Fun? SEO? Really? When you combine some great photographers and a wonderful little coffee shop called Cafe Caliente in the Highlands it can be fun.

Five great photographers, Andrew and Jessica Schaefer, Paige Elizabeth, Heather Smith Matthews, and Trish Eberlein got together for my first Coffee Shop Class to talk and learn search.  I brought the concepts I’ve learned and applied on my own site, they brought the readiness to learn (and hopefully start using!) the pretty simple concepts I introduced.

In a nutshell, here’s what we learned in our SEO workshop:

• Make publishing interesting, relevant (and beautiful) content a weekly habit.
• Identify the keywords your clients are using to find you
• Weave those keywords into your blog title, headings, picture filenames, alt-tags, and body text.
• Remember that you have two VERY different users that will see the same content: Google the search robot, and your future human client.
• Google robot wants to find the keywords in your content
• Human client wants to see beautiful pictures and maybe a bit of text that is relevant to their search.  Then the human client wants to see more once they get to your website.
• …so make your site easily usable for your humans.
• Long Tail search results are fun to grab from the tree.   Your search volume will be low but visitors will be very targeted.   A visitor finding your site by searching “Breckenridge Hyatt Wedding Photographer“  are probably getting married at the Breckenridge Hyatt next summer and are looking for a photographer!

And, I got to yack about my pet cause:  Photographers MUST link to each other more!  The California Photogs all do it, they link to their friends in their social circles, and it comes back around as an increase in pagerank.   We need to do it more within our own circles…not only becuase that’s what blogging is all about…finding interesting content and sharing it within our OWN circles, but those links into our own site from our friends are how google determines who is a reliable source of information.  Think about it:  If I’m taking the time to post the link to another website, I probably have found something interesting or relevant to my topic on that website.   Google sees those links and gives a little respect to them.  Hopefully, that link-favor will be returned sometime soon, because you are out there publishing content interesting to some other photographer.

So get out there, make bloggging a habit, post a link to a fellow photographer and get out there and see if they might link to some of your content someday as well!

I have this thing with photographers and our willingness to pay top dollar for things we think we MUST have to run our business or be successful. I place the blame squarely in the hands of the consumers here, not the producers and marketers that sell us this must-have stuff. Over the last 5 years, I’ve seen an explosion in the photographer-to-photographer business: actions, gear, workshops, websites, online proofing, forums, anything that photographers will buy, there is another photographer who wants to sell it. My beef isn’t with the seller-photographers, it’s with fashion and how we are sold what we buy. The next time you read about the latest thing, look at who is endorsing it…the same few people seem to be circling around the products, endorsing each other’s products and raving about them on the blogs.

Now, before we go too much farther, I’ve got to make a disclaimer: I have nothing against what these photographers are doing or selling. They are honest, mostly selling excellent products, and all excellent photographers. No, it’s with all of us who buy their products, things we don’t need and things that won’t give us a decent ROI.

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker. I’ve paid $150 for a few lines of photoshop code in the form of actions I rarely use. I’ve got the Canon 5d Mk II that I ordered as soon as I heard about it and saw what it could do. I signed up for this great new forum that I was convinced would be the be all and end all (well, not totally convinced, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.)

But it bugs me when a photographer is selling a service or product to other photographers using this line: “If it gets you just 2 additional weddings, you’ve paid for my service.” Break-even is not my idea of great business. It’s a horrible return on investment (ROI) Even worse is being IN THE HOLE to the tune of two weddings (depending on your market, your experience, and your pricing, that could be anywhere from $2000 – $10,000 and up) until you actually DO book those weddings.

Trust me, if you look hard enough, and buy enough people a cup of coffee or maybe even splurge on a really nice lunch, you’ll get that supposedly secret info for a lot less. Need actions? No, you don’t. Your clients are still asking for selective color. Need that new camera? No, you don’t clients won’t print 90% of your wedding images beyond 4×6. Need that new do-it-all photographers editing service that some photographer is raving about? No, do your own editing and stay close to your work.

And that brings me to SEO knowledge. Lately I’ve seen a few websites offering workshops and services to photographers for multi-thousands of dollars. That’s great, offer away. I’m going to be the curmudgeon and tell you that everything they are going to teach you is available for free on the internet. 100% The only holder of the search-secrets is Google and Microsoft and Ask.com, who hold their ranking algorithms near and dear.

Look at this site. The only thing I get out of blogging about SEO is googling my search keywords and hoping to get to the first page of results. I get no money, no ad revenue, no workshop fees, nothing. And yet, I’m giving it all away. Can you pay someone a few thousand dollars to get better information? Yes and no. You can pay, but you won’t necessarily get better information.

SO what’s the take-away here? Don’t buy it. If a sexy photographer is selling it, don’t buy it.

Learn it for yourself, find it for free, be guerrilla about it (and read guerrilla Marketing while you are at it)

A dollar saved is a dollar earned. $1000 saved is $1000 profit.

Remember, information want’s to be free. There’s people like me blogging about every subject under the sun. Dig hard enough on forums and you’ll find that information a photographer will be sharing at her workshop, just in draft form on the forums.

Are you a sexy photographer? Go for it. Are you selling information that is free out on the internet, just packaged in your own special way? Way to go. That’s what we do as photographers. We create images of people, something anyone can do with their cell phone, but we package it in our own special way. So you continue to sell it, and I’ll continue to counsel temperance.