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Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is more important now than ever. Simply defined, SEO is the ability for online search engines to recognize your site through proper indexing. With a sound SEO strategy, you will be able to organically drive customers to your business, based on keywords and common search terms.

With a saturated marketplace, it is often challenging to drive your desired client base to your website. It is proven that just about 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results (imFORZA), so it is absolutely vital that you stay on top of your SEO game. Getting your site boosted in search engine results will result in a free rise in traffic to your website.

liveBooks takes the guesswork out of your SEO strategy. Our SEO EVERYTHING™ tool is here to help boost your online visibility, allowing users to connect with your site organically. Easily add title tags, page and image descriptions, and keywords to every aspect of your site. From your homepage, down to individual images, your site will be working to ensure that the right customers are seeing your site in their search engine results.

SEO EVERYTHING™ OVERVIEW

Quickly add tags, descriptions, keywords, image alt text and more to your website so that your site is easily searchable and indexed properly, resulting in increased traffic from search engines.

IMAGE/PAGE LEVEL

Add a title, description, keyword, and even a photo credit to every image on your site to ensure search engines can crawl all of your content.

• Title Tag – add words and phrases to explain to search engines what your website is all about, ensuring that you come up under the appropriate search term
• Description Tag – provide concise explanations of the content of your web page for search engines to crawl through
• Keywords – add words or phrases, relevant to your business, to be crawled and cataloged by search engines
• Navigation Label – change the navigation label on your site’s URLs to specific pages on your website
  • For example, yoursite.com/about-us can be changed to yoursite.com/abouttheteam
• Page Indexing – allow search engines to index your page
• Follow Links – allow search engines to follow links on your page
• Canonical Links – if someone tries to copy your content and paste it on their website, search engines will still recognize you as the primary owner of the content. This is especially important for websites that are constantly generating new, fresh content!

SITE LEVEL

Your liveBooks8 site will allow you to edit your site title, site description, set your search settings, and choose the most accurate Schema.org organization type to help search engines better index and leverage your content.

• Site Title – edit how the title of your website appears in search engine result lists
• Description – edit how the description of your web pages appears in search engine result lists
• Option Edit Search Settings – site verification codes help validate your identity to third-party sites and services such as Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Twitter
• Schema.org – choose the most accurate schema.org organization type for your site to help search engines better index and leverage your content

Hopefully by now you all know about the importance of social media for the success of your business. At this stage in the social game, Facebook and Twitter should be old hat. But what about some of the newer platforms that are quickly becoming more popular – even surpassing – some of the old favorites? Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr are the networks to watch in 2015 – and the good news for all you creative professionals – all of these platforms are dominated by photo and video content.

Instagram – With 300 million monthly active users and Citigroup just raising the valuation of the network from $19 billion to $35 billion, Instagram has officially surpassed Twitter. With a number of recent updates to the app, such as looping videos, like its main competitor, Vine, does, Instagram has made some huge strides in overall user experience. Instagram also just released a whole slew of new photo editing tools – from creative tools, to brand new filter choices – making it the ideal space for creative professionals to share their photos. If you aren’t on Instagram already, this should be the first social network that you check out ASAP so you can connect with customers, showcase your work, and develop your brand. (Also, make sure to follow @liveBookswebsites!)

Pinterest – With another round of funding, Pinterest is rumored to now be valued at $11 billion with an 111% growth in active users in the past six months. Pinterest has also been making some pretty significant updates to its platform – a smarter search tool called Guided Search that allows a user to filter their searches by adding specific filters relevant to the original search term. Plus, much like Instagram’s Direct feature, Pinterest also recently released the ability for users to have private conversations about specific pins. Since up to 80% of all pins on Pinterest are repins – this is a huge opportunity for photographers to organically “pin” their own content with a high likelihood that it will be re-pinned by the Pinterest community. Everyone – from agency’s (for commercial/editorial work) to consumers (for portraits and weddings) are searching photos on Pinterest. This is a great platform to showcase your work and get noticed – and don’t forget to #hashtag!

Tumblr – While Tumblr has actually been around since 2007, because of some updates and a refreshed interface, its active users grew by 120% in the past six months. To put this all in perspective, Facebook’s active users grew by just 2% in the past six months.  And while Tumblr is mostly known as a microblogging platform, the reason to be on Tumblr is its highly engaged community. Posts are shared, reblogged, liked, and commented on with great frequency, and it has become known as the “Twitterized version of WordPress.”  While you can share and post pretty much any content you want, from text, photos, quotes, links, chat, audio, and video, unsurprisingly in this day and age, the most shared and liked content is photos. Since 83% of Tumblr posts are photos, and most users do not create their own content, adding your original photos to the content pool will set you apart in the Tumblr world. Check out Harrison Jacobs “7 Tumblr Tips for Photographers” for some really great info on how to best utilize this platform for your business.

