So, you have a website. You built it with The Turning Gate's CE3 plugins, you made smart use of album titles, image captions and other content options, and you feel secure -- as well you should -- in your site's search engine optimization (SEO). Now you can kick back and sip lemonades while the world discovers your masterful, life-affirming, world-transforming photography ...
I wish it were so, but it's not quite so simple as all that. Search engine optimization is only the beginning, and you will likely find that even with the best SEO, your site will still flounder in search rankings.
With the rise of social media, the Internet becomes increasingly reliant on popularity contests. Linking, liking, sharing, tweeting, plussing, pinning, curating, starring, favoriting ... these things matter now, and their importance is ever increasing. It's not enough simply to have a website; you need to get people on your side. You need to put yourself out there at every opportunity, hopefully picking up some word-of-mouth along the way.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Good content is the key to search engine optimization. The better your content, the more your visitors will appreciate the work that you do and the time that you spend in making it available for public consumption, and the more likely they will give you a bump via social media. And as search engines themselves continue to become smarter in how content is analyzed and prioritized, the best content will float to the top, while the worst content will continue to sink into oblivion.
The CE3 plugins are built to make the most of your content, to leverage it as well as can be done for clean, solid SEO. Our wiki discusses our SEO implementation in some detail, providing guidelines for image file names, page and album titles, descriptions, textual page content, image metadata and captions, and more. It's all there for your benefit.
But SEO is one piece of the puzzle, a single variable in a larger equation. It forms the foundation on which you must continue to build your presence. These days, search placement is crowdsourced.
Page Rank
In general, Google search results are determined by a combination of Search Engine Optimization and Page Rank, with other search engines adhering to similar protocol.
Page Rank is a measure of your site's social relevance, by Google's reckoning. Google weighs various factors in determining a site's page rank, most notably the number of external websites linking to your content, with the sites' own page rank giving those links greater or lesser relative value. Webpages with a higher Page Rank are more likely to appear at the top of Google search results.
There are many ways to check your page rank, such as using Google Toolbar or various websites dedicated to the task. The free sites will usually do little more than tell you your current rank, while paid services may offer a greater breakdown of information. It's up to you how far down the rabbit hole you want to take this, but I have not and would not pay for detailed analytics. To quickly check your page rank, try http://www.prchecker.info/.
Page rank is rated on a scale of 10. To give you some notion of what the values may mean, here are a few examples:
Apple, 9/10
http://apple.com
The New York Times, 9/10
http://www.nytimes.com/
CNN, 9/10
http://cnn.com
The Washington Post, 8/10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The Daily Show w/ John Stewart, 7/10
http://thedailyshow.com
The Turning Gate, 5/10
http://theturninggate.net
Terry White's Tech Blog, 5/10
http://terrywhite.com
Terry White Photography, 4/10
http://terrywhitephotography.com
LightroomQueen (Victoria Bampton), 4/10
http://lightroomqueen.com
Community Forum @ The Turning Gate, 3/10
http://community.theturninggate.net
Rod Barbee Photography, 3/10
http://barbeephoto.com
Campagna Pictures, 2/10
http://campagnapictures.com
It's all a lot of voodoo, so it's difficult to derive concrete facts from the scores, but we can make some observations and deductions.
▪ Most of us can't hope to compete for page rank with the likes of CNN or The New York Times, so it's probably unrealistic to expect a page rank greater than 5 or 6.
▪ The Turning Gate and Terry White's Tech Blog both rank 5/10. Both sites have been running and established for years. I've been doing Lightroom-related work at The Turning Gate since 2007, but the site was online several years before that as well. Terry White is a well-established name and his site content also dates back to 2007. I don't know whether or how long he was running his site before that. So we can surmise that even a page rank of 4 or 5 can take several years to achieve.
▪ I've seen TTG-built sites ranging in page rank from 0 to 4. My own site, Campagna Pictures, is relatively new and already ranking a 2. Honestly, I've done very little with the site to bolster its page rank: I link to it from The Turning Gate, and I have setup a Facebook page for it (that I never update). Campagna Pictures does not currently include a blog.
