A year and a half ago I started this blog. Mostly I just wanted a spot to upload a select few of my photos as I finished them and say a few words about them. There was no long-term ambition for my blog until about 6 months ago. That was when I officially retired from being a Real Estate Broker to follow my decades-long passion of photography.
It was then I decided that I did have some goals with this blog and I started learning a lot more about the blogging world. This includes SEO, WordPress best practices, metrics, keyword research, landing pages, marketing.. all that stuff that takes a long time to pick up, digest, and then implement. Along the way I even learned that there are special things that should be factored in for photography blogs.
I decided this week to make my website a dofollow blog. Let me tell you how that came about and why it’s important.
There are a ton of resources online to help out with this. Choosing what to read was a chore in itself but some things just kept floating to the top so I have come to rely on just a few sources for my information and then do further research when one of those sources points out something that I feel needs my attention or that I’m ready to implement. I would say that my two top resources are Hubspot.com and the blog by Kim Castleberry; Just-Ask-Kim.com. If you are a blogger, you can’t go wrong with these two resources. I know that there are plenty of others with really good information, I just happened to choose these and have a very high confidence level in the information they put out.
Sign up for their mailing list. Hubspot.com offers a bookshelf full of free eBooks all about inbound marketing, landing pages, SEO, and website design and their ebooks are very easy to read and understand. I first learned about Hubspot when I ran across a tool of their called “Website Grader.” You put in the URL of a website and Hubspot analyzed it and spit out a score along with tips where there is room for improvement. About 9 months ago, Hubspot replaced that tool with another one called “Marketing Grader.” This is a FABULOUS tool and it tells you where you’re good to go with your website and where you might want to spend some time making improvements. Use it early & often.
Kim Castleberry has a beautiful blog and it’s crammed with awesome information. She is really smart, especially about WordPress. Her posts are always relevant and if I need information on something I’m working on at the moment, a quick search of her blog will turn up the information I need. I love her videos, which she frequently embeds into her posts. She is quick and the video’s never drag on. I get so tired of finding videos where the speaker isn’t present or does not communicate well. You will never experience that form any of Kim’s videos.
Her expert knowledge of the WordPress blogging platform helps me anytime I have a need or am trying to find a way to do something with my blog. It’s great receiving her emails too because she is always on top of what’s new in WordPress so it’s easy for me to keep up with the upgrades and changes that happen almost daily. So, I would also suggest that you subscribe to her email updates if you have a WordPress blog.
Right now my project is optimizing my blog. This week I found that my current challenge is to get quality backlinks from other websites to mine in order to increase my authority with Google in the quest to reach page 1. Google still uses backlinks like a vote of confidence for the authority of a website. To get ranked higher by Google, you WANT more backlinks. Reading through Kim’s blog I learned that a really great way to is make the comments on my blog “dofollow.” What that means, is that when somebody comments on a post of mine that they will get a backlink to their blog or website that Google will follow, in a good way, and they get a little boost in their SEO. By doing this and being a good citizen online, my blog will, in turn, be given backlinks by some of those commentors. That’s just what the blogging community does for each other. By default, WordPress comments are always “Nofollow” so people who comment get no juice back to their sites.
To make your WordPress blog a Dofollow blog, there is a super simple plugin that you install that does it all completely automatically. Yup, the plugin is called Dofollow. It’s now installed on this blog so please feel free to find an article or photo that you like or want to comment on and get a quality backlink to YOUR website from mine. This blog is a page rank 2 by Google, which is pretty good for the time I’ve been working on it.
Using Google’s free page rank checker, I am happy to learn that EssenceInPhotography is a PR 2.
Garden of the Gods at Dusk. Photo by Mai Vu
Nikon D-90, 28-105 lens, f5.6 ISO 2000, 1/160 sec. Made from single RAW file in Adobe Lightroom and NIK color efex pro.
My girlfriend, Mai, has the same camera as I. A Nikon D-90. We always have a great time together photographing and she is really good, although she hasn’t grown into that fact yet. When I make my landscape photos I generally use my 11mm wide angle lens, while Mai likes to get in closer. She made this photo at Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs and I love the color contrast in it that we were seeing at dusk this particular evening. That yellow sky is especially unique.
Strangely enough, Captain Photo has never been the captain of anything, except his golf team in high school. He was on a big boat once, a cuise ship, and was banned from the bridge while offering to help navigate after leaving the ship's nightclub at 3 AM.
What I, Captain Photo, can do for you is to help sail the stormy seas of HDR photography. It's treacherous out there. I've been shipwrecked more than once. (I wasn't Captain those times)
Read the blog and learn the easy and inexpensive process of making Perfect HDR photographs that beginners will love and will make your friends begin to reassess and elevate your worth! You'll quickly be sailing smooth and making amazing images!
