How to Optimize Your Photographs For Google

I get asked the question all the time about ranking photographer websites? How would a photographer gain any significant PageRank for his or her site when the subject that really matters—images—has no anchor text? Often, the photos alone will sell the photographer to his/her clients. How can we overcome this challenge?

This isn’t the easiest thing to do.  I have found that local citations are one of the most important things you can do when ranking your local photographer company online.  Make sure that your Google Places, Yelp, Local.com, and all other local business sites have the same information on them.  For help on optimizing your Google Places account and other local citations check out our help page.  This will help you brand your photography website.  Make sure after you get them set up that you have people and customers review your business.  Google Places and Yelp would be the first place that I would make sure to focus on for reviews.

When naming your photo, make sure that you are giving a name to it with a good meta description.  On each page make sure that you are describing your photographs and giving them enough text to describe them.  This not only helps readers know what the photograph is about but it tells Google how to rank it.  Most photographs are named OMR56D5.jgp, you should re-name it to sometime like bluewasp.jpg so Google will know what to rank this cute little bee picture of.
Below is a video of Matt Cutts, who oversees Search Quality group at Google helps photographers out: