Many of my photography marketing posts talk about SEO – the simplest form of affordable advertising where the only cost is your time spent. This post talks about the importance of titles and meta descriptions, and why the keywords in the meta description don’t matter!
Titles First
A webpage title appear at the very top of the browser window, above the URL bar. Keywords here accurately describe the topic of the page. You’re not going to find Charlie Sheen content on a page titled “Best Atlanta Wedding Photo Albums”. You know what you can find on that page I just mentioned without even looking at it. So does Google and so do your potential clients. Keywords in the title not only match your page to search queries, but more importantly show on the search results page. That’s right, the list of links you see in the top 10 of Google are all page titles, and are the deciding factor for whether a searcher clicks to your site, or chooses someone else’s.
Below is a sample search result for “Best Atlanta Wedding Photo Albums”. The title of the page appears as a blue link. Notice that the words in my search (best, Atlanta, wedding) become bolded. It even bolds “photography” which is not what I searched, but closely related.
These factors align searchers to your page and act as cues for them to click you.
The meta description for a page or post appears as the black text below the blue link on a search result. This is the only place it appears, thus is often forgotten, but has a tremendous impact on how many people click on your link. The keywords in a meta description don’t necessarily help a page/post rank better, but will stand out as bold to help convert users to click. As a user, I’m likely to choose the above website because the photographer is the best, award-winning photographer in my area (or so the claim goes). Does your homepage description speak to your strengths and encourage users to choose you over someone else?
Titles and descriptions are the easiest and most important item to pay attention to for every page and every post from now on. A homepage title is especially important since that result will appear in search most often. Here are general tips when writing titles and descriptions:
- Titles are cutoff at 60 characters and descriptions at 160 characters
- Titles almost never need your business name – that’s wasting keywords when you will rank for it anyway
- Your blog title should not be the same as your site title (don’t compete with yourself)
- Titles should focus on 1-2 main phrases (not 3 cities or 3 niches – it won’t work)
- Every page and every post needs a unique title and description that describes the page
- The blog name should not appear at the end of every page or post title
- Any unneeded words dilute the power of your quality words, so remove words that you’re not actively trying to rank for (while still maintaining good flow and not just a list of keywords)
- Keywords at the beginning are weighted more heavily than ones at the end. With these tips in hand, let’s update a homepage title and meta description.
Homepage
Users search for pages dedicated to a topic, so that’s what Google ranks highly. A blog homepage will target the broadest and most competitive phrase in your niche, like Atlanta wedding photography. That’s no easy task. To do this successfully you need to completely focus your homepage on that one phrase. Adding a second or third phrase to your homepage optimization will risk your ability to rank well for any of them.
Your title should describe your blog in as few words as possible while using your main phrase.
Example blog homepage title: Atlanta Wedding Photography Blog
Your blog homepage description supports that title, driving users to click it when it appears in search results. It might include your business name, major keywords, and reason to click.
Example blog homepage description: Zach’s Wedding Photography posts wedding and engagement galleries from his award winning portfolio. View weekly photo updates and planning tips.
Again, blog homepage and description are the most critical pieces to update since the blog homepage appears in search more than any other page of the blog. Updating them takes only moments.
Blogger: Click Settings > Basic to access fields for title and description
TypePad: Click Settings > SEO to access fields for title and meta description
WordPress: Click Settings > All in One SEO to access fields for Home Title and Home
Description
This takes the place of the Blog Title and Tagline (found under Settings > General) which are used by WordPress as the default. WordPress Thesis Theme: click Thesis > Page Options to access fields for home page title tag and home page meta description. Verify how your new title appears by looking in the blue bar at the top of your browser window.
Posts
Titles and descriptions of blog posts are the most important tasks to increasing traffic to a blog from search. With dozens or hundreds of posts, you have the ability to rank for literally thousands of key phrases you never imagined users would type to find you. Bloggers instantly see that the sum of keyword traffic to individual posts will outweigh traffic to the blog homepage by 10x or more! That’s the power of the long-tail, which is a small number of visits to your site for each of lots of little phrases. Take a phrase like “Ritz Hotel Atlanta wedding.” That’s something a few people probably search for each month and there’s less than 10 pages on the internet that talk about it. So if I write a post about it, I’m almost guaranteed to rank well and get a slice of those few searchers every month. After writing 100 posts, I now have 100 slices and a significant source of leads from small phrases.
Your job is to write better blog titles. Still describe the post, but use words that someone might actually search for. If you’re posting client photos for Amber and Zach’s wedding, include where they got married, the season, what they wore, adjectives like “best, top, beautiful, stunning,” and photography words like “portraits, photos, photographs, images, pictures, galleries.” If you’re posting a product then the title might include price related keywords like “cheap, special, coupon, discount, free,” method of delivery like “pdf, download, shipping,” how someone might use it, benefits to the user, and the type of product it is instead of a clever product name.
Poor: Zach and Amber Wedding – 05/15/10
Poor: Zach and Amber Wedding – Atlanta Wedding Photographer
Better: Zach and Amber Wedding at Ritz Hotel
Best: Best “Prez” Wedding Photos from Ritz Hotel, Atlanta
The best example uses strong keywords at the beginning of the title, which Google weights more heavily. It uses the last name (Prez) which is shorter than the two first names. It avoids using the main phrase (Atlanta Wedding Photographer) because this post will never outrank my homepage which is going for the same term. It also uses lots of possible keyword combinations: best photos, wedding photos, ritz hotel, Atlanta wedding. Lastly, a user would be more compelled to click on this result in a search engine because these are the “best” photos available from the venue that they just searched!
If you’re not using WordPress yet, the post title is created from the headline of the blog post. In WordPress, the All in One SEO Pack or the Thesis theme adds a field at the bottom of each post where you can enter the title and description to give searchers a reason to click.
Example post meta description:
View stunning Ritz Hotel wedding photos from Zach’s Wedding Photography. Zach is an award winning and official photographer for the Ritz.
In TypePad, control meta descriptions via the excerpts field within each post. If using Blogger, the platform does not allow unique meta descriptions for each blog posts – a huge disadvantage.
Going Back
With your newfound knowledge about the power of titles and meta descriptions you may be inclined to redo hundreds of archive pages and posts on your blog. My advice is to focus on just 5 and rework those using specific niche phrases you’d like to target. Track the performance and see what you learn before investing a lot of time reworking dozens or hundreds of posts. As you’ll see in a moment, the title and meta description are a small part of the big search engine picture. Just changing those two things on existing items may not be enough to significantly affect rank. Putting them properly into place moving forward, along with other factors that we’ll talk about, does have a huge impact.
–
Zach Prez is a dad and social cyclist who loves to talk marketing over a cup of Lipton tea. He contributes to dozens of photography business sites and has authored 5 photography marketing ebooks to help photographers get more clients with photography websites.
Website: http://photographywebmarketing.com
Twitter: @zachprez
Facebook: http://facebook.com/zachprez
Here’s how you can share your tips, techniques and tutorials on CurrentPhotographer.com
–
*The Current Photographer website contains links to our affiliate partners. Purchasing products and services through these links helps support our efforts to bring you the quality information you love and there’s no additional cost to you.