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Posts Tagged: SEO

Despite how easy it is to add new galleries or new photographs to existing ones, some websites carry old content and updates get postponed. The major culprit is having no spare time to add new work online. While time may not be on your side, the liveBooks platform is – enter the multi user tool.

The multiple user feature is an excellent tool that enables you to give access to admins and contributors who can make changes to your website as per your requests. They will sign in with their own credentials and you choose what role they will have – some can have full access, while some can only make changes to your website without the ability to publish. This way you can have the last word and choose whether or not to publish those changes.

You can find this feature in your site settings, under Users & Roles. To add a new user, simply click Add User, fill in their email address and set a role for them. Here’s the break-down of the 5 types of users that can be linked to your website.

  1. Owner: This is you – the one who pays for the site subscription and the first user who can establish other user roles. It has full access to the dashboard and has the ability to publish.
  2. Admin: User has full access to the dashboard and the ability to publish.
  3. Content Only: User can access and make changes to the content, but they cannot publish.
  4. Design Only: User can access and make changes to the design, but they cannot publish.
  5. Contributor – Content and Design: User can access and make changes both in content and design, but they cannot publish.

As you can see, there’s a wide array of roles you can entrust people with to ensure that while your business is prolific, it also shows on your website. Whether you need to keep your portfolios organized, or just need a little spring cleaning now and then, this tool allows you to delegate an assistant while you are out creating new stunning work.

easy ways to rank well on google

Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is a long-term process that can help your website show up higher on search results. Ranking on the first page of Google never happens overnight, but it’s better to start trying sooner rather than later.

If you are just starting out and not sure which steps to take to begin optimizing your website, here are some simple steps you can take to begin the process:

Generate More Content

Having several pages that describe your services, products and company history is great. But in order to rank highly, you’ll need to start publishing more content on a regular basis.

Building an online blog is one of the easiest ways to boost your SEO. Why? Because it tells search engines like Google that you are actively engaging in the online conversation surrounding your industry. Blogging also provides additional content, keywords, images and more for search engine’s to search through.

Companies that publish relevant, informative content online will rank higher on search engines. If you aren’t one of them, you will lose out to those that do.

If you struggle with creating content on a regular basis, consider setting aside one day a month to schedule content out in advance. Or hire a freelancer to help you!

Add More Keywords to Your Website

Although you never want to make it sound like a computer wrote your website, you may want to review the current web pages you have to ensure you’re including the right keywords to begin with.

While you read the content you already have up, keep your eyes peeled for keywords you know your potential audience may use on search engines to find you.

If you already have a large following and great brand awareness, make sure you have your company name listed in an appropriate amount of places. If you are a fairly unknown company, but have specific services or products others may search for, it’s vital that you begin listing out those services in detail.

One great way to see what phrases people commonly use surrounding your business or industry is to begin typing in keywords on Google. As you type, you’ll see related phrases and common search queries come up underneath the search bar. You’ll also find an area of “related” search terms at the bottom of your results list. Use these keywords and phrases (also known as long-tail keywords) in your website copy when it sounds appropriate.

Drive More Traffic

Whether you are regularly engaged on social media, or you’ve started a great email list of contacts who want to stay in-the-know about your company, find ways to drive free traffic to your website.

The more traffic you bring to your website, the more that search engines will see you as a relevant source of information. When that happens, your ranking starts to increase over time. It’s a great way to connect all of your marketing efforts and easily begin boosting your SEO — for free!

Improve Your Web Design

liveBooks offers stunning, customizable website templates for wedding industry professionals and creatives.

Impress your potential clients with a visually stunning website that is ready for search engines and looks great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!

It’s easy to build your liveBooks website from scratch by yourself; it’s also quite possible that some things will be left out. We want to make sure that all your parameters are properly filled, so that you won’t have any technical hiccups down the line. Here’s a list of five liveBooks features and why they’re so important for your website building process.

  1. Canonical URLs

In your liveBooks content editor each page has its own presence, with specific content and design, but the search engines might not see it that way. In fact, when the “crawlers” go through your website and index it, they might get confused and see some pages as duplicates – a nuisance, especially when you spend so much time make each of your pages unique.

The fix: Go through each of your pages or items and open the SEO and Sharing dropdown. Make sure the Title tag and the Canonical URL fields read the same info. Do this for every page and search engines will never again get confused. Remember to do this every time you add a new page or item.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Search Engine Optimization

We’ve covered the importance of SEO, so go ahead and check that out for a comprehensive guide through your liveBooks SEO Everything™ feature. You’ll find all the info you need on the three main pillars of proper SEO in a liveBooks website:

  • Overall website SEO
  • Page SEO
  • Image SEO

3. Image Size

All we want is for your clients to see your photographs and services in great quality and for them to show and load as fast as possible. To ensure that visitors, humans and bots, won’t leave your site due to slow loading time, resize your photos accordingly.

The fix: Photographs don’t need to be more than 72 dpi (dots per inch) for digital purposes. Most photographs, however, start around 300 dpi, causing them to be bigger in size (bytes). Ideally, images should be around 200-800 KB maximum each. We’ve covered this subject in greater detail here, so make sure you check it out!

4. Legacy URLs

This applies only to those who have migrated their old site to our liveBooks platform and ensures that their old links redirect to their new website. This is helpful with both search engine bots that are now able to find your new website, and to clients who bookmarked pages from your previous online presence.

