If you have just started a stock photography business or wondering why your photos aren't selling well, there are a few ways to help increase your sales or getting readers to click your photographs. If you think Search Engine Optimization is just for web designers, you're wrong. Search Engine tips can help you get more hits to your photos as well as uploading them to popular stock photo membership sites can help your business more than just social network promotion alone.

Optimizing Your Images for Search Engines

A little trick to help you name and organize your images so that they get found by search engines is naming them by keywords. You can do a search online and see what people are looking for by the popular search results that come up before you hit send. You can also use a keyword service like Adsense to see the popularity of the titles of photos in your niche that you're selling. Once you have an idea of what people are searching for, you can write descriptions on your page around those keywords or name your images by the term so that you can get more hits to your images.

Concentrate On One Subject

Getting your categories of photos narrowed down to a few subjects, not only helps you get more organized and become a better photographer, but it helps people associate photos with your brand name. For instance, if you are a nature photographer, people will come to your site more often knowing that you take high quality nature photos. Breaking your subjects down into simpler categories organizes your website better as well. You can add your categories of photographs into your meta tags for better search engine hits as well. You can also offer your tips and tricks on how to take good nature photos because you know what works when you go out to shoot. You can start answering questions on Q&A sites and forums with link backs to your website. This helps you become an authority on your subject of interest and draw more people to your website.

Uploading Your Photos

When you go to upload your photos to your website, why not look at some major stock photo sites and see what their registration requirements are and sign up. Chances are, they have high amounts of traffic that you can benefit from, even if you think you may have images that are already uploaded. Composition, lighting, camera angles and more affect a photograph and is subjective to most designers and onlookers. You may have a different angle of the same photograph someone else already uploaded, but that angle can be the selling point. Don't be afraid to upload your pics to as many stock photo sites as you can with high traffic.

Uploading your photos to your social networking sites is a great idea as well. On Facebook, you can connect it to twitter so that your twitter followers can be notified when you add new images, bringing them to your website or Facebook page. Spamming links is noted as one of the major annoyances on social networks, especially Facebook and twitter. Promoting your page is one thing, but make sure you have a healthy balance of updates and site promotion or you could drive away your followers out of annoyance. You could also be reported for spam.

Social networking may be seen as a major way to drive traffic to your stock photography business. While it is great, you could try uploading your photos to larger stock photo sites and even keyword and search engine optimization techniques. These will drive traffic to your page and interacting with your customers can keep your customers buying your photos.

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