Meet Jessica: Personal trainer extraordinaire. I met Jessica a couple weeks ago at a prep-session for this week’s upcoming Everything Wedding Bridal Show at the Adamson House in Malibu, which is a venue I would LOVE to shoot at. I’m currently working with multiple wedding vendors to try to bring you all the best ideas and inspiration for your own wedding. That includes how best to stay in shape and get ready for your wedding.

Jessica offers a Bridal Bootcamp. The perfect opportunity to work out and get in shape before the wedding. She works for Elite Fitness Plus in Westlake Village. The best “gym” experience you’ll ever get. Every trainer  has at least their bachelors in fitness and nutrition, and they all either have, or are going for their masters. They are dedicated to a personal approach of training and every time you step through the doors there will be a trainer available. This is the perfect place for someone who is fed up with big-box gyms, and impersonal service. Either way, make sure to get ahold of Jessica when you contact Elite Fitness Plus at (805) 494-4279.

I love the romance that is evoked from just the look of this album, with it’s fine-art, hand-torn, white felt pages, to the pains-taking care that is put into the detail of fastening the book together. To ensure that yours is made to your specifications, the book is available in three different color options: light leather, dark leather, and woven leather. We can offer 5 different fine-art papers, from a thick and sturdy white linen, to recycled, eco-friendly option. I love the look of the hand-torn edges, but a clean cut is also available. These books are hand-crafted on old-world bindery equipment. The same kind that made the old books that are still intact to this day.

The sheath album cover is a separate option, and well worth it. The combination of the archival print quality, and the sheath box ensure that your album will stay safe and secure. This is an album that you will want to show to your children, grandchildren, and in turn, have them show their grandchildren. The Toscana wedding book is made that well. It will stand the test of time, and is well worth the investment. As shown here, the Toscana album with 100 pages, and sheath go for $4,400, or $3200 without the case. The same book & case with 200 pages goes for $4900, and the 300 page option for $5,325.

If this wedding looks familiar, that’s because it is. Check out the photos and the video from this wedding here: Steve & Lara’s Wedding.

The reception is a fun part of the wedding. For the majority, the dancing and festivities are a lot of fun. But there are always those times during the reception that you’ve danced just a little too hard, or you need to sit back and relax. Your beautiful linen covered tables and chiavari chairs just don’t cut it as far as being a comfortable haven. The Lounge offers a refreshing take on being a brief respite from partying on the dance-floor. It also gives your two-left-footed groomsman a chance to sit and talk with your cute cousin; you can then take credit(or blame) for them ending up together.

The lounge can take multiple shapes and forms. It can take a gorgeous venue and make it even that much more elegant. It can take a beach wedding reception, and transform it into an exotic barefoot festival. You can go all-out and have LED lighted tables and uplighting, or you can have candlelight.

We do regular work with Del Rey Party Rentals. They offer a huge assortment of rental equipment and lounge furniture to the greater Los Angeles area. They’re literally knocking holes in the walls of their warehouse to fit more lounge furniture. If you ask me, they’ll have to move to a larger warehouse soon to accommodate everything they supply. A couple weeks ago they asked me to come down to the warehouse to create a promotional video for their lounge furniture. We spent the day setting up the showroom as a lounge, and I didn’t want to leave. All that was lacking was a bar-tender, and the music(and the wedding party and guests). Make sure you give Julio a call, and tell him that Brian sent you.

So is the lounge right for you? I can unequivocally say yes… Having a lounge at your wedding reception will make your beautiful wedding even more so.

Re-live the classic elegance the morning after your big day at the family/wedding party brunch by pairing your jewels with a simple cardigan sweater over a tank or tee in your wedding colors. You’ll dazzle once again in the gorgeous yet casual look.

Where can I buy these?

