Thursday, April 24, 2008

Link building for a photo web site

It’s really not as bad as people say, it takes some time but I actually like to do “link building” for my web site. Surfing around trying to navigate the depths of the internet and finding new places. And making a benefit out of it, hopefully.

What benefit?
Well, I’ve now spent several years taking pictures and I think I have about 500 images on my web site. Now I’d like to get some more visitors, not just people looking to hire a photographer in Nepal, but also the “general public”, the silent internet masses surfing around looking for whatever it is they’re seeking. Some of them might occasionally order a poster or something, but that’s not the main point here. If I can get a lot of traffic to my site, it’ll sort of bring some more life to the whole project. Comments, suggestions, more links, referrals etc. I might even start to sell add-space! Getting a diverse audience is part of my own little strategy, since it’ll hopefully make me less reliant on the random fluctuations of any one single market. I’ve never gone to any business school, but I do know that it’s dangerous to rely on just a few customers. Several staff photographers are being laid off these days, they’ve had comfortable jobs for decades now and just forgotten how reliant they’ve become on that one particular job and how difficult it has become to get your foot in another place. That’s not gonna happen to me!

Hence the efforts to make my web site more visible to all sorts of people. That spells making it show up in Google searches. On the first page, not listed on page 17 or something. It’s common knowledge that hardly anyone’s gonna click on your site link if you’re not on the first page. Your placement on Google is determined by your PageRank, which again is determined by the number (and quality) of other sites linking to your site.

Right now my Google PageRank is a disgrace: 1. It used to be 3 and I’m not sure what happened. But I’m determined to get it at least back to where it used to be. PR4 would be quite good, PR5 would be fantastic!

Now there’s many ways to get links to your site and improve your Google PageRank, one of the simplest ways is to get listed in various web directories. That’s what I’ve been trying to do the last few days. If you want to do the same for your site, check out this list of free photo-related web directories I’m using. (- It’s also good if you just want to browse around and see a lot of nice photo sites.)

My efforts are not over yet and it’ll take some time before the results start to show. Check back here from time to time if you’re as interested as me to see how it’ll all turn out.

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