Link Building Strategies for Wedding Photographers

Having a website is crucial and the best way to showcase yourself and your work to the online world, however that website need to be found. This could be linked to from your social media accounts or even better found via search engines such as Google.

How to Get Link Quality Back Links for Photographers

First off, it is important to understand what a back link is and why it is important. A back link is a link from a page on a website to a page on your website. These links act as a vote for a website, building trust and authority.

The more votes/back links the better? Wrong.

Before we delve in, it is important to understand the back links you want, a back link from an established and authoritative website will be worth a lot more than 40 links from small new blogs or sites. It is important to bare this in mind when reaching out to sites to work with.

The number of links is important, and to come higher up more links are needed, but you want to ensure they are quality and related links. As a wedding photographer links from wedding blogs, photographer sites are all within your niche.  A side bar link from a low quality gardening blog isn’t what you want. Sites such as Moz and Ahrefs can allow you to see the domain author of a site.

In this article we are going to look at these areas to help build links.

• Social Media
• Real Weddings
• Guest Posts and Sharing Articles
• Contributing to Articles
• Featuring Images
• Online Directories
• Reclaiming Links

Social Media

The quick, simple and easy win and way to get back links to a new site is from your social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all allow you to add a URL to your profile. This link to your site isn’t just a back link, it also helps Google trust your site a little bit more and that you are a real business.

There is also Pinterest, again you can add a link to your site here too, as well as pinning your articles creating more links to your site. Pinning your images also helps you be found via Pinterest which is a visual search engine in itself.

These simple links won’t suddenly put you top of Google, however they are quick wins even if they are small wins, they all add up.

Real Weddings

As a wedding photographer you will have hundreds of weddings, many will be shared on your own site and blog, if not, then why not?!

While publishing on your own site is great, it is also a good idea to share your work and publish it on other sites, this has more benefits than just a back link. In the real wedding feature you will be credited as the photographer and linked to your site, however from a marketing strategy it also helps get your work shown in front of people who maybe looking for a photographer which could then lead to couples clicking through and potentially booking you.

There are many online wedding blogs to look at publishing your work on, we have a blog post on this here – Best Wedding Blogs & Sites to be Featured On.

Guest Posts & Sharing Articles

There are some blog wedding sites that allow guest posts or where you can share an article you have written. For this they would likely to be interested in articles that would help their readers and not just an article about you and your work.

For example, articles on what to do if it rains on your wedding day, why couples should have get ready photos, what to consider when hiring a wedding photographer. All these are useful and informative articles, combine them with your own photos and a link to your website this is another good marketing strategy and link building opportunity.

Contributing to articles

As a professional wedding photographer there maybe oppurtinities to conrutube to an article within this sector, for example news sites may want to quote from a professional photographer for a related article and will look for contribution. These types of opportunities can be found on Twitter for examples under the #jornorequest and adding in wedding or photographer as a search term.

We have featured a number of articles where we have asked our members to contribute to an article subject, a great way to share views and opinions on different areas and to read others.

Featuring Images

Wedding related blogs and websites always want images to go with their articles, and there is so many times you can use a stock photo. Contact wedding blogs you like and read, allow them to use photos off your website if they wish, just as long as they credit and link back to your website.

Many wedding venue websites will have a gallery showing photos from photographers of their venue, if you have some great photos email them over to the venue and allow them to use them on their website ensuring they are credited.

Finally venue directories such as Bride book and Wedinspire feature photographer photos and will link back to your site too, again these are worth looking into.

Wedding Directories

There are many online wedding related sites and directories, and many will have a backlink to your website. These are great ways to market yourself and also to get a back link to your site. Many sites are paid however sites such as BrideBook is free.

With our memberships there is a link to your own website from your profile page, great for SEO and also great for couples to see more of your work and style.

When looking at directory sites to makert yourself on consider these things: are they wedding related? Are they established? Are they still going and being updated? Do they reflect my work and do I want to be promoted on there?

Reclaiming Links

There maybe times where your work has been featured on a blog or in an article, this could be a photo which may or may not have been credited. For example a blog may have shared your photo and said it is by you, however they never added a link to your website. A quick email to that site to highlight this and asking if they could just add a link to your name is a quick way to get a link.

A blog site may have used one of your photos and forgot to credit this at all, so an email to the editor highlighting the use of your photo without credit and link, and ask them to do this or remove it. These can be found by using the google image search tool, and allows you to see where your images maybe used.

Searching your company or brand name in Google will bring up sites where you are mentioned, you can then check out those blogs to see if they are linking to you and if not you could drop them an email asking them if they could. When searching use the quote marks to get exact matches.

Unsplash

Sharing your photos on royalty free photo sites such as Unsplash for example, it’s another great way to feature your work, and you may get a link this way. As the photos are shared as royalty free and at no cost, there is no obligation to add a credit, however some sites will add a credit, and some sites if you send an email and say I see you see they are using one of your photos and if they would be kind enough to add a link.

Many news sites and blog site shall use photos from sites like this, so you could pick up a very high quality link this way.

What about internal linking?

So the above is all about external links, web links from other websites linking back to yours. Internal links are web links on your websites, linking to other pages on your website.

While external links is important to how you rank on Google, internal links is also important, and this is for a number of reasons. Linking to pages in your website helps Google know which are important pages to rank, which to rank and also what they should be ranking for.

It takes time

Link building is time consuming, however it is an important strategy to your SEO of your website. Take time to think what you are doing and what you could be doing. Review your website and ensure it is optimised, with lots of great links, if your site is very slow to load and not mobile friendly, then you are limiting how high your site could rank.