2011 Vera Wang : Fiona - http://www.onewed.com/wedding-dresses/designer/vera-wang/dress/strapless/mermaid/floor-length/spring-2011–fiona/
Jimmy Choo : Macy – http://www.jimmychoo.com/bridal/macy/invt/010macysat/
Ivory Bandeau Birdcage Veil – http://www.etsy.com/listing/72982765/noa-ivory-bandeau-birdcage-veil-set-with
Charlotte Statement Necklace – http://stelladot.com/sites/sarahnoah/productcatalog?page=productdetail&sku=N132
Baby Flower Post Earings – http://stelladot.com/sites/sarahnoah/productcatalog?page=productdetail&sku=E109G

Robert, this is directed specifically at you: Purchasing this camera does not make you a photographer. The use of this camera at a wedding does not make you a wedding photographer. Advertising on Craigslist does not make you a professional photographer.

P does not stand for “professional,” green does not mean “go”, and Kevin Kabota and other stylized actions or presets will not make your snapshots look good.

The lens and flash that come with this camera are not sufficient. An additional investment of at least $3000 will be necessary in order to bring the possibility* of your images up to par with other professionals. On that note, you will need to invest in a second camera body for when this camera “freezes” in the middle of your niece’s wedding. The freeze is actually a user malfunction; you pressed the 10 second self timer with your forehead, and can’t figure out how to get it out of that mode.

If you desire to make a living with this camera, remember the following principals: Quickbooks does not replace a good CPA, Facebook is not a replacement for a website, Federal, State, and local taxes are mandatory, expensive, and you have to take them into consideration with you pricing. Insurance isn’t just for your car or your health. You WILL screw something up, so be covered.

Everyone and their grandma wants to be a professional photographer. This is your competition, and in a market where the supply is higher than the demand, your images won’t be worth anything to anybody until you create value in your products and services. Not only will you need to be a cut above the rest when it comes to photography in order to bring in any decent income, but you will also need to learn how to be a marketing genius and small business guru. This is not a small undertaking. What makes you any different from the other millions of “professional” photographers out there? If a bank can’t seem to be able to stay in business, what makes you think that you have what it takes?

You will spend a minimum of 2 hours editing for each hour shooting. Figure this into your pricing. There is no such thing as shooting for free. Your camera costs you money, your CF cards cost you money, your computer costs you money, your external hard-drive costs you money, your time editing costs you money, dvds cost you money, the sharpie with which you label your dvd costs you money. Someone is paying for the images… It shouldn’t be you.

*possibility. The $3000 additional investment only gives you the possibility to shoot incredible images. It does not guarantee it, and furthermore, is extremely unlikely. The investment of a few years, learning, shooting, taking workshops, and trial and error are the only ways to actually create incredible images consistently.

Or this:

The use of this camera to earn an income will likely result in the following: Stress, Hair-loss, Tax problems, strained relationships with your spouse, high blood pressure, neck and back pain, nausea, IBS(Irritable Bride Syndrome), No savings or extra money in your bank account.

I hope this was entertaining. I wrote this as a response to a discussion in the Pictage forums about regulation. The general consensus from most photographers is that regulation would be a bad idea. I think I agree. However, Proper education would go a long way to deter people that shouldn’t be going into business for themselves from trying to make a quick buck from photography. Either way this is purely satirical, I mean no harm or offense by it. And if you respond with any debasing comments, they will be deleted.

I’ve been talking a lot about building up your web traffic without spending a ton of money, and actually doing it yourself. If you are just starting this 5 part article right now, go back and read Part 1-3. You’ll see the links below:

• Part 1: SEO – Why your web traffic sucks(The Bad News)
• Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)
• Part 3: WordPress
• Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites <—You are here.
• Part 5: Social Media and Networking.(How twitter and facebook can change your life)

Well, I’m really hoping that you installed WordPress, and maybe tried out a few themes. I’ll be talking about the Noah Photo Blogsites now, and how they can be beneficial to you.

