SEO for photographers is critical to the success of a portfolio website. For almost a year, I’ve listened to what Rob Haggart at A Photo Editor says. He’s brutally honest, highly opinionated and knows a hell of a lot more about the editorial photo biz than I ever will. Rob recently launched A Photo Folio so that photographers can have websites that photo editors won’t hate. If I were looking to launch an online portfolio today, A Photo Folio would be the place I’d start.

For several years, however, I’ve been a relatively happy client of SiteWelder. So, when Rob did this blog post about how his Photo Folio site is tweaked to keep photo editors happy, I compared it to what I had going on my site.

Here’s how I hacked two of Rob’s great ideas into my SiteWelder site. The common theme to all of this is “Photo editors work at warp speed in an environment that constantly distracts them from your portfolio. A PE will give your site a handful of seconds. Don’t waste it.“

Turn Off The Flash

Yes, Flash is cool. But, there are two big reasons not to use it for web galleries (beyond your homepage). First, if your dream photo editor gets interrupted while looking at your flash portfolio, she might miss THE one shot that gets you the phone call. Turn off the flash and force her to click through the thumbnails. This way your best shot will still be waiting when she gets off the phone. The second reason to trash the Flash is that PEs are pros and can digest pix a heck of a lot faster than us mere mortals. If your Flash gallery is moving too slow, your dream editor will move on to another site.

To kill the Flash in your SiteWelder galleries, go to the Galleries editor and click on “Slide Show Active” for each gallery. Then click on “Slide Show Disabled” or “HTML Pages With Slide Show Link”.

Make It Easy For Photo Editors To Get In Touch

Of course every good site has an “About” or “Contact” page somewhere. Why risk losing the PE’s focus over an extra click or two? As Rob brilliantly advocates, the best place for your contact info is under every photo in your galleries.

So, rather than use the photo caption for something lame like “Syl Arena California Magazine Photographer”, I now have my phone number, a live email link and ©.

I‘m not much of a coder. So, I always have to go back to this great online resource for HTML code every time I do things like this. The code for my contact info is:

Tel: 805 / 226-2794 * <a href=”mailto:studio@sylarenaphoto.com”>Studio@SylArenaPhoto.com</a> * © 2001-2008 Syl Arena

I stuffed it into each and every caption box on my site. My first strategy – putting this code into my global copyright notice box – failed as it screwed up the thumbnails in my now-not-flash galleries.

If you’ve made it this far and have not stopped to check out the links to Rob’s sites, do it now because I’m covering just two of the ten points that Rob raises. Here they are again: A Photo Editor, A Photo Folio, and the great post that inspired my hacking.

A Final Tip For SiteWelder Clients: Tweaking The Homepage Text

SiteWelder Users check out the text on my home page. Be sure to keep an eye on your vertical scroll bar while you are checking it out. Every bit of the text below the Flash gallery was hand coded. It’s there to give prospective clients several sources of info about me and to help bolster my presence on relevant Google searches. I wrote the code in Smultron (a free text editor for Mac OS) and pasted it into the “Copyright information” box on the Home Page control panel. To make this work smoothly, you have to go to the “Account Info” control panel and turn off the option to show contact info on pages. Otherwise the contact info tragically appears at a random point in the middle of my long, rambling home page text.