Part 2 of the series "Web Marketing Workflow"...

Wendy Roe has spent the last 10 years ingrained in all things web marketing – from design/development to search/social media. In May 2010, she decided to quit the corporate life and join forces with her husband, Byron Roe, to shoot full-time one of life’s ultimate highs – weddings! She now focuses on business development and her role as a second shooter for wedding photographers, Byron Roe Photography, based in Bend, Oregon.

She is the co-author of "55 Smart Web Ideas for Photographers” e-book, a 2-time speaker at WPPI Photographer’s Ignite, and has traveled through west coast speaking and consulting with photographers on web marketing. She’s known as an "interpreter", changing technical language into easy to understand information. Above all, she’s an educator at heart and believes: “Web marketing and wedding photography are two passions that drive bringing the best out of beauty and brands.”

Just in case you missed part 1 "Naming and Branding Your Images" you can find it here, otherwise let's join Wendy Roe for part 2 "Web Marketing Workflow Guide to An Individual WordPress Blog Post".


WordPress is hands down the best blogging platform on the market. Pending the fact that you're already using WordPress for your photography blog, I'd like to share some insider tips on optimizing your posts to align with your web marketing workflow. Part 1 covered naming and branding your images and prepping them for online usage. Today, we'll be reviewing how to utilize those for your blog!

Keyword Focus

Before we begin a blog, we need to focus on what the purpose of the blog post is. I always like to identify a keyword phrase that I would like this post to rank for in Google for SEO before I start writing. If I'm blogging a session, I focus on where the session took place (venue, landmark, park...anything that people would be searching for) as well as including 'engagement photography' or 'family photography' or 'wedding photography' as well as the city and state. Putting those all together, I would get a blog title similar to, "Jack and Jill; GasWorks Park Engagement Photography in Seattle, Wa."

SEO Items Within The Blog

There's 3 main important items to name with your keyword focus. The first is your blog post title, which if you have your permalinks (or URLs) setup correctly, should also act as part of your post URL (the second item). One plugin I use daily is the 'SEO All in One Pack,' (Example 1) which is a free plugin. This plugin allows on each post for you to customize the meta title and description (the third items) and focus your post on your keyword phrase. Redundancy is key, so it's super helpful to utilize the same information in all THREE of these places: blog post title, URL and SEO meta information (meta title and description).

So, let's review! We've created a post with a keyword focused blog title, URL and meta information as well as having images that are named with a keyword focus ready to upload to our post. The last item that's needed is blog content! The content needs to be readable and entertaining to your client and other visitors as well as....you guessed it....have a keyword focus! It doesn't need to be awkward but it's the last piece of the puzzle to sharing with your visitors as well as to Google what this post is about. Infusing your keywords in your content needs to be natural and not forced. We love to have 2-3 short paragraphs as an opener and then caption images to add more text to the post and make it fun!

Now that we've added the content, we need to just upload the images. Before I found the 'Faster Image Insert' plugin, I was spending at least 30 minutes a post manually entering individual images to the post - YIKES! This fabulous free plugin lets you upload and insert all at once. Now we have our blog writing from start to finish down to 20 minutes.

From there, choose your categories and if you want, tags (although less important for SEO) and BOOM, you're ready to publish!

Additional Plugins To Add

Outside of the blog content and individual posts, there's several things you can add to your blog posts that aid in continuing your web marketing and the conversation with your clients. The first thing would be to encourage, even bribe your clients with prints, for comments. Comments act as testimonials and will forever be linked to your post. Use them! We've also added a plugin called "Link Within" so that similar posts will be shown below the post with an image to encourage your visitors to spend more time on your site.

Moreover, having the 'Facebook Like' button installed on your blog will encourage visitors to follow you on Facebook. We've also recently added a 'Pin It' button below each image of our blog to encourage pins on Pinterest. Lastly, each blog post at the bottom should naturally have call to action buttons to draw visitors back to your site, to learn more about your services and to BOOK A SESSION. Make it big and obvious, like all good call to actions should be! Example 2

I know this sounds like a lot but talk with your web developer about adding these fabulous plugins to your blog theme. They will help your visitors learn more about you and your services, see more of your work and book a session by contacting you with ease.

SO! Now that you have your blog published, the next step is to announce that puppy on Facebook and other third party social media tools! Join us next week where we'll be reviewing "The Protocol To Announcing and Releasing on Facebook." As always, comments and questions are welcome, I'd be happy to answer questions via comments below.

Example 1



Example 2

(click on either image to view larger and in a new window)

That wraps up Part 2, see you next week for part 3 "The Protocol To Announcing and Releasing on Facebook Timeline"

You can contact Wendy for a 1 on 1 coaching session, purchase her e-book or just stop by and say hi on Facebook!