By David Saffir
Publishing a blog is a good way to get started in social networking. Once you’ve started a blog, here are a few tips to help improve your visibility on search engines and social media sites.
Write about what you know best. When you share knowledge that can help your customers achieve their own goals or increase their skills, you’ll gain credibility. Strong credibility means you'll be quoted and linked to more often on social-media sites. (Note that because you are a photographer, you should also include an appropriate image with each post.
Stick to one topic per blog post. This helps keep each post short. It also makes it easier for other bloggers and media resources to point to your blog, and be confident their readers will like it.
Be clear and concise. Try to write 500 words or less. Sometimes two or three sentences and an image will do. When you finish each draft, go back and remove any "extra" words. In this step, I usually cut the word count by 10 to 20%.
Organize for readability. Write an outline for your post before you begin. Use the classic structure of main heading, main idea, details, and summary of the main point. Readability encourages others to quote you, and/or point to your blog. It helps customers feel they can come back and get more of what they want or need.
Post regularly, and often. I try to post two or three times per week. Search engines and social-media sites seem to prefer to work with bloggers that have a predictable pattern of publication.
Edit each post with the intention of enhancing your "searchability" on search engines. For example, keep your titles short (less than 60 characters if possible). If your titles are longer than that, put the most important words first. Your title should also include the primary keyword (e.g. bride, dress, wedding, groom, photography). Then, make sure the most important content appears near the top of each post.
Create a concise, focused keyword list for your post. Enter these into the keyword field on your blogging application. For example, your keyword list might be: photographer, wedding, california, reception, guests, digital, album, and your name.
Work on getting noticed by other blogs, so you can create incoming and outgoing links for your blog. Incoming and outgoing links help raise your visibility on search engines. Encourage other bloggers to mention your posts, and do the same for them. Ask them to create links to you, and offer to create reciprocal links to them. Make sure any journalist or other blogger who writes about you includes a link to your blog.
Use Facebook, Twitter, and forums to post a compelling title about each new post, along with a working link. If you belong to a special-interest forum for photography or your photo specialty, log on at least once a week, find a relevant question you can answer, and post a reply. Include a link to your blog if the moderator allows it. This does a lot for your visibility. It increases your search- engine presence, gets the word out to your friends and customers, and improves blog traffic.
Put a link or button on your blog that makes it as easy as possible for a visitor to subscribe. Most people don't understand or use RSS. But syndicators and news aggregators do. Because less than 20% of the people surfing the net use RSS feeds, I also provide a button for e-mail subscription, and a button that says "Follow Me on Twitter." Use both, they work quite well. This also helps new customers stay connected to you and your blog.
There are more ideas, of course, but these tips can help make your blog easier to find, and help your customers stay with you.