This part isn’t really geared to getting people to visit your site, it’s more about getting them to interact and stay on your site longer. What I love about my blogsites, well one of the things that I love is the elegant clean layout. I’ve talked to A LOT of people about what they do or don’t like about websites, and tried to incorporate the good stuff into the blogsites. People like ease of use. They want to be able to get anywhere with a couple clicks of a button without having to search everywhere. They don’t like confusing layouts, or scrolling for a mile and a half. The Noah Photo Blogsites have passed the MOM test. Can YOUR mother go to your website and navigate the content?

Another thing I really love about these blogsites is that all you need to do is upload your own header image, background image, bio image(if your blogsite has a bio section,) and change some colors  around. It’s amazing how much you can really do with these sites. It really is limitless. What can your imagination do? That’s the limit.

Although there are only two designs right now, I’m in the planning stages for a few more. So stay tuned. Also the beauty of these blogsites is that they are 100% interchangeable. If you see a new layout that I designed that you want to change/upgrade to, just ask, and it’s yours for no charge. You have to have purchased a Noah Photo Blogsite in the past of course, but all the same, these come with a full lifetime of free upgrades.

I love the fact that they’re so easy to install and work with. In the video below I show myself installing the Noah Photo Blogsite theme onto the wordpress blog that we created yesterday. The video is 10 minutes, and apart from uploading the theme, that’s about how long it takes to install, and change a few things around… can you beat that? That means that if you put yesterday’s video and today’s video together, I installed WordPress, a few plugins, installed the Noah Photo Blogsite theme and imported our old blog in about 20 minutes. Now I do realize that I’m a pro, and have been doing this for a while, but I show you how to do everything here, you just need to try it out… I realize this isn’t for everyone, and that’s why I offer installation support which can be purchased separately.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc1Dey9zPEE

Now what should you do to keep people on your site longer? Well, content, content, content. You need to have interesting content on your site. Whether that be videos, photographs that you made, captivating articles, or anything really that can keep and hold people’s attention. I wish it was as easy as “if you build it, they will come.” But it just isn’t. You have to work hard at creating top notch blogs, or showcasing your incredible images. And another thing, keep on updating your blog. I’ve seen too many great blogs go to waste because their owners stopped caring for them. Remember that this is YOUR space. This is your virtual storefront. You don’t want people to come to your virtual storefront and come to the conclusion that you haven’t been in for over 5 months. Would you go to a business that the owner or manager hadn’t actually visited the store in over 5 months? I wouldn’t want to invest my time into a company that is an obvious dead end.

There are people that have decided to blog every day for a year. EVERY DAY! Can you imagine? I’m having a tough enough time creating fresh content over this week of articles alone. But every day for a year? Could you imagine what that could do to help your business grow? Remember what I was saying about search engines loving text? Imagine having a years worth of text talking about all the places you shot a portrait session, or would like to shoot a portrait session. Imagine if somebody searched for a photographer at Leo Carillo beach, and just because you visited the beach with your sister, took some photos and posted them to your daily blog, you just booked a wedding at that beach. Wouldn’t that be amazing? It happens all the time.

Should you create a daily blog? Maybe. It’s not for everyone. I lack the discipline to do it at the moment. But do you think you could put forth the effort to writing interesting content? You’ll be happy you did, and so will the people visiting your site. At the very least, take 1 photo a week, write a blog post highlighting it, and talk about how you created the image. Where you were, what is in the image, what you would do differently. And ask for people to take part in a discussion, and let them leave comments and even critique your photo if you want.

So here’s the bottom line. You want the people coming to your site to stay more than 10 seconds. In order for that to happen you need to make sure that you 1. have a great looking site. The Noah Photo Blogsites are the perfect fit for that. And 2. Create fresh and interesting content.

That’s it for today, and I hope to hear what you think… Also make sure you get yourself a Noah Photo Blogsite, and take control of your site’s image today!

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s article.

Over the past two days I’ve talked about SEO, what NOT to do and what TO do. If you are just starting here, make sure you read Part 1& 2[link] first.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about over the next few days.

• Part 1: SEO – Why your web traffic sucks(The Bad News)
• Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)
• Part 3: WordPress <—You are here.
• Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites
• Part 5: Social Media and Networking.(How twitter and facebook can change your life)

I’ve talked a little about WordPress, and how it can be beneficial. The incredible coding structure and integrity of the XHTML. Along with the plethora of tools available for free. But I haven’t really talked about what it is, or how to use it. I’ll be discussing that today and showing you how easy it is to do anything on it. I won’t get into the Noah Photo Blogsites yet… we’ll have to wait for Part 4, but I will be referencing them a little here and there.

I finished Part 2 with a call to action: GET A BLOGSITE! Now I’m gonna assume you didn’t… if you did, then Congratulations, you are on the road to Web Traffic Recovery. But for those of you who didn’t, I’m gonna conclude a few things:

Either

1. You have no clue how to do such a thing
2. You just spent a bunch of money on your beautiful new Flash site
3. You think it’s gonna cost you money, or
4. You don’t want to put forth the effort to improve your web ranking.

Well I’m gonna clear up a few confusions… If you already have a URL, you can install wordpress free of charge. All you do is set up a subdomain(blog.URL.com) or a new folder(www.url.com/blog) upload wordpress to it, configure a new database(in your cpanel,) and plug in a few figures. I’ll even show you how to do this in the video. Now I know that number 4 isn’t true, otherwise you wouldn’t be at part 3.

Now I do understand 100% if you don’t want to get rid of your flash site. I really do. But I just want you to realize that you won’t be getting any search traffic on it. If you decide to keep WordPress separate from your site, then that’s fine, but the beauty of the Noah Photo Blogsites is that you can either use it as a traditional blog, or as a blogsite. Either way, you’re fine. But whatever you do, if you have a domain name already, get rid of your free blog and install wordpress on your site today!

Are you worried about your old blog or how you are going to recreate everything? Well, wordpress has a nifty import tool that allows you to import your old blog with a couple clicks. That’s it! now all you have to do is forward your old blog to your new blogsite!

WordPress and it’s plugins

WordPress is an open source project. It’s constantly being updated with new improvements. But honestly, it’s so amazing now, that I’m not sure what else they could want to do. WordPress was designed to be a standalone blog engine that you could install on your site. It has an administration section that makes adding new posts and pages super simple. It has a pretty decent media system that makes uploading photos, audio, and video easy. You can download and install plugins with the click of a button, along with new themes and templates. It’s 100% configurable to your heart’s desires. If you want something, there’s a way to do it.

Now, I think it’s obvious why this is better than any static html site. Every page on an html site needs to be designed and coded individually. Sure you can use css, and copy and paste, but everything from menus to uploading and updating everything has to be done manually… There is no easy way to do it. Also if you want to have any kind of extra special thing, like a blog, there’s no easy way to go about it… And don’t even get me started on trying to build an xml file for your html blog… forget about it…

WordPress takes away all of the hard, difficult parts of running your website.

WordPress can look however you want. If you want big images to impress your clients, that’s possible. If you want a simple, clean, full 1000 pixel design, that’s doable. In short, WordPress IS all it’s cracked up to be, and more.

This is a list of my favorite plugins and what they allow me to do. They range from eye-candy, to nitty gritty seo tools.

1- All-In-One SEO Pack:

This plugin allows you to have control over every page’s title, description, and keywords(if you decide you need them for some reason.) It also has some advanced uses, like turning on and off canonical links. This prevents you from having duplicate posts. For example, you have a blog post under blog, but also under favorite photos, google will mark you as spamming. The Canonical links tell google that this other blog is just a copy… The original is at such and such a link. This is a MUST HAVE plugin.

2- Featured Content Gallery:

This is the slideshow you see on the front page of my site. This let’s you select a certain blog category as the FEATURED blog. You upload an image, and paste the url(provided) into a custom field, with the name of article img. It sounds difficult, but trust me… it’s easy. A lot of people want just a slideshow that has nothing to do with their posts… I have a couple options for that.

