livebooks blog

One of the best feelings in the world as a photographer is capturing memories and emotions for your clients that they’ll be able to look back on for years to come.

And as the artist who created it, you’re bound to feel personally invested in every single image you’ve provided to your clients.

However, this doesn’t mean all of the photos are website-worthy.

When it comes to showcasing yourself and your work online, there are a few key things you should remember, including quality, efficiency and branding. If you aren’t sure how these factors play into choosing the right photos for your photography website, we have some tips to help you:

1. Place Yourself in a Client’s Shoes

When someone browses the web for the ideal photographer for their needs — whether it be wedding photography, newborn images, or their annual family photos — they should see photos that speak to your brand and niche.

This requires you to know your photography business well enough to know who your ideal customers are and what you want your company to be remembered by.

If your ideal customers are expecting mothers looking for a maternity and/or newborn photographer, and you aren’t all that interested in weddings, high school senior portraits or commercial photography, focus primarily (or only!) on the photography areas you want to do more of! Cut back or avoid placing photos on your website altogether that are from projects you aren’t interested in doing more of in the future.

2. Choose the best images out of your entire portfolio.

Just because you have thousands of images on file from dozens of sessions doesn’t mean they all belong on the web. Take some time to look through your past photography sessions to find the absolute best 2-3 images from each session.

You may love all the images you’ve ever taken, but challenge yourself to hone in on the ones that are sharp in focus, have great composition, beautiful colors, emotion, and/or the right amount of lighting — no matter how “long” it took to capture or edit them. Focus on quality of work, not amount of time spent to create the image.

Why? First, your potential clients want to see your best work and there’s no need to overwhelm them with hundreds of photos. Second, the more photos you have on your website, the more your site load speed will be slow. This ultimately hinders the user experience and will hurt your website’s search engine optimization as well.

3. Ask for a second opinion.

If you really struggle with attempting to be unbiased in your photograph selection for your portfolio, narrow down as much as you can and then ask a friend or family member to give you their thoughts. You may be surprised to see which ones they love most!

Optimizing Your Images

Have your top choices for your website portfolio, but want to make sure they don’t take up too much space and slow your site down? Head on over to our other post, SEO Best Practices for Website Images to learn how!

Showcase Your Work on a Beautiful Website

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!

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.