PhotosByJay enjoys record Google Rankings

The biggest search engine in the world, Google, is a mysterious beast. To protect their intellectual property and preserve their world-famous and increasingly more accurate search results, Google only provides a general set of guidelines as to how a webmaster can improve his or her rankings.

In essence, their search engine ranking guidelines are designed to help webmasters provide relevant, helpful content, ultimately making the web a more useful, organised place.

With these guidelines in mind, I designed PhotosByJay.com.au with the intention of providing loads of photography-related news and tips in order to (hopefully) attract lots of budding photographers to my site and hopefully enjoy better search engine rankings.

Of course, first and foremost I am running a photography business so I had to make sure that the user could always find a quick and easy path to read more about my services and contact me.

After speaking with several friends and colleagues in the search engine marketing industry, I compiled a set of key phrases that I wanted to rank well for. After some thorough research, I decided on these phrases:

1. Sydney wedding photographer
2. Wedding photographer Sydney (yes, Google treats these two differently)
3. Indian photographer
4. Indian wedding photographer
5. Nightclub photographer

I set off optimising Photos By Jay, making sure to use these phrases where possible (and relevant), paying special attention to the home page on which Google seems to place a lot of importance.

I launched the site in February 2007. Knowing that Google takes around a month to add a new site to its index and show it in search results, I waited it out. I tried to find my site in March, and was very disappointed. I wasn’t even in the first 20 pages for “Sydney wedding photographer”, I couldn’t even find myself on Google.com.au for “Indian photographer” and wasn’t doing so well for “Indian wedding photographer”.

I immediately started adding the phrases more desnsely around the site, again focussing on the homepage.

Still nothing.

It was now June 2007 and I was starting to question a lot of things. Why were sites that had very basic content (the usual about us, contact us plus lots of search-engine-unfriendly flash animation and slow load times) ranking higher than me, even though I was getting lots of traffic (around 11,000 unique visitors in March thanks to my “take better photos” articles”), was writing lots of quality content, and constantly optimising my site to load faster?

Adding some more tips, I took a brief holiday to Japan at the end of June. Returning at the beginning of July, I was in for an earth-shattering surprise.

Number 1 on Google for ‘indian wedding photographer’

Number 1 on Google for ‘nightclub photographer’

Number 9 on Google for ‘Sydney wedding photographer’

I was smiling. This is significant improvement to my rankings. So why did this happen? After much head-scratching, here’s what I think helped boost my rankings.

• Addition of free Google analytics code on every page, which provides me with lots of stats on my users, and also lets Google know how much traffic I am getting. My guess is that Google rewards sites with lots of traffic.
• My competitors have not updated their sites to reflect new web trends. The new wave of web sites focus on a simple and effective user experience, giving away lots of information in the form of blogs and forums. By structuring my site to focus on the user experience, I think I have been able to attract lots of web users and get quite a few links back to my site (which Google has been proven to place a lot of importance on)
• Google is constantly making changes and improvements to its algorithm and pages are always getting shuffled around - thankfully my hard work has paid off and this time it was in my favour!
• Google seems to recognise the age of sites - the longer a site has been around, the more trustworthy it is. As my site aged even as little as a few months, it may have been enough for Google to recognise it as not just another quick money-making scam site.

The result of this higher ranking? I have received more enquiries from couples looking for a wedding photographer than ever before. I also have had a record number of click-throughs from Google for my search phrases, which I’m certain will translate to more qualified enquiries.

This whole experience has proven a very powerful learning tool for me. The importance of spending some time and money researching search engine strategies to help boost business cannot be ignored. Rest assured I will keep on with my mission of supporting and growing my site to be more user friendly and relevant to the exciting and dynamic Australian photography industry.