livebooks blog

Organizing portfolios can seem like a daunting task. It may seem difficult to choose the amount of portfolio galleries necessary to showcase all of your work. With some planning and organizing, your images and portfolio galleries will begin to take shape before you know it!

Here are 3 steps to get you started:

Categorize your work before uploading to galleries

This first step is sometimes overlooked when starting off your website. If you’re able to categorize your artwork or images into categories, portfolios will soon develop. For example, if you are a wedding photographer, you may choose to categorize your weddings based on the bride and groom’s last name. You may also choose to sort them by season, location, or year. Whatever means you choose to sort your images, ensure that you have a cohesive system in place on your entire site.

Bulk uploading your images onto portfolios

Once you are able to organize your work on your computer, bulk uploading will become easier. This allows for a multitude of images to be uploaded to your website’s gallery/portfolio at a time.

Adding Image Details

Adding image details to your images can help index your work in a more organized way. Attributing the correct information will also help search engines pick up on what your image is related to and will help explain what you’re trying to show the world. Ultimately, these simple steps will help boost your images’ SEO.

Get more details here on how to implement each step.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the most important things you can invest your time into when maintaining a website. Simply defined, SEO is the ability for online search engines to recognize your site through proper indexing. With a strong SEO strategy, you will be able to organically drive customers to your business, based on keywords and common search terms.

Following SEO best practices is critical to building your online presence and attracting customers to your website. The higher a website appears in search results, the higher the number of visitors the page will receive from the search engine. Here are 5 best practices to follow:

• Use Keywords: What are your customers searching for online? Be specific as possible. If you’re a wedding photographer in Virginia, use “Virginia Wedding Photographer.” Just make sure you aren’t going overboard with keywords, otherwise Google may flag as spam.
• Add Metadata: You wouldn’t buy a book without reading its title, and search algorithms feel the same way. Page titles and meta descriptions help search engines understand how relevant a page is for specific keywords, and also help searchers determine if a page will provide the information they’re looking for. Manage your SEO details here.
• Update Your Site: By refreshing the content on your site, you are showing Google that you are relevant. Make a reminder to refresh your content once a month!
• Optimize for Mobile: Google wants you to provide the best user experience, so the better the user experience on your site, the better you will rank with Google. With liveBooks, your site is already responsive.
• Analyze: By setting up Google Analytics, you can see how your visitors are finding your website and the search terms they are using to find you. Diving into your website’s user data can help you make changes to your website that increase conversions and can provide valuable insight about what content users find useful, and what sections of the site aren’t performing well.

liveBooks is proud to boast that our built-in SEO tool offers our clients the ability to customize their SEO settings on a photo, page, and site-wide level. liveBooks SEO Everything™ tools allow you to quickly add title tags, descriptions, keywords, and image alt text to your website.

All liveBooks sites automatically include micro-data that search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process to provide a richer browsing experience for users. Learn more about liveBooks SEO Everything™ tools here.

We know that with the beginning of a fresh new year, many people get wrapped up in new projects and goals. Why not make one of them cleaning up your website?

Here are a few tips that will help get your website ready for a new year with a fresh start.

1. Update your image gallery: Sometimes you get caught up with work, whether it’s at photoshoots, editing images, creating editorials, and forget to update your website with the new images you’ve created. Updating your images is an important part of showcasing your work. This is especially important for your homepage. Now is a great time to look at your recent jobs and see which images would be best to showcase.
2. Check your links: It’s important to check your external and internal links continuously throughout the year. Links that don’t lead your audience anywhere create a poor user experience. They are less likely to go back to your website once this happens. It is especially important to check external links as other websites may change page names, website URLs, etc. Internal links are equally as important but are under your control. Check these every time you change a page name within your website.
3. Optimize your SEO: SEO is one of the most important aspects of your website! The liveBooks8 platform allows you to control SEO on a page/photo level as well as as on a site-wide level. It’s important that all of your SEO tags, descriptions and titles be up-to-date. Now is a great moment to look over these parts of your website. Still need some help understanding what SEO is and how you can optimize it on your website? Read here.
4. Remove any outdated information from your pages: As a new year begins, it brings the opportunity to showcase new works and events that you would like your clients to see and attend. Potential clients interested in attending your events and conferences could be lost if they see that you have not updated information for the 2018 year.
5. Update your website’s copyright footer: Your website’s copyright year will not automatically update. Make sure that if you have a copyright on your website and change the year from 2017 to 2018. This is especially important in the footer – the place where most people forget to look through.

These simple tips will make your website look both cleaner and more professional. As the new year begins, make sure to set aside some time to complete these tasks. They will make your website look both more professional and will help attract the right clients in 2018.

Getting started on a new website platform can be a daunting task. From adding content to learning new design tools, we can see how it can become overwhelming. This is why our liveBooks8 platform was created with you in mind and offers easy-to-use tools that will make help you start creating different pages, content blocks, and calls to action.

In addition, our 24/7 Knowledge Base offers you articles, tutorials, and videos to help you along the way. Take a look at our video below to begin exploring all of the features your liveBooks8 website has to offer.

Still have questions? Contact our support team at help@livebooks.com!