SEO and Photo-Blogging

Anouilh

Hello!

I'm visiting from the Photography Forum, where a
discussion on the best upload systems for photographers is running at the moment.

The question of SEO seems to fit in better here and I would be interested to learn how best to make my blogs more visible on the Internet.

I am an amateur blogger and have joined MyBlogLog and several other aggregator sites.

This thread may be of interest to posters here:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055466815

Everybody is now very aware of the need to protect our photos in relation to copyright while making them easily available.

caminowebmaster

Post your blogs and I will have a look.

Anouilh

Thank you, Caminowebmaster.

They are all on this Technorati site:

http://technorati.com/people/technorati/Anouilh

I have noticed interesting reactions to Blog Hosts while learning the nuts and bolts of blogging.

Some people will almost physically avoid looking at Blogger and it seems to be categorized as an amateur's playing ground.

I made a Wordpress blog to try to teach myself more tech-savvy tricks and to find more versatile widgets.
Unfortunately, I find it slower than Blogger; and since I started with Blogger, people comment more often there.
Also, Askimet, in the past was a major deterrent when it came to other posters leaving comments.

Comments are few and far between on my blogs.
I installed "Comment Moderation" as at first I found a lot of advertising and drunken, midnight ramblings were being posted.

This is a bit long as an explanation, but I've worked hard to get a mild profile on the Irish Blogsphere and would like to do better, and be more entertaining, as time goes on.

Some people took time out from a busy schedule to tell me my posts were boring recently. I'm relatively introverted and not easily bored, so many of my bland blog posts on the subject of SEO don't seem to ring too many bells on the vastness of the International Blogosphere.

caminowebmaster

Anouilh wrote: »

I made a Wordpress blog to try to teach myself more tech-savvy tricks and to find more versatile widgets.
Unfortunately, I find it slower than Blogger; and since I started with Blogger, people comment more often there.
Also, Askimet, in the past was a major deterrent when it came to other posters leaving comments.

Okay some good news and some bad news.

Askimet is great and I could not live with out it, I use it on forum sites, all my blogs and wordpress sites that I have hacked into cms. However I do not use wordpress free blogs - that is the start of the bad news.

All free blogs will cause you long term problems, they have their upside - no cost, easy to set up, easy to use - however to get noticed you do need to go down the road of having your own hosted accounts.

This is not expensive and it will pay for itself during the first year easily. My hosting provider in Ireland is Blacknight - they make it very easy to set up wordpress blogs on your own domain. If you buy hosting and .com or such domain names for all of those blogs you will pay less than €200 in the first year - maybe less - check their site for details.

It is much easier to market blogs on your own domain - directory will be more willing to take your link and other will be more willing to link to you - free blogs disappear too quickly for me to bother linking to them, I don't want broken links on my site.

Read seobook.com - search there for a free down-loadable SEO guide for wordpress. It is great - also yoast has the best WP tech setup for wordpress here http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Good news - your photos are good - bad news, you hotlink to your own photos hence leaving you with less on the page for google to find and index. If you have your own hosting it is easy to upload galleries and photos with watermarks - and search engine will find them and send you visitors. If photos are on your own domain you will have alt tags filled which will get you more visitors again.

Your food blog in is an area where it is fairly easy to get visitors and high visitor numbers - I know I have 16 recipe domains - not all finished yet. It is easy to find a niche here and do well.

I write on SEO - search for cube online marketing and look at the blog - some of it may help.

But the best advice I can give is get your own domains asap - if you intend to keep doing this you will have to eventually - better done now.

Just download all the blogs and up load to WP on your own domains - wp will inport the data.

All the best

Anouilh

Thank you for taking time to make such a comprehensive post. I'll certainly get to work on all of that.