Doth a candle come in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? (Mark 4:21)
For additional information, also check the Web presence section under Goldmine links in the Main Menu at your left.
PhotoShelter has an excellent, concise and detailed SEO Cookbook for image and portfolio sites, but you will have to sign up there to obtain a copy.
why SEO?
Any site is virtually useless unless it can be found easily, preferably at the first search results page of the search engines for relevant keywords that the searcher has entered.
More and more, textual information and images are found by universal search engines like Google and Google Images.
For now, the search engines of the stock agency sites still provide the bulk of your sales, but Google Images (and similar tools) are expected to take a much bigger part of the hits in the future.
If you want to stay alive in the rat race of the global competition of image creators, you'll need to be pre-emptive and optimize the visibility of your images beyond the search engines of the stock agencies.
It's not quality or impact as such (above a certain basic level) that drives your sales, but your visibility in terms of ranking in the search engines.
That's why your top sellers can differ from agency to agency: it all depends on the ranking of your images.
You don't have any control over the ranking algorithms on the agency sites (apart from sound keywording) but you can influence the ranking of your images and your site substantially in the global search engines like Google (Images).
That's why you'll need to apply some form of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on your site.
the psychology of bots
SEO is one of the most active fields on the Net, and there is a lot to be found about it on Google.
I'm not going to repeat all these tricks and hints here, but I'll just present some selected useful links and a very rough summary of what to do or not to do in any case.
The search robots (bots) will crawl your site once in a while but they are blind and easily distracted.
They can easily get indigestion, so part of SEO is to guide them gently through the content by sitemaps and exclusion rules.
They are also a bit paranoid in avoiding scams, spam, netsharks and linkfarmers.
my basic tips
 Your site should have sound, original and relevant content as to the area you want it to be found in.
That's photography, images and the business side of it.
Don't mix it with an unrelated blog or other articles, since the bots will get confused and kick you down in the search results.
Don't repeat content from other sites too much; don't repeat content from other sites of yours.
Don't put identical articles on a blog and on your production site.
Bots hate it. They'll feel you want to fool them.
Use the meta tags of your site.
Those are site title, keywords and description as you can find in the HTML section of the landing (home) page and other pages of your site.
Now this might sound silly but quite some (beginning) sites still have the pre-filled info there of the content management system (CMS) that they use, like Joomla or Wordpress.
The page title of all the different (sub) pages on your site (showing in the browser header bar) should be related to the content of that page, and not be something like "page1.html".
It's so silly to see home pages called "index.html".
The page title should cover the content, like "tutorials.html".
The content on your front page should be a summary of all that you have to offer, preferably in the first paragraph.
You'll have to satisfy both your readers and the bots writing it.
The bots will also viciously check whether the meta keywords, title and description of your site match the content in that first paragraph.
So write it using your keywords and description as a guide.
If there is a big content mismatch between the metadata and your first paragraph, the bots will decide you are a cheater.
You aren't! Aren't you?
Make sure you have no (or not too many) broken links on your entire site. Bots might decide you are sloppy. Yack.
Bots are blind.
They can't see images, or textual content and images embedded in Flash.
Guide them, and surround your images with a short description in the ALT tag, the TITLE tag and textual info in the same <DIV>.
Even better, also change the image file name from something senseless like "DSC_05673.jpg" to "image-of-sexy-lady-wearing-stockings-DSC_05673.jpg".
The number of backlinks will largely determine the ranking of your site.
This paradigm is the original one that made Google great.
Backlinks are links on other sites to you, on condition that those sites are categorized as serious and that they have a good Page Rank.
The mechanism has been abused a lot in the beginning and adaptations have been made.
It's useless and even bad if you solicit backlinks on sites considered as linkfarms or commercial link-boosters.
The bots will nod their heads with a cheesy smile then and kick you down the stairs into oblivion.
more tips
Be aware that posting profile links on very high-profile sites like some forums and Flickr is useless from a SEO point of view.
Flickr for instance attaches rel="nofollow" to all the links you post.
By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines).
Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.
Don't enter your site into the search engines yourself.
The bots feel that it is preposterous and they feel neglected.
They might boycott you!
Let them find you themselves. It makes them feel good.
Enter your site in high-profile free web directories like DMOZ.
Snoop around for relevant (i.e. photography) high-profile blogs or industry sites and leave your link behind in your profile.
Chances are they don't have a rel="nofollow" policy in place.
You can always check directly viewing the page source of the site after you made the comment.
For FireFox, that's "View < Page Source".
Don't post your link on irrelevant sites like poker-sites, gambling-sites or whatever.
It will degrade your rank.
FYI: if you comment here on this site, I won't attach a rel="nofollow" directive to links, so go ahead.
I'll find the real estate and Vi@gr spammers that escape the Captcha anyways.
Post some free files or tips on your site.
Google loves the keyword "free". Visitors love "free".
They'll come back for the candies always!
If you have free images to give away, don't do it on the agency sites but on your own site.
Doing so, the extra traffic will benefit you and not somebody else.
If you post free images on some high profile "free images" sites, makes sure to link back to yourself.
Update the site and add articles regularly.
Dead sites easily bore the bots and they'll stop visiting.
Static sites they'll crawl about every 3 months; sites with frequent updates and new material they'll crawl daily.
As a reward, you'll get kicked up in the rankings.
Your readers will love it too, especially when you notify the world of new content by a feed link, by Twitter, by FaceBook or even by a newsletter (make sure you include an unsubscribe link there).
People get quickly bored to look at one-way web sites.
If they can interact in some way or another, they'll come back faster.
Look at the success of social networking sites where you can post and comments.
Take advantage of that human weakness and add a contact form (obligatory if you want to catch buyers), a comment section or a mini-forum, and even a chatbox (frivolous!).
Take advantage of the added and targeted traffic from FaceBook and Twitter.
Have an account there and a fan page.
Those media are well on their way to render feeds and newsletters obsolete.
links
Photo SEO service for photographers
A new (paid) consulting service for photographers that have no clue about or no time for their site's SEO.
the Photography Directory Project
A free, searchable, categorized, online directory of photography resources.
the Photography Directory Project
A free, searchable, categorized, online directory of photography resources.
DMOZ
A general Open Directory Project.
W3C dead links checker
Will check all broken or dead links on your site.
Google Images search optimization
Top 10 Google Images Search Optimization tips. An article on the SEOworld.
Ragepank
Article on the SEO blog Ragepank about optimising for Google image search.
Website Analyzer
On PageBoss: checks the domain, the presence of a robots.txt and sitemap, and what pages are indexed by several search engines.
the Internet Marketing Driver
Covering the latest in online marketing strategy.
Free SEO tools
Pagerank Checker - Backlinks Checker - SEO Tools.
SEO Guru (in Dutch)
Lessen in moderne zoekmachine optimalisatie (SEO) en marketing.
Keyword density tool
Free SEO Keyword density analyser.
XML sitemap generator
Free unlimited XML sitemap generator.
Making Sense of Blog Bounce Rate
Article on GSQi about what to learn from your bounce rate.
Submit Express
Several free tools to check your metatags and keywords.
How to increase your website Traffic?
An article on Squidoo.
Googlebot simulator
Simulates how Google sees your pages.
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