The fix: Go to Settings – Legacy URLs. Copy all links from your old website and redirect them to your new pages. Do this for all pages! If the old link doesn’t correspond to either of your new pages, add the redirects to the homepage.

5. Responsive Design Review

This aspect is something that can easily be overlooked, but with great consequences on the mobile experience. Our platform features are all responsive and designed to look great on all devices. Still, editable factors such as padding or page and gallery names can sometimes interfere with the smooth design we create in every template. So when you build your website yourself, double-check that all pages look sharp. Just go in the design editor and toggle between all the devices.

If you have any other questions, remember that our award-winning support team is ready and happy to help! Good luck and have fun creating your new liveBooks website!

If online visibility for your website is what you want, proper SEO is what you need

Your website is relevant, your portfolios are updated, your photography is flawless; so how come so few come to visit? It all comes down to that super popular fellow who only listens to bits of your story, but is excited to share all info it has on you to whomever will ask – the search engine.

Yes, it’s definitely your friend, as long as it gets to know you. Introducing SEO, the one thing every photography website owner knows they need, but not too many actually accommodate it. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the information laid out for the algorithms that skim through each published page, indexing them. They go from link to link and figure out what each website is about, how reliable it is and thus, how relevant it is for the online seeker.

According to what keywords you’ve used in the SEO fields, it will determine a ranking for your website. You already have a great photography website, but does the SEO formula agree? There are a few things you can do to put your foot in google search’s door and say “Alright, I’m here!”

It’s SEO Everything™ time!

The liveBooks websites are all about ease of access to your content, and SEO fits right in the whole scenario. It’s a platform used mainly by photography professionals, a career that stresses on the visual advantage over linguistics, which usually makes indexing a little harder, but we have many ways to go around that. It’s called SEO Everything and it truly is everything you need to get your photography website running at the speed of SEO. (There’s no such measurement unit, but we figure it’s fast. Superfast.)

First things first: check that your website will be indexed by search engines. This feature is automatically turned on, but we’ll go ahead and double-check just in case.

  1. Go to settings, then click on the SEO tab.
  2. While we’re here, let’s make sure that your website title and description are filled in. We’re determined to make the title visible for search engines, so our advice is to make it easy to read: business name + the keyword that describes your field of work (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” is a great example, even though we’re positive it wasn’t intentional). What you write in the description is up to you. This is the place where keywords are not important and it’s the only place where you don’t need to worry about google’s piercing scanners. The description appears under your website name in search results. (http://goo.gl/3HBg5R)
  3. We can now proceed to the reason why we’re here: the first field in the search settings field. You want your website to be found, so the first option should be turned on. (http://goo.gl/cENHbu)
  4. Finally, scroll down to the last field, Schema.org, and choose the appropriate organization type to be featured by this tool in indexing your website. (http://goo.gl/HkQJAU)

SEO for your pages

Now we’re ready to take on the great adventure of page and image SEO. This is an important journey to make, since we’re dealing with a photography website where written content is usually scarce. To give an overall perspective, the SEO algorithms behave best in a page containing around 600 words, so we’ll have to make up for it if you choose to let your photography do the talking without inserting text blocks to your galleries. Still, a few words are in order here, a few well written and descriptive words which will serve as your copy-paste material for the keywords field and will never again be seen on your website.

Before you move any further, get writing! Remember, capitalization is unimportant here, but spacing and spelling is. The recipe for a proper keyword sequence is keyword comma space keyword comma space and so on. (ex. wedding photography, engagement photography, ceremony photography in AZ, etc.)

In your content area click on a page and you’ll see a SEO & Settings dropdown field on the right side. This is where you stunning copy-paste skills will come in handy. Fill in these blocks with the keywords and description you’ve set. Do this for all pages. It’s tedious, we know, but you only do it once. Okay, you do it every time you create a new page or item, but trust us, it matters.

SEO for your photos

Now, we’ve said SEO Everything and we mean it! Don’t think we forgot the most important actors in your show: the photographs. In your image library click on the eye icon that appears when you hover over with your mouse and you’ll see a pop-up with the image info. We’ll focus on the first two fields: the title and the description. liveBooks allows google to index this info even if you choose not to show it on your website with the image info on hover option. This is a great feature that not all photography platforms can take pride in having, so we’re boosting over here.

  1. Fill in the title first; it should be descriptive (sunset wedding on Cape cod, floral arrangement at reception, newly weds take wows, etc.).
    Notice how the examples we’ve given contain more words connected to your business, not just photography. That’s because as much as you want people to find you for their specific need, you also wouldn’t mind to have a prospective client bump into your work while googling for a flower arrangement and finding a great photographer to capture the spirit of their big event. and coming back to our buddy google and its power to validate your website, this is a great way to convince it that you are a proper professional who understands the entire ensemble of your work field.
  2. The description, on the other hand, can differ from image to image and it is up to you to make it as detailed as you want to give an even bigger picture.

Extra tips

  • You should have one website for your business so that google doesn’t get mislead
  • If you’re doing a blog, use your website as the platform for it instead of an external page. Feel free to use outside links to projects.
  • Keeping track of your ranking and optimal keywords is a must when reaching for a greater audience. The liveBooks professional plan includes real-time analytics, so you won’t have to bother with 3rd party tools.
  • Changes won’t happen straight away, it takes time for the algorithms to find your updates and index them.

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