Jerroid Marks, a good friend of mine from the ChiFlickr meetup group, has put together a video for us of the photos for our upcoming gallery. As a thank you for his hard work, I decided to dig into his
site and offer him some search engine optimization tips to help drive more traffic to his website. As I was getting ready to send it, I realized it would probably be a good overview to share with my readers.
As a background, I do this kind of analysis as part of my job at Duo Consulting and have given presentations on it at content management conferences. Before I started at Duo I was the guy who builds websites that function and even ones that look pretty but didn't realize that I was missing some opportunities to really drive traffic through the roof. I spent some time researching and experimenting and, after implementing some of what I am about to share, I was able to drive one customer's online business from 3,000 dollars per month to 33,000 dollars per month. Since then his business continues to explode and he needs to hire more people to handle the work. Enough bragging, here's what I sent to Jerroid:
Frames. I see your site is built with frames, this works well for people but the search engines will scan your site and find each sub-page like http://www.jerroidmarks.com/gallery1-9.htm and index these as well as your home page. This means that if you were able to search for a keyword on one of these pages you might see an orphaned chunk of your website without the header to say Jerroid Marks Photography. Although it means more work up front, you can build templates to allow you to include a header and footer around an image so each page always carries the navigation. This is important because you no longer have the orphaned pages in google - everything is consistent.
Page titles. Google's primary approach to indexing and ranking your website relies on the content of the page title tag in your code. It doesn't display on the page but it does show in the toolbar in your web browser. 
It also shows up in the Google listing so it is really important. 
All of the pages on your site right now use either <title>Jerroid Marks Photography</title> or <title>PORTFOLIO - Jerroid Marks Photography</title>. Ideally each page should have a unique title since this really broadens the base of words used on your site and more words means more traffic, especially if you are able to isolate important keywords. For instance, I expect you would want to drive people to your site looking for Chicago photography or simply Chicago photographer. To improve your traffic on these keywords you could change the page title on your home page to Jerroid Marks - a Chicago Photographer. Having the two words Chicago and Photographer next to each other means that searches on this are more likely to find your site. Presently, your page titles rely on someone searching for you by name alone which means you only capture traffic from people who know your name. Implementing the change I mentioned will result in more people finding your site who don't know you. Similarly, go through your portfolio and for each picture think of an accurate description of the type of photography and turn it into a title including the keyword Chicago so you capture the eyes of potential customers, like Chicago model photography, chicago portrait photography, chicago candid photography or chicago wedding photography.
Heading tags. Each page should have an H1 tag with similar content you used in the page title but minimally it should repeat the keywords. This displays the title inside the page but it also is a crucial component for google to analyze the page contents and help them drive traffic to your site.
Alt tags. Once you have your page titles in line, look at the code for displaying the images on the page. An image is usually displayed as
<img src="images/jmphotography12.jpg" width="300" height="450">
There is another attribute you can and should use called an alt tag which is supposed to contain a description of the photo. The alt tag serves two purposes. The first is for people who are vision impaired to be able to understand what is on the page. The other purpose is that search engines read the alt text and index that content too, so you end up with more words for the search engines without necessarily having words on the page for people to see. The search engines won't use the ALT text to determine relevancy but it will help direct the search engines summary of the page. Again, the use of keywords is important so should repeat the keyword used in the page title here but in a more descriptive context. The key though, is to use the same format. For instance, if your page title was Chicago portrait photography, your alt text on the image might be "Chicago portrait photography: Jerroid took this photograph of xxx in his studio with 3 200W lamps and a Nikon SLR." It's more verbose than the title but adds some really great text so the page might also get picked up by people searching for Nikon SLR photographer, Chicago studio photography etc.
So for the example above, you would end up with <img src="images/jmphotography12.jpg" width="300" height="450" alt="Chicago portrait photography: Jerroid took this photograph of xxx in his studio with 3 200W lamps and a Nikon SLR">
Image text. Images are text are obviously text to our eyes but the search engines can't read text in images yet so your bio page effectively contains nothing for the search engines to work with. This should be one of the key driving pages of your site and reuse some of the keywords you used throughout your site and provide links to some of the representative pages. If you can convert those text images to real text you can add link things like the paragraph "Jerroid Marks specializes in portrait photography" to link to an image you think is the best from your portraits.
Text in general. If you can add a paragraph to each photo page from your portfolio describing the shot, who it was for, what is was used for (a magazine cover, a book sleeve, a press shot etc) it will all help drive more traffic to your site. It should also offer links within the paragraph to other parts of the site you think are related. Give people a guided tour of your portfolio instead of having them choose their own path and explain what they are looking at. It can be mechanical text about how the shot was achieved but that would tend to attract photographers instead of customers. Ideally, the text should be more about the end uses of the photos since that is what your customers are searching for.
Link titles. In the same way that images have the alt attribute to allow you to describe an image, links have a title attribute to allow you to describe what is going to be on the page if they click it. This content is seen as a tooltip when a visitor hovers over the link. Try and hover over some of the links in this article for example. This is a great opportunity to introduce the next page you show them with some descriptive text, you can even use the same text you use as the image alt attribute for the page they will see and it all adds up in your favor from the search engines perspective. You will go from having no mentions of Chicago portrait photography to having the inbound link from several pages, the page title, the heading, the descriptive text and the alt text all telling the same story - this page is about chicago portrait photography and you should read it because it is exactly what you are looking for.
We do this type of analysis with customers at my company and it can make the difference between one referral per month from the website to hundreds of visitors, a pervasive reputation and some really strong leads. I don't know if you use any kind of analytics package with the site to be able track how many visitors you get per day and where they came from but it can be a real eye opener. It's fairly trivial to add Google Analytics to your site and you get tons of valuable information about where people are coming from, what they are searching for, how they found you and what they did when they visited, including whether or not they clicked on your contact form and submitted something. This can be useful to help spot opportunities - who links to your website that drives the most traffic, and more importantly, who drives the traffic to your site that complete the contact form? They are the people to send Christmas cards to help build your relationship with them further!
So there you have it, my "SEO in a nutshell" guide. I'd be interested to hear anyone's ideas or feedback about the suggestions I made. I'm not prescribing a magic bullet that will change your rankings over night - once you implement this kind of work it can take up to a month for the search engines to pick it up so if you don't have an analytics package installed you can use the downtime to do that so you can print the graphs of and show your clients/ your boss/ your cat how you are helping drive more traffic to your website.
Some readers may debate whether search engines do or do not recognize individual approaches outlined here but the bottom line is that the combination of these items HAS made a tangible difference to client's businesses. Even more importantly the approaches help make your site more accessible for vision impaired users and improves the usability of the site for those who can see it.