I think we all know that social media is here for the long haul, and the good news is that it’s a great opportunity to show off your creativity and add meaningful content to the conversation. Take advantage of all of these free ways to get your brand out there – because it will be imperative for the future of your business.

1. Add Fresh Content
With the new year on the horizon, our design experts recommend refreshing the images and content on your website to make sure you are displaying recent and relevant work. “So many people like to build their site and forget it.  We’ve found that the most successful websites are those that are updated regularly,” says Ryan Maher, designer at liveBooks.com.  Just like a store changes the display window each season, we recommend refreshing the work displayed on your site two or three times a year.

2. Keep Mobile in Mind
It’s no secret that the world is going mobile. As more and more of your website traffic comes from smart phones and tablets, you need to make sure your website is optimized for those visitors. Whether you use a responsive website platform or enable a mobile-optimized version of your desktop site, you need to be sure your website looks good –and functions well– across all devices.

Expert Tip: Design with mobile in mind.  The mobile visitor behaves differently than the desktop visitor- make sure your site looks good for both!

3. Use Clear Navigation
Website Designer Adam Royer advises, “Function over fashion. User-friendliness is a must!” As you build your website, have an idea in mind of what you want your visitors to do when they land there. Do you want them to view your portfolio? Contact you? Watch a video? Whatever your answer, make sure your navigation and layout makes it easy for people to go to the pages you are hoping to highlight. A clean navigation menu is one of the easiest way to accomplish this!

Expert Tip: Make sure the text is legible! Use fonts that are large enough to be read on all devices.

4. Blog Regularly
Since we don’t all have time to change the photos on our website every week, a blog is a great way to add fresh content to your web presence without altering the look and feel of your website. Make it a goal to generate one blog post per week. You can start short and simple, just try to get something out there. Not only will new blog posts engage your visitors and showcase your recent work, it is also a huge benefit from an SEO perspective, as search engines tend to favor sites producing new content.

5. Let Your Images Do the Talking
Your photos are your calling card, show them off! One of the biggest trends in website design for 2015 is large, full-bleed photos that extend across the entire page. We recommend choosing a few photos that convey your vision, and displaying them (in a rotating slider or stacked) on your homepage.  A great website design that uses this full-bleed feature is the STATURE template within the liveBooks Professional Design Templates.

6. SEO
Search Engine Optimization is considered one of the most important things you can do for your website. No matter how great your site looks, and how user friendly it is, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are not going to display it in their results without the proper keywords, tags, backlinks, etc.  While search algorithms change constantly, (making it nearly impossible to “game the system”) one thing you can do to help your ranking is to name your images. Since most photographers websites are portfolio based, you can counteract the lack of keywords with naming and alt tags in your images.

7. Make it Easy to Contact You
You’ve worked hard to get visitors to your site- make sure you’re making it easy for them to contact you!  Whether you utilize a traditional contact form or simply write out your contact information, our experts recommend having a way to contact you listed from every single page of your website.

Expert Tip: Contact forms with fewer than 5 fields perform best!

8. Showcase Videos
Whether or not you have a videography component to your work, including two or three videos on your site is a great way to engage your visitors and bring your work to life.  Each liveBooks template allows for vimeo integration, providing you with the ability to have a video grid, single video, or full-page video embedded into your site.  Some suggested video types include: behind the scenes footage of a shoot, a welcome video of you talking about your work or a promotional video featuring your work.

Expert Tip: Videos perform better when they are integrated into your site, rather than requiring a pop-up to play.

9. Track Visitor Behavior
In order to ensure that your website is performing the way you want it to, you need to understand what people are doing (or not doing) on your site.  Google analytics is one of the easiest (and cheapest- it’s free!) ways to track the behavior of visitors to your website.  Once you understand how visitors are engaging with your site, you can adjust photos, content, and calls to action to maximize each visit.  Notice that people keep hitting your pricing page after visiting a specific gallery? Highlight that gallery on your homepage to increase conversions!

10. Choose the Right Photos
Some photos resonate better than others when put up on your website.  Designer Ryan Mahar recommends that you have a portfolio editor or even some friends or colleagues go through your images and pick out their favorites. Then choose what to upload accordingly.