Keyword stuffing occurs when you fill your website with keywords that you want to show up for in an attempt to show the search engines that you are relevant. The correct way to do this is to make sure that the keywords in your website content are in context and make sense. Stringing together all your keywords and then making them the same color as your background will not cut it.

Link farming is basically purchasing a lot of irrelevant links on a third party’s website to trick the search engines.

There are also tactics that are considered white-hat, or search engine friendly, that you should avoid, too. A lot of people think that adding all possible keywords to their meta-keywords is smart. On the contrary, this confuses the search engines as their goal is to determine what it is you are relevant for. If you are trying to rank for “utah wedding photography”, and “utah weddings”, and “utah wedding planning” or any other keywords that you think would be valuable to your business, the search engines will not know what to do. Keep your meta-keyword list to 8-10 different keywords and no more. (Your meta-keywords are located in the html code )

A general rule of thumb is: don’t try to trick the search engines.

The organic or natural results are located within the main section of the SERP while the sponsored links are located along the right hand side of the SERP and sometimes across the top in a yellow shaded box. Contrary to the popular belief that the sponsored links don’t recieve any clicks, this section recieves 30% of the market share leaving the the remaining 70% to the organic results. From this you can understand which section would yield the best results. Unfortunately, the photography industry is very competitive, and while you can pay to show up in the sponsored listings, you cannot pay to rank on the front page. You will have to prove to the search engines that you are more relevant than the hundreds of thousands of competitor websites out there.

The process of proving yourself to the search engines is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization. By understanding how the search engines determine rank, you can take the necessary steps to get there. This can be done by either doing the research and work yourself or by paying an SEO firm to do it for you, keeping in mind that even if you do pay someone, it takes at least 6 months to see any results, and will probably take a lot longer to do yourself. But if you are in the same boat as me because you’ve spent all your money on camera equipment, you will probably like to know how to do it yourself. Stay tuned for more information on this.

For a more immediate effect, you can invest in a PPC or Pay-Per-Click campaign. In this situation you are responsible for writing the ad-copy and the search engines will then display your ads at no cost. You only pay if someone actually clicks on your ad. The cost-per-click is determined by a couple different factors. The most important factor is the demand for the keyword. In a competitive industry such as wedding photography, the demand is quite high so you can expect a cost-per-click of about $5.00. One factor that most don’t know about is the quality score that the search engines assign to you. If your ads are getting a lot of clicks then the search engines will make more money and they will value you. They reward you by increasing your quality score which will in turn lower your cost-per-click and increase your rank amongst the sponsored links. So be sure to start your campaign off on the right foot by increasing your bid price so your ad shows up more often. Then slowly dial in your campaign and adjust parameters and ad-copy until you can maximize your conversion rates. PPC is another involved subject that will receive more attention at a later point in time.

Push marketing is something we all encounter every day, from billboard to radio to tv. If I had a product or service that was new and largely unknown I would want to “push” it on to the consumer through advertising. The reason for this is that if the product or service is unknown then obviously the demand on the product is non-existent, therefore I would have to create a demand.

Pull marketing on the other hand is a strategy one would use when there exists a demand for the product and the consumer “pulls” it through some kind of delivery channel. Online marketing deals mostly with the pull strategy. As you can imagine, pull marketing is a lot more effective, especially for the wedding photography industry. One very effective way to accomplish this is to utilize the search engines to determine if there is a demand for your product or service. Go to Keyword Research and see what kind of demand there is for certain keywords. For example, the keyword “utah wedding photographer” gets about 1,600 searches a month. This is a fair amount of search volume for a regionally qualified keyword. In order to get any of this highly qualified traffic to visit your website you are going to have to show up on a search engine results page (SERP). This image shows the distribution of clicks

My next article will cover the different ways one can show up on the front page of the search engines