Photography SEO Tips For WordPress Users

If you’re a WordPress user, you know that optimizing your site for search engines is important if you want to attract more visitors. In this post, we’ll share some tips on how to improve your SEO using WordPress.

There have been some minor changes to WordPress lately, so I wanted to write this article for those of you who use WordPress for your photography website.

We’ll also discuss the importance of using keywords and backlinks, and provide some examples of how to use them effectively. So whether you’re just starting out with WordPress or you’ve been using it for a while, be sure to read on for some helpful tips!

I also want to note that I touch on these tips but of course each tip has it’s own guide that could be written for it. So if you want me to dive further into a specific tip with a separate guide, be sure to drop a comment!

1. Enable HTTPS on your site

One of the most important things you can do to improve your site’s SEO is to enable HTTPS. This ensures that your site is secure and that visitors can trust it. In addition, Google has stated that they give preference to sites that are HTTPS-enabled.

To enable HTTPS on your WordPress site, you’ll need to install a plugin like Really Simple SSL. Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, all you need to do is go to Settings > SSL and make sure that the “Enable SSL” option is checked.

If you’ve ever been to a site and it said “Not Secure” next to the URL, this is why.

2. Use an SEO plugin

Another great way to improve your site’s SEO is to use an SEO plugin. There are many different SEO plugins available, but I recommend RankMath. It’s a free plugin that’s easy to use and it includes features like keyword optimization, XML sitemaps, and social media integration.

To install RankMath, head over to the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard and search for “RankMath.” Once you’ve found it, click “Install” and then “Activate.”

An important note to make that I think some people don’t understand is that installing an SEO plugin does not automatically improve your site’s SEO. It is the options and tools the SEO plugin provides that allows you to improve your site’s SEO — such as the ability to create XML Sitemaps, creating a robots.txt file, and ability to edit metadata on page/post level.

3. Check Your Page Speed

Google introduced what’s called your Core Web Vitals.

These are essentially metrics that Google likes to look at with websites that let’s their machine learning algorithms know whether or not a page is fast enough and provides a good user experience for the user.

If your website is slow, then this is not good for SEO and for the user experience of your visitors.

In case you want to see your score, pick a few different pages from your site and paste them into Google Pagespeed Insights.

Now it would be difficult to cover all optimizations in this article, I may cover this in the future with a guide to improving pagespeed. If this is something you’d like to read then be sure to drop a comment.

4. Use keywords strategically

Once you’ve configured your permalinks, you can start using keywords in your posts and pages. A keyword is a word or phrase that someone would use to search for your content. For example, if you’re a photographer who specializes in landscape photography, some of the keywords you might want to use are “landscape photography,” “landscape photos,” and “landscape photographer.”

To find out what keywords people are using to find your content, you can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Just enter a few of your potential keywords into the tool and it will show you how many people are searching for each one.

In addition to using keywords in your content, you should also use them in your title and in the alt text of your images. The title is what appears at the top of your browser when someone visits your site, so make sure it includes keywords that accurately describe your content. The alt text is the text that appears when someone mouses over an image, so including keywords here can also help you attract more visitors.

One big thing is to also remember that you should only be targeting one keyword per page or else you may end up with duplicate content which is bad.

The example I love to give is that let’s say you sell shoes and shoelaces. Well you wouldn’t want to have one page targeting those two keywords because they are 2 different keywords. With that being said, you will want to have one page targeting shoes and another page targeting shoelaces.

5. Internal and External Links

Internal links are when you link to other posts you have written. They are useful for improving the crawlability of your site and helps with user experience, which are both important for SEO.

Linking to other sites can also help improve your SEO. When you link to a site, it’s called an external link or backlink. Backlinks are important because they show that your site is trusted by other websites.

To get backlinks, you can reach out to other website owners and ask them to link to your site. You can also guest post on other sites and include a link back to your own site in your author bio.

If you don’t like the manual work of outreach, then you can do the natural link building strategy that I prefer, which involves creating great content and having people link to it naturally.

By following these SEO tips, you can improve your site’s ranking in search engine results pages. This will help you attract more visitors and grow your business.