A link from another website to yours is good for search engine optimization (SEO), but a link with the right anchor text is great.  If you don't already know this, anchor text is what a link actually says.  So, for example: go here for photography websites.  The anchor text for that link is "photography websites".

Anchor text is important because it helps search engines determine what the linked website is about.  In the example above, I am telling search engines that our domain, www.intothedarkroom.com is a place for photography websites.  Because of this, the search engines will now rank www.intothedarkroom.com higher for this term.

What is the right anchor text for you?

As a photographer you will first need to brainstorm a few specifics about the type of clientele you want.  For example, what city and/or state do you want your clients to reside?   What type of photography will you shoot for your client (children, weddings, portraits, etc)?  

After you figure out these specifics go to Google Keywords, where you will be able to determine your optimal anchor text.  Type in a few keywords/phrases that you figured out from the questions you answered above and click "Get Keyword Ideas".  In the example picture below we entered:

Phoenix photographer
Phoenix wedding photographer
Arizona photography


As you can see Google automatically suggests other related keywords/phrases as well as the ones you entered.  It combines this with three other columns.  First is "Advertiser Competition", which displays the amount of competition there is for that term on Google Adwords.  This column means very little to you unless you use Adwords so you can just ignore it.  The second column, "Local Search Volume", is the amount of monthly searches there are for that term in your country.  This is the most important data you will need when determining anchor text.  The third column is "Global Search Volume", which is the world-wide search volume rather than just your home country.  This will apply to you if you plan on working with clients from other countries.

Which keyword/phrase should you choose for your anchor text?

Now that you have the important data in front of you, it is essentially a judgment call.  Try to find the keyword/phrase that best describes you as well as a one that gets a lot of monthly searches.  Generally the more searches per month, the harder it will be to rank well for that phrase, so don't just pick based on the phrase that gets the most searches. 

Now that you know your desired anchor text, how do you get your links to have that anchor text?

Unfortunately, this is the hardest part. 

For future links you acquire to your website, ask whoever links to you to include this anchor text.  So if another blogger interviews you or you are featured on another website ask them if they can create a link to your website with your anchor text. 

You can also try to go back and get some old links to your website to switch over to your new anchor text.  A polite email to the website owner usually does the trick.  If you don't remember who has linked to your website, you can find all of your links by going to Yahoo.com and doing two different searches.  First, search "linkdomain:yourdomain.com" (without the quotes).  You will see all of the links to the "non-www" version of your website.  Second, search "linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com" (without the quotes).  This will show all of the links to the "www" version of your website.  The explanation for this is an entirely different blog article so just roll with it for now.

Lastly, use this anchor text on your own website or blog.  Go back to previous posts or pages and scan for places you can include this anchor text while linking to your home page.

Hope this helps!  If you have any questions or comments you can put them in the comments area below. 

We get a lot of questions on how to get a website or blog indexed in the search engines, especially Google.  So in response to all of these questions we decided to write a blog post about it.  Below is a list of search engines and a link to where you can submit your website or blog.


Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Bing: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx


If you have a blog and want to take it a step further, go to http://pingomatic.com/.  From there you can submit to a large list of blog search engines.

Many photographers have flash websites that are not Search Engine Optimized. Since search engines can't crawl their website content, they try to STUFF key words onto an HTML splash page to help with optimization. The truth is that most search engines frown upon this method. In the last year, I have see so many people using this method. So, I thought I would provide you with some links to learn a bit more about search engine optimization.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

KEYWORD STUFFING: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing