SEO STRATEGY GUIDE

for the non-techy professional photographer

 INTRODUCTION
This guide is meant to give you a basic but strong
understanding of Search Engine Optimization
(SEO) as it applies to Intothedarkroom websites.
We hope that you will learn strategies and how
to implement those strategies to help your
website rank better in search engines.

ACCESSABILITY PICK A STRATEGY IMPLIMENTING KEYWORDS

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ACCESIBILITY
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A WEBSITE TO BE
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED (SEO)?
It all comes down to organization and the accessibility
of your information by search engines. Search engines
need to be able to read all of the information on your
website and it reads it in a specific way.
FLASH VS HTML
Many people want to know why Flash websites are not
SEO. To get a better understanding of this, we should
first look at HTML websites and understand how they
work. Traditional HTML websites are organized into
pages that can be read easily by search engines one at a
time. (ie: mysite.com/about, mysite.com/pricing, mysite.
com/contact, etc). Because these pages are HTML,
search engines have access to the information on this
SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com
page. Traditional Flash websites, instead, are built as
one file that lives at your domain (mywebsite.com). To
understand traditional Flash websites better, imagine
Flash as a closed container: this container holds all of
your pages and information and search engines can’t see
inside the container. This makes most Flash websites
not SEO friendly...notice I said most.
HOW ARE INTOTHEDARKROOM’S FLASH
WEBSITES SEO?
The reason our Flash websites have always been SEO, is
because we have always separated the information from
the Flash. We do not use Flash as a container, but rather
a thin layer on top. We use Flash to make things pretty
but always allow search engines to access the content.
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PICK A STRATEGY
YOU NEED A STRATEGY
When you search for something in Google, you type
in keywords until you find what you are looking for.
It’s important to rank for the right keywords. If you
have a website that is accessible but has all the wrong
keywords, it is not going to do you any good. Therefore,
you need to create a keyword strategy.
PICK YOUR KEYWORDS
“I put the keyword ‘weddings’ all over my website. Why
don’t I come up in search results?” The word “weddings”
is searched over 6 Million times per month. Because
this term is such a broad term it is going to be highly
competitive. You would have to beat companies like
“TheKnot.com” to rank number one for this term.
To pick your keywords, we recommend using the
assistance of a free tool called Google Keywords (https:// for “John the wedding photographer” because it has
adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool). This tool will
show you the amount of searches each keyword phrase term that you can win and not only get on the first page,
gets per month in Google.
To pick good keywords, you want to have the right
balance between high searches and your ability to win.
It gets easier to find these keywords the more specific
your keyword phrase gets. Let’s look at some examples.
The term “wedding photographer” has 22,200 searches
per month
The term “hawaii wedding photographer” has 3,600
searches per month
The term “John the wedding photographer” has 0
searches per month
So you can see that the more specific the term gets,
the less searches per month. Chances are, as a small
business, you would have an easier time ranking
for “hawaii wedding photographer” then “wedding
photographer”. In addition, it would be pointless to rank
little to no searches per month. The goal is to rank for a
but within the first 3 spots.

SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 2

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PICK A STRATEGY (CONT)

THIS IS A RACE TO THE TOP
Getting on the first page of a search term that has value
is great. But it will do you little to no good if you are not
ranked as one of the top 3 search results. Let’s look at
some general statistics.

The first result gets about 30% of all the clicks.

The second result gets about 12% of all the clicks
The third result gets about 9% of all the clicks
The tenth result gets about 2% of all the clicks

As you can see, the best place to be is first place. So, now
let’s look at how you can get there and how you can
determine if you can beat the competition.

SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 3

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IMPLEMENTING KEYWORDS
KEYWORD STUFFING
The first mistake that many people make is called
“keyword stuffing”. This is when you string a long list of
comma separated keywords together on a page instead
of writing a paragraph (looks like: wedding photographer,
photography, san diego, california weddings, brides, etc,
). Will this cheat work? In the short term it probably
will, but if someone implements good SEO practices,
they will beat you in the long term. The truth is that
Google doesn’t look favorably on keyword stuffing and
ultimately is smarter than that. So now we are going to
tell you some great ways to use your keywords.
DOMAIN NAME/URL
Having keywords in your domain name can help with
SEO. This is a touchy subject, because most companies
want to use their company name as their URL, not
some long ugly keyword phrase. However, if SEO is not
going to be your primary source of business, then it is
understandable if you opt not to use keywords in your
domain name. We just want you to be aware that this
will help.
SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com
META TAGS
This is a place on your website that allows you to add a
string of keywords that are associated with the content
of that website or page. This is how people started to
SEO a website many years ago. This has since become
outdated and most experts believe it offers little to no
value anymore.
PAGE TITLES
This is a big one. Search engines always look at the
page title. If you are trying to rank for the keyword
phrase “arizona wedding photographer” then it would
make more sense to title your about page “arizona
wedding photographer” instead of “my bio” or “about the
photographer”.
CONTENT IS KING
If your page titles are keywords, but you do not give the
search engines any content to read, then you are not
giving the search engine any reason to believe that your
page is important enough to rank. Therefore, you want
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IMPLEMENTING KEYWORDS (CONT)

to make sure that you write rich content on every page.
What is rich content? Rich content is a paragraph that NAVIGATION BUTTONS
your readers are going to want to read that includes Your navigation buttons are internal links that are on
your keywords in a normal and casual way (no keyword every page of your website. These internal links should
stuffing). For example, your paragraph might start out utilize the same naming strategy as page titles. If you
with “I chose to be an Arizona wedding photographer name these links with keywords, it helps Google group
because...”. Google wants to see content that is both that page with the keyword being used.
relevant to the keywords and is interesting to your
reader. In addition, the more content, the better. This LINKS THAT POINT TO YOUR WEBSITE
is the reason that many photographers have added a
A contextual link (a keyword that is a hyperlink to
blog to their website. Blogs allow you to create a huge
your website) on another website is one of the most
archive of rich content that people want to read.
important things that can help your website rank in
search engine results. Two things are important for a
IMAGES
contextual link: the credibility of the website it’s coming
Don’t forget your images. Google cannot see images from and the actual text in the link. So, ideally you
so it’s important to fill in the “alt” text when inserting want a link that reads “Arizona wedding photographer”
them into your website. By doing so, you’ll be describing from a reputable website like “TheKnot.com”, rather
your images to Google, so it’s important to include your than a link that reads “click here” from a website like
keywords here. Make sure, however, that you don’t use “spamwebsiteforum.com”.
the same keyword/phrase for every image – mix it up
a bit. Where you input this “alt” text depends on the
platform you’re using for your website or blog.

SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 5

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IMPLEMENTING KEYWORDS (CONT)

EVALUATE YOUR COMPETITOR
Hopefully you now have a general understanding of
keywords and how to implement them into a website.
With this knowledge you can now evaluate your
competition. When looking at the competitors that
appear in the search results, you can evaluate their
page titles, content, URL, etc to see how worthy of an
opponent they are.
BUT HOW DO I PUT ALL THIS STUFF INTO MY
WEBSITE?
Intothedarkroom has created a video library that takes
you step by step through adding content. With our
websites, there is no coding necessary. We make adding
text, alt tags, meta data, navigation, page titles and more
a snap. Please check out our support videos by clicking
the link below.

WILL I RANK TOMORROW? Support Videos

No. In order for all of your hard work to payoff, you are
going to have to wait. Google has to index your pages
into their system. Once this begins, you may see your USE CODE: “SEO30” FOR
site start to appear higher and higher in the results.
You are going to want to help push your website up the
results as much as you can. So what can you do? More of
the same. Evaluate your keywords and competitors, add
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more content (maybe a blog), and get more contextual
links on other sites. Offer not good with any other offer, limited time only

SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 6