How to Get Your Business Outranking Others in Local Search

Getting your page listed first on Google is like winning the lottery - you won’t know what to do with all the money - but absolutely not because it's up to chance. 

Being a top search result can make or break a business, so it’s no wonder why people are taking this stuff so seriously. If you’re part of an industry where the competition has yet to catch on, consider yourself very lucky. For everyone else, you’re going to have to put in the work.

Here's a step by step guide on how to get listed 1st in local search results.

5 More Ways Photographers Fail to Optimize for Search

Because five was never enough, and you knew it!

If you missed my first post on How Photographers Drive More Traffic to Their Pages by Optimizing for Search, you're going to want to catch up and read it first :)

5 Ways Photographers Fail to Optimize Websites for Search

With the advent and popularization of digital SLRs, the business of being a photographer has become increasingly competitive. There are far too many would-be photographers out there - myself being one of them. This is why it blows my mind when time and again I see the same mistakes being made not by armatures, but by top ranking photographers in major cities.

Here are The Top 5 Ways Photographers Fail to Optimize Their Websites for Search Traffic.

Top 3 Search-Engine-Results-Page Title & Description Sins

#1. The Over Optimizer

This person hasn't asked themselves "why be a top hit". 

They're too busy trying to get a 1-up on Google by stuffing as many keywords into their title and meta description as possible - far beyond the visible character limit. They don't know that meta tags are in no way a ranking factor and will be unpleasantly surprised when they are hit by one of Google's many deranking algorithms specifically made to counter these sorts of tactics.

I know it's more work, but by focusing search terms through a collection of unique pages, and by building a coherent URL structure, you will always see better results, without the risk & unpleasantness of shady "one size fits all" page titles. 

The golden rule: write for people, not for search engines.

There is no Spoon | a Guide to Ranking Images in Search

Do you remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo (Keanu Reeves) is given a crash course in telekinetic spoon bending from the Last Airbender?

It’s a fundamental turning point it Neo’s understanding of the system surrounding him – a system not much unlike Google…

OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but I am going somewhere with this.

Google doesn't actually rank images, the same way Neo isn't really bending a spoon – there is no image!

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