As an aspiring photographer with my own media pages and websites to promote my work, I never realized until day 2 of sitting in Search Engine Optimization that I was doing it all wrong. Much of the media I have produced, I’ve produced with as few words as possible to let my work do the talking. I keep the biography in my Instagram short and the captions to my post brief. I kept the description of my work in the website I used to post all my works short and sweet.
When I started learning about the basics of SEO what Onsite and Offsite SEO have in common and how to tell them apart, I went to my pages right away to look at what to change, and what to make more efficient in the language I use across my sites. Search Engine Optimization is something that is almost as important if not more than the look of the site. Although my site might have good content, getting people to the site itself is half the battle. In making my site more efficient, I realized that the content of the site should be tailored not towards what may look good on paper, but what is going to look best on the search engine.
Creating a page that looks good with designs and content can be done well with trial and error, but optimizing your results in the search engine gets all eyes on your page. At the end of the day, what’s the point of making a site that looks good if no one is ever going to get the chance to look at it?
5 Responses
I know exactly where you are coming from, I feel like in many of the design classes we have taken SEO is not mentioned and can become easy to forget. As a very aesthetic person, it is hard to not just have short and simple captions, websites, ect.
SEO is all about getting people to see your website! I enjoyed reading your journey of coming to the conclusion, all eyes on the page. Getting people to travel to your site is certainly a battle, one that cannot be easily won. SEO is basically the answer to the battle of the websites. I enjoyed reading your post.
I also do photography, and I have an Instagram and website for it. I do not get a lot of traffic right now, and do not keep up with posting as often as I should. However, this class makes me want to commit to optimizing my site. I think there are a couple ways we could do that, such as posting photography blogs or creating more long-form content. The more information we provide on our website through blogs, or the about page, the more Google’s spiders will pick up on it and the higher our websites will rank on the SERP.
Yes, the emphasis on the design is important but it is also good to have balance. I get where you are coming from, something could look amazing and reads amazing, but it just does not score where you want it to. Sometimes finding the golden ratio is difficult to do.
Aidan, this is great! I think a lot about user experience (UX) when it comes to websites and it is paramount nowadays for websites to be appealing to the user and simple to use, that you may remain relevant in the minds of your users. This leads me to your point though. Without SEO, nobody will really get to experience the beautiful and clean website that you have to offer and it is an important mix of being ranked high on the SERP because of your SEO plan and having a website that allows for a beneficial UX.