In the presentation I covered the basic understanding of how SEO, Social Media and Pay Per Click can play an intricate role in building a photography business online. Some good questions came from the group after the presentation so clearly our photographers in Cape Town have a growing knowledge of web based marketing. The big takeaways from the evening are the need for links and basic strategies behind link building (competitor analysis being the focus). We shouldn’t be focused on directory links but rather building solid relationships with others in the industry. The other is to understand the return on investment, that 1.5% of traffic are going to convert, well that is the benchmark at least. We should be trying to increase this percentage to at least 5%.

I’ll hopefully have the audio for you to listen to as well. Our technicians are working on this..

Yesterday, I was privileged enough to be asked to talk about Yoast’s SEO Plugin at Cape Town’s Wordcamp 2011. I gave a basic run through of what settings we use to optimise WordPress websites. Yoast’s SEO Plugin offers a comprehensive set of tools, which can help provide the perfect platform to get your website ranking within the major search engines.

In a nutshell the most important aspects of the plugin are the following:

• Title tag optimisation, use category taxonomies for extra optimisation
• Title tag optimisation, use most important keywords in the beginning
• Ensure you have setup all three webmaster tools correctly (especially Google Webmaster Tools)
• Ensure that your admin, login and tag pages are not indexable by search bots
• Hide the wordpress generator i.e. version 2.3.2 from code, which increases your wordpress security
• When importing meta data from another plugin, use SEO Data Transporter.

Here’s the video just recently launched. I welcome any critical feedback

The video covers the following basic principles into SEO and why your business needs it:

1. relevant content on the page
2. the importance of title tags
3. links between websites
4. anchor text links
5. reputation and authority

What we have noticed with SEO over the past 12 months is that receiving one way incoming links are becoming increasingly difficult. We can get links from social media profiles and links from other blogs but unless we are creating quality content, the social media profiles are useless. Added to that, no blogger will want you to contribute to their blog if you aren’t providing value to their readers. Identifying competitor links and unpacking their link graph is crucial to take advantage of your written content but with no strategy and competition analysis in place, your content will not be fully taken advantage of.