Simple, Do-It-Yourself Ways to Increase your Visibility Online

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization via social media

If you are familiar with the Internet, please forgive me, because this is the first article about this topic I am going to start with very simple SEO methods relating to social media as can be utilized by professional photographers. SEO (search engine optimization) can be thought of as a combination of "on-page" methods--the methods you use on your site--and "off-page" methods which is what other sites link to you and how.

Right now, to keep this short and simple I am going to start with (mostly) off-page stuff that you can probably do very easily right now.

Search Engines view links as "votes" for pages and sites. If you want a site or page to be more popular, you need to "build" more links to it. One of the easiest ways to do this is social media—especially since most people already have profiles set up.

You should have a Facebook profile (personal) and page (for a locally relevant business you should choose a "local" business page...if you have time, you can set up a regular "company" type of page too). Truth be told I hate Facebook but it is incredibly popular so you gotta do it.

Also, set up a profile and local (or company page depending on the scope of your business) page on Google+. I find Google+ easier to use, nicer to look at and less invasive but you may disagree.

Set up a profile on LinkedIn (and a business page too).

Same for Twitter.

That said, if you will never use a profile/page the isn't much point in setting it up. Social media is pretty time consuming (most of these services will take 1-2 hours per profile or page to set up correctly). Thus, I only have a Twitter account for my business, not a personal, I allow it to act as both and due to the nature of Twitter (posts are limited to 160 characters) it is fairly impersonal and public—and in my opinion appropriate to use one account as both business and personal.

Ideally you should have a profile or 2 on social bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg.

Next, claim the popular local merchant directory/maps listings. Google Places, Bing/Yahoo! Maps, Yelp, Angie's List, Merchant Circle, City Search/City Grid etc.

Now, and this is CRITICAL, you need to link them all to each other and your website and make sure you fill out the profiles with relevant information. What's relevant? Anything that is a business asset basically...it really doesn't matter if you like to crochet unless it will help your potential customers find you so make sure you fill out descriptions and captions with full sentences that feature keywords relating to your business and your location. Make sure your hours and address are correct. Upload a picture or two (or ten, especially if you're a photographer—another thing I like about Google+ is that it displays pictures really nicely). And fill in links to everything else everywhere possible.

But remember the "vote" idea, Twitter only allows you to list one link (on your profile, not in your posts), make it your website, not Facebook. That is part of what I like about Google+, they prominently feature links and you can separate them by category and level of privacy. Anything that isn't totally public on any of these sites is invisible to search engines, so my recommendation is that you have profiles that you use for business and, if you like social media, that you maintain separate personal profiles. Having multiple profiles is a violation of some of these sites terms (another reason I don't like Facebook) so take this recommendation with a grain of salt.

Links, should be formatted like this:

http://www.your-site.com

or

http://yoursite.com

In most cases, using www or not is not important, but it is important that you pick one format and stick with it...otherwise search engines will split the weight of your link "votes" amongst the variations and it dilutes the effect of SEO strategies. If you want to err on the side of caution just include www every time.

Next, make sure you "like" and "follow" and "friend" people and pages. Tweet about and +1 each others pages, profiles and sites. While a link is basically a "vote" for that page, don't be stingy with them when appropriate and especially when it is to and from other relevant sites/blog...being in the photography business, the most valuable links you can have and give are links to and from other sites about related topics, it helps with 'relevance' and 'authority.' Thus, liking and commenting about and linking to (and everything else you can) related resources is a wise move...But that doesn't mean you should freely link to a competitor, after all it is still a "vote."

This guide is intentionally formatted as a webpage so that I can use it in the future as an example for future discussions, if you know how to "view source" in your browser and you know a little bit about code feel free to take a look: I formatted it in a way that should allow it be be used as a template for things like blog posts, etc.

As I write this I realize there is an awful lot of ground to cover here. After the original draft I had Greg look it over for me. He seemed to think that I needed to be more explicit about exactly how to link profiles and such. Thus, I am going to create an additional more, detailed post about just that, as well as a video (well actually a ScreenFlow which shows what's on my computer screen as I do it) to guide people through this process. I am also going to create additional articles and videos that are specific to each individual site. So there wil be an article and video about Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more, with a discussion on merits and techniques suited to each.

In each of those posts/articles I will provide links to my profiles and pages and thus examples where you can see just what it looks like when I do these things myself. But for now, I'll just include a link to my business: At Adam Infinitum I provide web design, SEO, SEM, and social media services (setting up profiles and making posts), if you'd rather hire someone to do these things for you, I hope you'll consider me for the job.