Once you’ve built your photographer website, you need to spread the word and attract people’s attention to your masterpiece. Website promotion is essential today, thus lots of resources and services dealing with search engine optimization, better ranking and online marketing are flooding the Web today. Managing a photo portfolio site, remember that it has certain specific features which should be considered while choosing promotion strategy and tactics. In this article we will cover promoting tips and techniques you might use to boost your personal photography website without any external help.
1. Compelling Content
Even the most progressive promotion tool won’t be really effective until you put a high-quality, rich content into your website, so that both visitors and search engines would “enjoy” it. Divide your photo gallery into categories and write a short description for each one. Captions for each picture are quite necessary as well. Be sure to include your best works into your portfolio, even if it won’t be large. A handful of featured photos will work better than an endless gallery with photos of all levels. 
2. Optimized website structure
Website meta data setup is one of the crucial things you should pay attention to. Once you stated your site’s title, keywords and meta tags, search engines will be able to index and rank it. Each web page should have its own unique URL for better indexing. If you manage your website by means of content management system, check if deep linking is supported. This is especially important when it comes to flash websites, as deep linking is one of the major methods for making flash site search engine friendly. 
3. Blog!
The importance of a blog can hardly be overrated. Blog can be the main traffic source for your website photo gallery. It’s the major medium for successful communication and profile building. Writing about your professional experience, sharing interesting photography related resources, discussing current industry news and events, you can make it interesting for amateur and pro photographers, potential employers and photography lovers, therefore, attract the wider audience to your personal website. Besides, by writing a blog you provide your photo website with relevant, frequently updated content, which appeals to search engines a great deal. 
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4. Get links from trusted resources
Link building strategy includes a huge variety of techniques, some of which can be implemented free of charge, while others can cost you a pretty penny. You can avoid considerable money expenses by putting some time into self-help link building. What you can do to get links from websites fairly trusted by Google is to submit your online photo gallery on:
- Bookmarking websites (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc).
- Design showcase websites (bestwebgallery.com, cssremix.com, cssmania.com, thefwa.com). Note, your website should have a really cool design to be showcased in such galleries. Once your design is accepted, you get a weighty link.
- Niche related resources (Digital Photography School, Photocritic, Digital Photo, Professional Photographer, etc). Register on such top-class photography websites, become a community member and spread the word: write articles, submit photos and comment! Don’t forget to state your personal website when commenting on websites and forums.
- Photography Directories. For instance, Photozzle photographer directory enables you to submit your portfolio into multiple photography categories and write professional articles to share them with the users. As a result, you get both link from the relevant resource and additional traffic to your website.
5. Be active on social networks
Presenting your photography website on social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and similar major resources, is critical for successful promotion and branding. Be sure to start your own gallery at Flickr and share your photographs with the Flickr community. Join various photo clubs and send your pictures to the pool galleries for everyone to see. Same goes for Twitter and Facebook - these are giant sources of traffic for your website. Plus, social networks help you stay on the wave of the industry, as you can follow photographic organizations, famous photographers and creative minds that push the boundaries of the profession. 
As you have probably noticed, active communication and sharing are the highlights of modern website promotion techniques. That doesn’t mean that basic optimization of your website structure is not important, this is a necessary base for further effective promoting which includes active blogging and social networking.
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[...] How to promote a photography website [...]
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