For my blog, I photo friend's cars, and take photos at meets. Then I upload them to my blog, and do a little writeup. I know a lot of people swear by article submission, but I don't have any articles on my site!! Should I start thinking about including articles on my blog so I can submit them to article directories? Any suggestions for relevant articles? Thanks! (blog is first link in my sig btw)
Promoting a photo blog is not easy, but I'll give you a few hints/tips. Get listed at photblogs.org and try and get a listing on photos.vfxy.com Participate in photo forums and as your photos are of cars etc participate in Car forums and put a sig link AND also post thumbs with a link back to your photoblog. Seek out and comment on other photoblogs that are similar to yours it helps a lot! Do directory submissions. Do link exchanges with other photo blogs, add a signature to the bottom of all your email that has a link to your site. Your site looks OK, but even a quick look at the photos indicate that the quality of them differs quite a lot! Try and be consistent with the quality of the work you present. You are off to a good start, so stick with it. As you are showing several photos per page then you really do want to ensure that all photos are the same size. What works quite well, is to decide on a width and process all your photos to that width that you post. If you post a mixture of landscape and portrait shots then if you use different widths it will (and does) look like sh*t. People who visit photoblogs like to see a new picture every day - post it at the same time- so ensure you have the content before you promote it too much. If you miss updating for just 1 day you will see a drop in your regular visitors (trust me on this one!) It takes a lot of effort but is very rewarding to build up your viewers. Now, you need to decide early on if your photoblog will be all about the photo ( a true photoblog) or if you will write a small amount about each photo. Writing will help you get SE visitors to some degree. Anyway, good luck with your site!
Well, since you offer distinctive images, you could focus on seo for Google Image Search. The principle should be much the same: craft your title to reflect likely searches. As I understand it (and you really should research this, as I am not an expert) the filename (XXX.jpg), Alt Title attribute, and text above and below the photo all count. So if you wanted to optimize ferrari.jpg Alt Title: Hot Girl with Ferrari This Ferrari is hot...and the car isn't bad either <ferrari.jpg> Hot Girl with hot car Of course this just an example. But one tip...image search brings results based on all of the above EXCEPT the actual content of the photo. You will need text, captions for photos, and the engines will crawl that primarily. A descriptive paragraph about each photo, keyword selected, will help. Remember that even when searching for images, SE's use text. Good luck!
Thanks for the advice guys. I know the quality of photos does vary - particularly in my first post. I'm much happier with my recent photos though. Unsurprisingly, Google images is practically my main referrer!! As for naming the .jpg towards SEO, its a bit too time consuming for uploading my pictures . Other than that, I have started to name my photos (with a number key), and they all have relevant Alt tags. I do have a standardized size for my photos - the Homepage photos are 520 width, the subpage thumbs are 250 width, and the photos themselves are 786 width. I am on loads of car forums, with appropriate sig links. I also promote the site when I have a new post by previewing a few of the photos in the respective forum galleries, and then linking back to the site. As you say though RRWH, perhaps I should start going on some photography forums. I will also try and comment on similar blogs. Thanks for the advice so far!