The Region Wildlife and Topical Photography

Recently I started focusing on my blog again, I started writing some posts and found that writing about the process was a useful place to start. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I am planning on some serious photography this spring. Yes, I am planning on finding and capturing a bunch of cute baby animals etc… to herald in the best time to be outdoors. Additionally, I felt that by documenting some process I could better formalize a process for myself and any strategy is better than no strategy. I offer these posts in the hopes that you may find them helpful, see what I do, watch as I post results later. Pick up things that work for me, avoid things that don’t.

Currently, I am using Wordpress to publish my blog so the first thing to do in an SEO context is to either learn to edit the templates and code directly (hard, really hard) or get a plugin which will accommodate basic SEO tasks. I chose to go with a plugin, specifically I chose “The All in One SEO Pack”. This plugin adds several SEO options to the familiar “add new post” window. This post assumes that you know how to add a plugin.

The fields which I am going to focus on are the “Title”, “Description” and “Keywords”. I will get into a bit about how to use the Google Keyword Tool and make brief mention of “Keyword Density” but this is mainly a starter post and will not get heavy on those concepts.

The title field gives you an opportunity to get more creative for the search engine titles. The field allows you up to 40 characters to grab users and search engines attention. The  description field gives you a 160 characters to describe your post, potentially using some of the keywords you decide to use. This field will be picked up by search engines in lieu of just grabbing the first 160 characters of your post, so you get some control over what shows up when you hit the SERP (search engine results page).

Keywords is (in my beginners opinion) the important field. Here you get to put in potential search queries to match on. Selecting keywords can be a tedious and time consuming process, the Google Keyword Tool (mentioned earlier) can help. To use the tool, click on the link above and just type in keywords that you think describe your post. When you submit it, it will kick back a list of related terms and tell you how many times they have been searched for this month and the inventory of results returned by the query. You obviously want popular terms with a small amount of inventory, so spend some time looking over the proposed SEO keywords and then type them (comma separated) into the keywords field.

Now we’re done with the basic planning for our search engine optimisation and we can write our post. Try to use the keywords you selected (naturally, not forced) in your content. You can google the term “keyword frequency” to learn different opinions about how little or how much to use them. Remember, SEO is about helping the search engines decide what content to show and the search engine is about helping the user find useful content. Make your content useful, and the above tips will help you to start ranking.

Tags: photography, seo

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under SEO and Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.