3- WordPress Gallery Slideshow:

This is a slideshow that you use on individual pages. It makes inserting photos super simple. All you do is upload images to your blogpost or your page, and type [ slide ]….  and when you go to that page, you have a slideshow with your images. It’s really quite amazing.

4- Slideshow Gallery:

This slideshow is like the featured content gallery, except that it’s not dependent on blog-posts. All you do is insert the URL of an image that you want in the slideshow, and click save slide. It automatically adds that slide to your slideshow. This is great if you have an extensive portfolio. I prefer using the Featured content gallery, just because I like to have a headline image.

5- cforms:

This plugin allows you to have very flexible mail forms. On your contact page you can insert a form so that anyone can send you an email without having to copy and paste your email address into their mail program. Don’t leave home without this one.

6- FeedBurner FeedSmith:

This plugin allows you to redirect your rss feeds through feedburner, so you can get accurate statistics as to who is reading your blogs… pretty cool.

7- WPtouch iPhone Theme:

This plugin is just cool. It reformats your wordpress blog so that if you have traffic that visits your site on an iphone, or android, or a few other smart phones, it works perfectly for their little screens. Another one to not leave home without.

8- Twitter Tools:

If you’re like me, and you spend a decent amount of time on twitter, this little guy is great. Not only will it tweet your latest posts for you onto twitter, but it will also allow you to tweet from the admin menu, or directly onto your twitter widget. So if your job doesn’t allow twitter, you now have a workaround(without going over the text limit on your phone.) I would never actually suggest this, and I personally wouldn’t do that… but it’s there all the same.

9- Subscribe2:

I love this plugin… It allows people to subscribe to your blog with their email address. It also allows you to schedule how often, and at what time you will deliver updates. Per blog entry, up to a weekly digest.

10- Ultimate Google Analytics:

This one is just cool… All you need to do is paste your google analytics code into the settings menu, and you’re good to go. I always make sure to turn off tracking for the admin user. that way I don’t get false reads. I did actually create a space on the Noah Photo Blogsites where you can paste in your Google Analytics code… which in effect allows you to not have to install this plugin… but either way it works great.

And last, but not least:

11- Smart Youtube:

When you want to blog about, or include a youtube video on your site, all you will need to do after installing this plugin is copy the full URL, and past it into your blog post. next you just add v to the http://www.— so that it looks like httpv://www.—. Pretty easy, and once you define video size that you want, it takes care of everything for you.

That’s it for you today. I hope this shed a little light on what wordpress can do for you. Other than SEO-wise…. WordPress is just an incredible platform that is ever expanding in capabilities… install it today. and in case you still think it’s too hard, or don’t understand what’s so great about this…. just watch this video:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lQEu00F7wM

Make sure to read part 4 here:

Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites

Yesterday I talked about what NOT to do for SEO. There is a list of common mistakes and practices that will actually harm your search engine ranking. If you missed it, go back and start there. here’s the link: [link]

Here’s what I’ll be talking about over the next few days.

• Part 1: SEO – Why your web traffic sucks(The Bad News)
• Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)
• Part 3: WordPress
• Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites
• Part 5: Social Media and Networking.(How twitter and facebook can change your life)

I’m gonna skip over the introduction to SEO talk that I gave yesterday, and assume that you either already know it, or just read about it. I’ll talk instead about a simple well-known marketing concept: Know your audience. I know it sounds simple enough, and everyone knows it, but what have you done to implement it? Yes, It is important to run your business in a way, and present yourself in a way that holds true to your personality. But when you are building, or re-building your website, you need to take into account what you are actually selling, and to whom you are selling. Can you identify with your client? Can your prospective client identify with you?

In an ideal world we would be able to do business with people just like us. We wouldn’t have to change, we would be able to do whatever we wanted. But since we don’t live in this ideal world, we have to make compromises. We actually need to draw in the clientele that pays the bills. And how we represent ourselves, and what we know about our clientele is paramount.

When I was developing my Noah Photo Blogsites I made sure to talk to multiple photographers. Ask them what they wanted in a website, and took all that data, and tried to make it as best as possible. I found out that they wanted to be able to control the look of their site without having to touch a single line of code. An easy to use admin section that they could change a few things here and there easily. WordPress was the obvious choice for the platform(this is what I use, and the platform is incredible.) But I was able to make the blogsites to the standards that photographers desired and required.

Step 1: Keywords(not the meta tag ones)

You might be wondering why I’m talking about marketing and branding when I should be talking about SEO. Well this principle applies with SEO. Especially what KEYWORDS to be using. Now I’m not talking about Meta tag keywords, I’m talking about the search words with which you want your clients to find your website. You need to find out what your future clients will be searching. Are they looking for “unique family portraits in Canoga Park”? Well, you need to actually write those exact words inside your website. Whether they be in an introduction, or inside of the text in your site. Refer to them a few times. Mention Canoga Park at about 3-5 times. But no more than that. If you write that you make unique family portraits in Canoga Park a bunch of times in a row, you will be marked as spamming keywords, and your search engine ranking will drop.

You’re gonna want to sit down, and write a list of keywords that you will be using. Call past clients, and ask them what they would search if they were looking for a photographer. This might take a little time, but it will definitely help clarify what you will actually be writing in your website.

Then you are going to want to actually sit down and write your website content in a way that makes use of your keywords. I could go into a ton of detail about keyword saturation and proximity and such, but until you get the basics of SEO down, that would be pointless.

Step 2: Is your site clean?

I want you to go to http://validator.w3.org/ and see how many errors or warnings your website contains. You are going to want to fix these. The cleaner your website is, the better your SEO ranking will be. Mind you, this is not the end all to SEO. This is simple just a step that you want to take to improve the health of your site. The incredible thing about WordPress, is that it is such a robust engine, and that it has the cleanest mark-up, and coding of pretty much anything around. That’s why blogs or blogsites hosted by wordpress far outweigh the competition in search engine friendliness.

Step 3: You URL (www)

What does your URL say about you? Is your web URL simply http://www.yournameherephotography.com? Yes, this is good for ease of use, and I’m not gonna tell you to get rid of it. But what about forwarding it to a more search friendly name like www.noahphotographyincanogapark.com. Basically you would be hosting your site at www.noahphotographyincanogapark.com but keeping your url for email purposes and for ease of use. Nobody wants to type in a huge URL, that’s why I send everyone to http://www.losangelesportraits.org it’s easy to remember and fairly short.

The reason that you want your site hosted on a URL that is search friendly is because the spiders love text correlation. They want to see that your URL has a correlation to your Page title, which also correlates to the page description, which correlates to the actual text in your website. Which I’ll get into in the next step.

Step 4: Page Titles, Descriptions, and Text.

Just as important as your URL, if not more so, is how you use your page titles and description, along with how relevant they are to your text. you could have the perfect url, title, and description, but if they aren’t relevant to the text that’s actually on the page, you’re kind of screwed.

I go to a lot of websites where I look at the page title, and see “home” or “about” or “blog” as the page title. That’s good at describing where you are, but honestly this isn’t usually a thing that people look at. I usually use my page title to quickly, in a few words, describe my page. Each individual page. not just a generic “noah photography, weddings, portraits and products in Los Angeles.” Although that is a good title, and it describes what I do… it will usually only work well on the about pages, or pages that describe what you do in your business. So for each page or post that I write, I will create a custom page title that quickly sums up what the page is about. for this page I wrote the following as my title:

“How to optimize traffic to your website, and get them to stay longer. SEO, WordPress, and Noah Photo Blogsites.”