▪ Rod Barbee Photography does have a blog, and Rod blogs there just a few times a month. He's also active on Facebook and Twitter more than I am with Campagna Pictures. It makes a difference, and his page rank is higher than mine.
Tactics for Improving Your Page Rank
Or rather let's say ... Simple, Legitimate, Natural Tactics for Improving Your Page Rank. Because there are plenty of dirty tricks to be employed, but we're better people than that. And when I say "Natural", I mean stuff that you probably would be or should be doing anyway.
"Holy Grail!!"
Don't trust everything you read on the Internet (says the guy now writing on the Internet). There are a lot of professional bloggers who make a living by writing crap, by screaming "Holy Grail!!" about every new thing that pops up.
"Twitter is the Holy Grail! Thou must Tweet!"
"Pinterest is the Holy Grail! Thou must Pin!"
Maintain skepticism. Tweeting and pinning can help, as we shall discuss, but there is no Holy Grail, no magic bullet that will shoot you to the top of the search results. There is only the toolbox, and sometimes you buy a new hammer. So let's take a look at some of the tools in that toolbox and simple ways you can use them to good effect.
Participate in Forums
Forums -- discussion boards both private and public -- exist in droves for just about any topic that you can imagine, and we suffer no dearth of venues for discussing photography or Lightroom. Most forums support user profiles with custom signatures, signatures being an opportune place to link back to your website. As an example, let's discuss how you might abuse The Turning Gate.
If you're on this list, then you are a part of The Turning Gate's community and have legitimate cause to be posting in The Turning Gate's Community Forum. It's a place to get assistance, to ask questions, to offer feedback or to share your work with others. And while doing any of those things, you can benefit from our forum's 3/10 page rank. Register in the forum, create your profile and be sure to include your site address in your signature. From there, whether asking for helping or helping others, every post you make will carry a link to your site. And if you've already been posting a while, know that signatures are applied retroactivelyt o all of your existing posts.
If nothing else, swing by the CE3 Showcase forum to share your site with us. We are literally asking you to post a link to your site, and may even share your link on our Facebook page, Twitter feed or in the promo site's showcase.
Wherever you engage in conversations, make a point of adding your site address to your profile and/or signature. Exploit every opportunity that is offered to you. It all adds up to your benefit in the end.
That said, don't go spamming a place just to rain your site address on it. But if you're a legitimate participant in conversations and the opportunity is offered, there's no shame using the opportunity to your advantage. You might even make new friends who will take up your address and spread it around a bit on your behalf.
Comments on Blogs
Similar to forums, comment threads on blogs provide yet another venue for conversation and opportunity to bolder your page rank through legitimate participation. Again using The Turning Gate as example, our blog has a page rank of 5/10, our comment form specifically requests your site address, and I don't believe in "nofollow" nonsense. If you're making a legitimate contribution to the conversation and I approve your comment (and I usually will), then it's a solid link back to your site.
Whomever you follow online, look for ways to partipate and contribute to the conversation. Most authors will happily engage you and will appreciate your participation.
Social Networks
While not the Holy Grail some would claim them to be, social networks do provide excellent opportunities to boost your standing, either by creating your own profiles or allowing visitors to share your content on their own profiles, from which your content may be seen and shared by still more people.
Twitter, 10/10
Even if you don't plan to do a lot of tweeting, setup a Twitter account. If you blog, setup your blog to automatically post your headlines to your Twitter account. Those automatic tweets will give your followers one more option in keeping up with you, will contribute to your page rank, and may be retweeted by your followers to still greater advantage.
Facebook, 9/10
Maybe you have a personal Facebook profile. You can also setup a page for your photography. Again, setup your blog to automatically post to your Facebook page(s) for free back links. If you add new photos to a gallery, post about it on your profiles and link back to the new additions on your site.
Pinterest, 8/10
Pinterest is a bit different from other social networks. Not only can you pin entire pages, but you can also pin specific images from your pages. So post a gallery, then pin a few of your favorite images to a Pinterest board. Enable the new Pinterest sharing features in the CE3 plugins to allow your visitors to pin their favorites to their own boards. Every one of those pinned images or pages links back to the source page on your website, being of benefit to you.
