Designing your site Layout

A major thing to do before going any further whatsoever is to sit down and plan the actual layout of your website, what you do at this stage effects everything to come and will save you much hard work and frustration if it is done correctly.

Your website needs to be simple and easy to use, flow nicely and also have pages and content that is highly optomised for search engines, what you call the individual galleries and pages of your website will have a profound effect on SEO and I will address this in this part before going onto content.

The sections of your website are completely and utterly up to you in what you place there, but there are certain sections that simply must be there to make the most of your site and your ability to use it to bring traffic your way.

1. About Page
2. Contact Page
3. Blog
4. Image Galleries

Each of these sections is vital to any website wishing to generate traffic or simply because your clients need to view your images and get in touch with you.

The "about page" will be covered in part 3 and the "blog" and "image galleries" in parts 4 and 5, needless to say they are all essential for your customers in one way or another.

The most important part at this stage is to set up the layout of the site regardless of the images and text that is going to be placed into it later, you will be using links and keywords that are important to be placed as soon as your site starts being built to save you time and headaches later.

Plan out what images you want to show and how you want to break up these images into sections, zenfolio uses groups, galleries and collections to organise your images and content.

Groups are folders that hold galleries and collections are selections of chosen images which can be placed into different areas later.

In some cases you may wish to use a group containing another group as a way of hiding folders from the prying eyes of the public (such as for your home page slideshow), with galleries in the second group, more on this in latter parts.

Your first starting point however should be planning and laying out where your images are going to be placed, you can see from Ninjaprints  that I use a main group to hold my 13 galleries each one is broken down into areas of photography to keep things simple for my customers and draw them to what they are looking for quicker and easier.

The key thing here is now creating the unique URL of your website or as zenfolio calls it (access code), we will be using these shortly so must rename and structure them now,  if you look at Comic Book Art as an example you will see I have titled them eg: comic-book-art-for-sale-vertigo-comics once you have created your gallery click on it and on the right of the screen it shows "create access code" and you will be able to change it.  Use - to seperate words, you may also use _ but apparently preference is given to - by the search engines.

Renaming the URL's like this allows you to add keywords into them creating what are known as "friendly URL's" which are very useful to SEO in many ways, firstly people can see what they are clicking into (which means so can the search engines) and secondly because its another great place to add in your traffic drawing keywords which will have a profound effect on your websites prescense online.

Feel free to add your business or brand name into these links as this will not have a negative effect on SEO.

You should end up with all of your galleries showing address such as: http://www.comicbookart.co.uk/comic-book-art-for-sale-vertigo-comics

Choose your own suitable wording using your keyword list to create the links.

Once you have done every gallery you wish to use in your site you are pretty much done and ready to move on, zenfolio optomises the titles of many of your pages automatically for you as you go, but you do not want to be having to come back to this later is it will involve replacing any links you place in your site with the new ones (and this sucks massively).

Next: Part 3 - Text and Content 

Regarding Pinterest here is a great and well rounded article from fine art America a site which I have used for the last year to sell my work through: Article

Personally I am a fan of Pinterest and have enjoyed linking my own content from it, what are you thoughts folks?

How to optomise your zenfolio website part 1.

Zenfolio provides an excellent tool for photographers and creatives wishing to display their work and sell it to either pre-existing clients or new clients as well as the general public, the presentation and ease to use of the site and software is exceptional, however it is fundamentally flawed for search engine optomisation which has a devestating effect to those of us with a real business to run, Zenfolio have the attitude to simply ignore the hundreds of requests to improve this side of their business.  I will go into detail about this in a future part.

This guide is here to give you an easy to follow overview on how to make the most of what is available to you through zenfolio and will be broken down into various parts, the overall aim is not to achieve a perfect placement in the search engines as this is utterly impossible using zenfolio due to the huge flaws in the way it presents your images, instead we aim to do the best we can with what we have available.

Where to start?

Domain Names & Keywords

The first and most important step you need to take is choosing at suitable name for your business/website, it is all well and good using your name as your website URL or name, but this is generally speaking going to draw you little to no traffic and cause a low placement in the search results unless you are famous or have the same name as a celebrity currently trending in searches and even then people will realise that you are not the person they are looking for almost instantly.

Before I go any further I must talk about keywords which are a vital part of any website and also an essential part of your domain name.

Basically keywords are words or phrases that people type into search engines in order to find content, your domain name should contain keywords that are going to increase the chances of your website getting a good initial placement and increased chances of it being relevant to people searching for something similar.

Keywords should be researched heavily in the planning stages of your business and google has provided us with the means to do this which can be found here: Google Keywords Tool

On this page you can enter a keyword or phrase that you wish to draw business from and google will very kindly show you relevant keywords that are used in searches to find content matching the keywords of your choice, you can also enter a URL for a competing website and be shown the keywords that they are using to draw traffic to themselves.

Keywords will be presented showing the following, Competition, Global Searches, Local Searches and these are the most important things you need to worry about.

High Competition keywords mean that an awful lot of websites are using them in their content, this then decreases to medium and low competition as fewer websites use them.  What you want to do here is filter the search by the number of search queries it recieves so that the list starts with high number of searches and decreases, look through the list for low competition keywords that receive a large number of searches and make a note of all of them exactly as they show, these are the keywords that you want to use, many people are looking for websites containing these keywords/content but few sites are using them, so your competition is low.

Unless you are a large and well established business you should not concern yourself with high or medium competition keywords too much at this time, you will not be able to compete with those sites using them and will therefore not really gain anything for using it.

Ideally now you have your list you want to take some keywords from it that recieve the most searches per month, local searches prefferably if you are trading only locally, global if you are trading worldwide, you then need to fit them into your domain name in a way that works with your chosen brand or business name.

Ninjaprints my own website is not an ideal example of an optomised domain name as it was set up many years ago before I knew such things and it is a well known and established brand in my circles and business area.  My new website however is a prime example of the use of low competition high yield keywords being used locally: www.comicbookart.co.uk this name guarantees it an excellent placement and relevancy to anyone searching for comics, art, comic books and it has indeed entered straight into google on first page for many searches.

People have greatly differing styles of photography and services they provide, you should try and capture this in your domain name and try and forget to splash your name across the domain name, there is plenty of room for that once the clients are inside your website.  

Some examples of excellently optomised domain names (that may or may not be real sites):

www.londonabstractphotography.co.uk

www.luminouslandscapesphoto.com

www.wildlifephotogallery.com

www.weddingphotographernewyork.com

You can purchase domain names very, very cheaply from a large number of sources, personally I use www.names.co.uk  and have utterly no complaints.

Remember to keep a tight hold of your keywords list you will be needing it and adding to it in future and it will be a lifesaver to have on hand and preferably saved in a rich text format document.

Part 2 coming soon:  Optomising your text