So along with the page title you’ve gotta have your description. This is where you describe your page in 160 characters or less. for example:

“A 5 part tutorial on driving traffic to your website and getting them to stay there longer. SEO, WordPress, and Noah Photo Blogsites. (SEO for photographers)”

You see how this describes what I’ll be talking about in these articles? What you want to do is make sure that these two have a good relevancy to your actual page. So Ideally, If you want people to search “unique family portraits in Canoga Park” you want to have Canoga Park, or Portraits in your URL. Then your title would also contain “unique family portraits in Canoga Park” and then your description would be something along the lines of “Noah photography specializes in  unique family portraits. Located in Canoga Park, we serve the whole San Fernando Valley.” Now the content of your page needs to reflect the search words. If you use this foursome(URL, title, description, and content) wisely, your search engine rankings will improve drastically.

I know that this sounds difficult, but with WordPress, there is a plugin called “All in one SEO Pack” that makes this incredibly easy. Each page or post can have it’s own title, description, and obviously you control the content. Next turn on your WordPress permalinks, and you’ve got your URL working for you too.

Step 5: Get a Blogsite

I know this might seem out of order, but the other 4 things you can do without getting a blogsite.

What can a blogsite do for you and your SEO? Well like I said before, WordPress has a plethora(yes I said plethora) of tools at your disposal to implement and create a unique blog. In my opinion, the blogsite is the best bet for SEO. It brings everything together under one umbrella. Now, like I said yesterday, a free blog hosted NOT on your site will do nothing for your search engine optimization. You want to go to WordPress.org to download and install your self hosted blog. It’s absolutely free.

As you know, spiders LOVE text. And with a blog, you are continuously adding more and more text to your  website. The more and more search relevant text you have on your website, the better.

So you ask, why a blogsite rather than a blog that is separate from your site? There are a lot of reasons, but in short here’s a few.

1. If you have a flash site, the search engines will have a harder time finding your blog unless you have a landing pages… and don’t get me started on landing page… Web traffic HATES landing pages.
2. You are going to have to duplicate everything that’s on your flash site to your blog anyway. A lot of people don’t have flash installed on their computer, and they aren’t gonna install it just to view YOUR site.
3. If you still have a static HTML site why not just make your life easier every time you want to change something or add a little bit of text, or just add a whole new page?
4. You have a lot more consistent look and feel. You don’t have to worry about branding your website and blog the same…. it just happens automatically.
5. They’re free! what more can I say? if you can follow a few fairly simple instructions, you can install wordpress in under an hour, and be blogging by dinner. YOURSELF!
6. You can get great pre-designed themes for your blogsite. Specifically the Noah Photo Blogsites. While not free, they are a cut above everything else that’s out there(I might be a little biased.) I don’t say this without caution of course. I can back it up. The reason they are so great, is the static front page and the incredible customization that is possible with them. Look around at other blogsite themes that are available, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You go to the front page, and it’s a BLOG. and it scrolls on forever, and it takes a minute and a half to load. Sure, it’s great looking, but it’s not a true blogsite. You are looking for a blogsite, where you can have a slideshow on your front page, or a promotional video(coming soon.)

So will you get a blogsite? Do it today!

That’s gonna do it for today, but Stay tuned for tomorrows article on WordPress, and find out how it can make your online presence so much easier and better. I hope you learned something today. I know that this isn’t the be-all, end-all, of SEO… Far from it. But it is enough to give you a very large boost in the right direction.

I’ll see you tomorrow!

Part 3: WordPress – Read it Now!

I’ve talked to a lot of photographers, and no matter how great a photographer, or person they are, there always seems to be one problem: getting and maintaining traffic to their website. Now I know that anyone can go the easy way, and buy advertising through google, but what if there was a way that you could do this all yourself, without having to buy ads with a low ROI(return on investment), or pay someone a ton of money to maybe get you traffic. There are a few simple steps that will drastically improve your Search Engine Ranking that I’ll be highlighting over the next few days.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about.

• Part 1: SEO – Why your web traffic sucks(The Bad News)
• Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)
• Part 3: WordPress
• Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites
• Part 5: Social Media and Networking.(How twitter and facebook can change your life)

I’m gonna make a few guesses here. 1: You have a website, but can’t seem to get people to stay very long if you can even get them to come at all. 2: You have a flash based website that looks beautiful, has large images, but kind of looks like everyone else’s website. 3: You have a free blog hosted by Blogger or WordPress. 4: You’ve heard of SEO, but think you need to pay someone $99 a month to “get you to the front page”

Well if even one of these guesses fit you, I hope you get a lot out of what I’m about to tell you.

Here are the basics of SEO. Google, Yahoo, Bing, along with a few other search engines take text from your website and run it through a few different highly complex algorithms and basically assess the quality of your site, and the relevance to searches made on their websites. If you are a wedding photographer in Los Angeles for example, you would want your bride to go to a place like yahoo and type in “Wedding Photography in Los Angeles,” and hopefully, if you play your cards right, you’ll show up on the first page. Last time I checked there were thousands of photographers in L.A. so the likelihood of front page results is slim to none, especially if you know nothing about SEO… I want to steer you in the RIGHT direction, but first we need to make sure you aren’t making some of the most common errors. So here is a list of things that you are likely doing wrong for your SEO.

1:You have no readable text on your website: It’s lost inside the flash file, or some random xml file. To further the problem, spiders(the bots that search engines employ to scrape the web for information) don’t read flash, they only read text. So if all you have on your site is flash, you won’t be getting very far.

This is what the spiders read when they go to a beautiful flash site:

This site requires flash.
Please visit HERE to download the flash player.

2: The quality of the actual text in your site is no good: If you want people to find your site by searching “wedding photographer in Los Angeles” you don’t actually have any sentences that say specifically that. You might only have the word Los Angeles written on your website only once. Another problem is that you have plenty of images, but you don’t describe them. With SEO a picture is NOT worth a thousand words. No-one is going to find your website by searching Google Images for “contrasty black and white image with plenty of film grain.”

3: You are using a free blog: Now this seems like it would be great for SEO, but in all actuality, the only people that your “blogger” blog is benefiting are the people hosting your blog for you. This MIGHT increase web traffic, but all this is doing is bringing people to blogspot.com or wordpress.com. Not only that, but you are extremely limited as to what you can do with your account. Yes, you can spend $15 a year to edit the CSS, but what does that really get you? Do you know anything about CSS? (FYI: You can host wordpress on your already existing website for absolutely nothing.)

4: You are using old and antiquated SEO “tricks”, like Keywords, or Link Farms. STOP DOING THAT! Link farms will only hurt you. Search engines have caught onto this a LONG time ago. They’ve also gotten rid of any value for your Keywords, so don’t waste your time adding 500 keywords to your Meta tags… Also don’t repeat the keywords that you want too many times. for example, don’t have a footer that says “Los Angeles Wedding Photographer” 5 times in a row. Spiders can tell that you are trying to trick them, and they will penalize you.

5: You are using INVISIBLE text: Yes, you will see this all over the place, especially with flash websites. You make the font color the same as the background so that you can have a nice clean design, without people seeing that you are over-using your keywords…. This might seem like a good idea, but it will hurt you, and the search engines will penalize you.

6: Your URL is ugly: Does your URL look like http://www.yourname.com/&page=?243&category=?345&post=?24563? Not only does your traffic think it’s ugly, but so do the spiders. If you have a website made with PHP, this will more than likely happen, and it’s not good. WordPress can be an exception though with it’s permalink structures.

7: You have spammed your URL: You sent a link out to all of your friends, and people in your network asking them to post the link on their site. Problem is, you sent the same text to everyone. The spiders don’t like this. They notice the trend that links to your site seem to have the same exact text surrounding the link. They then flag your site as a spam site. Along these lines, you don’t want to have more than 100 links on any given page. you don’t want to look like a link farm. Even if they are no-follow links, they can harm you. have a few high quality links to sites that you would put your name behind, like Camera Dojo, or Pictage. And the last part of this still fits this last point…. You need to make sure that the links on your site actually work. sites with bad links are also penalizes as a not high quality site.

So that’s it for today. Click the link below for what you can actually do to help your website grow traffic…. The GOOD news.

Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)