Let me tell you a story. Not too long ago, I wrote a quick post talking about HDR photography. I put some HDR photos on my website and wrote a quick description about them, thinking little of it at the time. A few months went by, and much to my amazement, those images had grown into a significant source of traffic for Blinq’s website. How did I do it? There were no programming tricks or hacks, no smoke and mirrors. I just paid attention to the rules of image SEO.

Pictures are something that we humans naturally “get.” We look at them and instantly understand what they’re about. The same can’t be said for the programs Google uses to search the web for useful content. They can’t “decode” an image in the same way we naturally can.

Put simply, we need to help the programs figure out what’s in our images.

That’s why images…

A bold prediction, I know, but there’s something more important at stake here than what people are or are not wearing on their heads. I just said this for one reason. It got your attention. Why on earth would all of your clients be wearing top hats? There has to be a reason for it. You want to know the answer, and that’s why you’re still reading this.

A clever title and an interesting description can go a long way toward boosting your site’s ranking on search engines. Content often gets read or passed over based on the title and the title alone. If you can create something interesting, a title that makes people perk up their ears, you can get them to click through the link on Google. Now you’ve got them! (well, sort of…).

Most of the time, you don’t even need to say anything profound. You…

We’ve almost fully utilised the power of Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Last time, we went through some of the more advanced individual post settings and discussed why it’s important to keep certain pages and sections out of Google’s index. In a nutshell, you want Google to see the pages with lots of written content and few external links. Other pages, such as your login page, are like leaks in a faucet. They siphon off your total page rank, ultimately harming your chances of ranking well for certain photography related search terms.

Now we’re going to switch gears and have a look at internal linking and XML sitemaps. You can find those setting in the same toolbar on the bottom left of your WordPress dashboard.

What is an XML sitemap? Without getting too technical, it’s a list of all the pages on your website. You send this list to search engines so they don’t skip over the…

In the last post, we installed the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and got to work on tweaking our blog posts for the purpose of SEO. We learned about the importance of picking the right focus keywords. This is all in an effort to bring in more traffic from our local area. After all, that’s where we’re most likely to get new clients.

I gave you a homework assignment in the last post. If you haven’t done it yet, please don’t continue to read this. What we covered in the previous post is more important than what we will cover in this one. You need to get it done first. The rest is important, but it’s mostly the icing on the cake. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down before you can use it.

What’s left to adjust on the individual pages?
Let’s go back to the post we were working on. You’ll remember that we looked at the page…

Photography and SEO. The two are rarely uttered in the same sentence. Photographers and other creatives often eschew the technical stuff like maintaining websites so they can do the awesome stuff like taking amazing pictures and pleasing their clients. I can’t blame you. I am you. And that’s why I’m so excited about Yoast’s new WordPress SEO Plugin.

This plugin helps you spot all of the little SEO mistakes you might be making on your WordPress website. The concept is simple. You tell the plugin which keyword you want to focus on, and it tells you whether you’re hitting the mark. If everything checks out, you’re good to go. But if there are a few bumps in the road, you’ll know about them.

With Yoast’s plugin, you don’t have to spend a lot of time wondering what you’re doing right or what you’re doing wrong. As long as you know which searches you’re trying to target, the…

We’ve been an avid supporter of Xero for a long time. A few months ago, we wrote a piece on Xero’s online accounting system and why it works so well for us. I think online accounting is still a touchy issue for a lot of people. They’re mostly concerned about security and what might happen in the off chance you lose Internet service. People are talking because the potential benefit is huge as long as they’re willing to put their trust in the system.

It wasn’t too long before the Sydney Morning Herald got ahold of it and interviewed Nicole and I. We mostly dispelled peoples’ worries about using a system like Xero, discussing why it works for us and why we’re never going back to the old way. The article appeared on May 6th of 2011.

Click here to read the article the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about Xero and Blinq.

We just want to thank the…

Does small business accounting software make you shiver? Do you feel like you barely ever have a moment in the office to take care of all the little administrative tasks that pile up? We certainly felt that way. The most challenging task, for us, was accounting. We had to bring in the accountant every now and again to assess our financial health, and it really took away from our ability to travel. Now, thanks to ANZ and Xero, we don’t have to worry about that anymore. We’ll show you why.

Blinq Photography is all about going to the location and getting the shot. Because we’re barely ever in the office, we need accounting software we can use while waiting in the airport or driving along the countryside to our next destination. Xero gives us this kind of freedom. It’s based in the cloud, so we can access it from any device we…

Pictures or Images play a huge part in many everyday tasks as they contribute greatly to the overall effectiveness of any type of presentation. In most cases, especially in the internet, images are vital in catching the attention of website browsers. Using just text to grab attention is not effective in the internet world, so the use of a powerful picture that depicts the message of a product or cause play a huge role in winning the interest of the website browsers. With this reality, using great images for your site may be a crucial part of your bid. Now the questions most people ask are: Where can I get powerful images for your website? And how can I protect and track my images?

Read the full post

The internet has been a valuable place where photos where uploaded and shared. It is excellent in terms of sharing it, but there are some instances that photos are used and manipulated by people even without any permission from the owner of the photos. It is like stealing one’s property, so much more getting one’s identity. This can be seen in social networking sites where people sometimes use photos of other people and claim it as theirs. It is like having a perfect clone on the other side of the globe.

Read the full post

One genre of photography is the advertising photography. Advertising photography is the art, activity, or process of capturing photographs for the purpose of advertisement. The photos taken for the purpose of advertisement must meet the quality or standard desired by its client, specifically the art director supervising the advertisement. Hence, it is challenging to engage in the business of advertising photography. The resulting photos must also be in harmony to the product it wanted to endorse and must be in agreement to the whole portion of the advertisement. So there are many factors to be considered before the photo shoot must be set-up and even before you click your camera. One of these factors and the most important one is the model for the advertising photography.

Read the full post