Three takeaways from my meeting with Steven: first, all of my images need to be optimized for the web. My site has been loading a little slower than I would like, so Steven suggested I check that each image is fully optimized. I found a great article here about finding the best dimensions for your web images.

Second, I need to have a ‘call to action’ (or CTA) on every page. The idea with a CTA is that if you give out great information, you then need to tell people what to do with it. I want potential clients to contact me to see how I can help them with their photography needs, so that’s exactly what my CTA will be.

Finally, upping your search engine optimization ( or SEO) game is vital to getting people to ring the doorbell of your business. My site is a template, and unfortunately, I can ostensibly only configure the SEO for the home page of the website. The photography biz has forced me to become somewhat tech savvy, and I have figured out how to get into my website source files via my hosting site’s FTP. Steven assured me that I can reconfigure the code to include metadata details on every page. This may take some work, but I like a challenge. (And more importantly, my hosting service wisely has a ‘do over’ button, so if I screw it up, I can go back to the site that was saved 24-hours prior.)

Putting my best foot forward through my website is a never ending work-in-progress, but I’m getting there. Just nine months ago I updated my site from flash to HTML5, and this new template is already about to become obsolete. (WordPress is the type of site to use now, but alas, my coding skills are not strong enough to get me where I want to be…YET.)

Do you have your own website up? Any issues you’ve come across or website SEO tips you would like to give? Drop me a line…I would love to talk shop with you.

Need a photographer?  Drop me a line if you would like to chat about your photography needs.

If you would like to view more photos from my portfolio, then please visit my website – KellyWilliamsPhotographer.com