Chasing the Holy Grail of Page Ranking for Toronto Wedding Photographers

Are you a wedding photographer in Toronto? Welcome to the club! It seems there are more of us than there are brides looking for our services. You can chalk it up to the rise of digital photography, newbies misled into thinking wedding photography is easy and extremely profitable (I get a kick out of that one), weekend warriors, etc., etc. There are several reasons for the current saturation of the market but that's material for an entire blog post by itself. 

We all have to struggle for visibility so we can get our work seen by the biggest number of potential clients before they move on to the next website. 

From late November of last year (2010) until early January of 2011, I had really dropped the ball on my blogging and social media channels, especially Twitter. This translated into my page ranking dropping from 6th page for "Toronto Wedding Photographers" to Page 19, ouch!!! Needless to say I had to get my act together quickly and got blogging right away. I became far more active on Twitter engaging followers and people I follow, instead of posting random quotes and retweeting someone else's content or even worse, spamming people with my latest workshop (again, topic for another blog post). In addition, I started posting ads on Craisglist and Kijiji. I know, that's the last place you want to be found at, but look at it from a different angle. Those two sites generate a tremendous amount of traffic and both of them allow you to incorporate direct links to your website (Craigslist allows actual HTML code in the body of your ad, while Kijiji charges $4 for allowing you to add a link). In other words, you don't have to post bottom feeder offers or anything like that, you can just use the ads to promote your services. 

There's more! Even though there are many of us wedding photographers out there, quite a few of us know or at least have heard of other members of our community. Some of us even network with other photographers and develop working relationships with those photographers. Guess what, we can help each other out by commenting on other photographers blogs. I'm not afraid to admit that I follow and admire a lot of other people's work and I'm sure each and every one of us appreciate a flattering comment on the work we do. How does that help, you may ask. Well, it's simple in most of the current blogsite platforms, the fields required for leaving a comment include your e-mail address and a wesbite so once that comment is approved, it eventually becomes and inlink to yours. Having said that, I try not to be a comment-whore (is that even a term?). I just leave comments on blogs of people whose work I truly admire. I couldn't bring myself to leave a comment on crappy work. 

Anyway, to recap that whole bunch of babbling above, here are the steps to follow in order to increase your page rank organically:

1. Comments: Be kind and leave comments on other people's blogs whose work you follow and truly admire. 

2. Twitter: Use Twitter to engage your followers and also provide useful information,  like a link to this blog post for example. 

3. Craigslist and Kijiji: Let go of your fears and use these two sites as promotion tools. 

4. Blogging: Posting beautiful weddings is all nice and cool but it also helps if you have a secondary blog (which links back to your photography site), where you post actual content, as opposed to just images. Remember, useful content. 

Now, has the strategy worked for me? Well, I'm no longer on page 19 but in the last two weeks I've moved to the bottom of page 11. 

The amazing thing is that in doing so, my rankings for other keywords increased dramatically. Here's my page rank for the keywords "Toronto Portrait Photographer"

If I were to charge for Landscape Photography commissions, then I'd be pretty happy with myself, as I'm the second listing on page 1 of Google for the keywords "Toronto Landscape Photographer", right above the Luminous Landscape Gallery.

Feel free to leave some feedback on what other kind of information you'd like to see on this blog. Thanks for reading this far.  

How to Find Out Where Your Website Visitors Are Coming From Using Google Analytics

So you've done the social media thing, you spend more time on Twitter and Facebook than you actually should, you try to stay on top of your blogging on a semi-regular basis, you advertise and on top of all that you also have to find time to meet with clients, shoot, edit entire weddings or portrait sessions, you know that actual work-related stuff.

At the end of the day, you are wondering: " Is it all paying off or am I just spinning my wheels?"  One easy way to check if your efforts are translating into increased traffic to your website is to use Google Analytics's Custom Reports. If you don't know what Custom Reports are, or worse yet, don't even know what Analytics is then you truly are spinning your wheels.

Watch this video for a quick tutorial on how to create a custom report in Analytics to pinpoint exactly where your visitors are coming from and what pages they are looking at.

SEO Optimization for Photographers and Bloggers in General Part 2

If you want to learn more about submitting your Blog to blog directories, creating sitemaps for Google and other search engines, and other important topics related to search engine optimization, then I highly recommend you go to this site:



The articles are very easy to read and the explanations are quite detailed.

SEO Optimization for Photographers and Bloggers in General Part 1

After spending countless hours tweaking and messing around with code for both my blogs/sites (this one and juanrojophotography.com), I've picked up a few URLs where you can go to take bits of code and paste into your own. It really don't requires any understanding of programming, you just have to follow the instructions given on the site and you'll be on your way. This is one of those URLs:

This Link gives you a tutorial on how to change the title of your post to appear as the main title of the page. By the default, when you first setup your Blogger blog, the title for your blog appears on every single page, even for archived posts and to top it off it's placed right in front of the post title. From a search engine stand point this is supposed to be quite counterproductive for your search engine rankings, as Google or any other search engine for that matter will only pick up a limited amount of words from the title to index it. If a good chunk of that title is already taken over by the Blog's name, then your post might go unnoticed by Google as the title of the blog has already been indexed by Google.