~Captain Photo 
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Wow this is fantastic. i have been wondering how to encourage people to comment on my blog instead of on FB. thank you for sharing and thank you to the people who created this option.
I have gotten a few comments here and there though not necessarily for my photography. My WordPress.com blog site lacks SEO and only has a few viewers. So I really thank you for sharing this. I really want to drive people from my blog site to my portfolio site.
Photography can be a great hobby or a cash-earning business. Either way, photographers must shoot so that others can enjoy their work.
Yes Andrew, it’s difficult at first to get comments. Just keep putting out great content regularly. It help a lot to actually tell your reders to comment or ask them a question at the end of your post that they can answer by commenting. Cheers!
Thanks Keith for sharing your experiences.. I’m also trying to make the transition to giving up my day job to pursue photography more seriously. The information and tips you have provided is invaluable. Also love your photography landscapes. Cheers, Jenny
Jenny I sure know how difficult it is to make that decision. I wrestled with it for years. After some great coaching this year I realized that it was fear of not being good enough that held me back and that I was just making it up in my head. The fear is not real. Surrender to your passion and you will be so much happier doing what you love.
I am a huge believer in the power of social media and how we can all help each other out. Thanks for the information here, Keith, this is a great post and I am going to look into doing the same on my blog to help out my fellow photographers. Many thanks, my friend, this is awesome.
That’s so great that you’re jumping on the bandwagon too. I’d love to get a list of photography websites that are dofollow so that we can all support our fellow togs. I do have a list of mostly non-photography websites. Some of them have a respectably high pagerank of 6 and 7.
So let me know when you get your website open for commentors and I’ll put it on my dofollow list to share. Have a fabulous weekend!
Cheers!
Great article, thanks for sharing! I have just started to think seriously about my blog as well, and have been wanting to improve it. Your article, and the pointers should be a big help! Tanks!
You have a beautiful blog and I LOVE your work Mike! Truly wonderful HDR processing. Cheers!
Thank you sir! I just redid the theme and the way the galleries are done and like it much better! I think one of my problems is that I do not post enough!
Well congrats on turning this into a DoFollow blog, which prompted me to visit and leave my own comments. Your comments should increase. I appreciate the info on HubSpot, which I wasn’t aware of. I’ll go check it out.
Thanks!! Hubspot rocks! thanks for sharing things about pagerank!!
The amount of free content Hubspot cranks out is just amazing and keep me busy reading it all. They have a lot to teach us newbie bloggers.
Wow. There’s some very helpful comment here. I am just starting out as a professional over the last few months. I hadn’t realised quite how much I needed to know about SEO in order to get my site visible, even at a local level. I thinking building up a network of links that are genuinely relevant and contribute to the broader web community. I use Disqus currently for my web comments but I can see the benefits in developing dofollow on my own blog. Not least because I value comment and engagement and it is a great way to reward that.
Does anyone know or have any experience of making Disqus comments sections do follow?
I am new and amateur hobby photographer, and struggling for seo for my blog site
http://photographyguide99.blogspot.com
This articles will definitely help me. Thanks for sharing
Great article! Just putting together my blog and I will certainly use this plug in!
Now I’m considering swapping my FB comments for WP dofollow WP comments! Thanks for the tip and Google Juice.
Thank you so much for the dofollow information. I’m just about to activate the plugin.
Your idea to make a dofollow blog is great !!
This encourage comments, and give to us google visibility…this is a perfect win=win advantage !!!
Je réalise que la passion de la photo peut amener à d’autres passions plus spécialisées.
I’ve also made my blog dofollow. Not only does it encourage comments, but why not help the general community, right?
Zach Sutton Photography recently posted…Model Photoshoot with Sita Huber
I made my website dofollow. But there are spammers who tried to hit my website as many as times, which resulted in eating lots of bandwidth. Hence I removed the dofollow and made it as usual nofollow again.
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Gourish this is also a bit of a problem for me. I’m finding that the Akismet plugin for wordpress catches most of the spammers. Looking at my Akismet stats for this month, there have been over 16,000 spammers caught by the plugin and only missed 51. So it caught 99.68%. I’m willing to deal with the ones that get through in order to give others the great backlinks. If it gets worse, maybe I’ll change my mind. Also, I’ve started using a new plugin that’s been around awhile called CommentLuv. This also gives do-follow backlinks and other benefits users who re-tweet a post or to logged-in users who comment.
(dofollow)
Captain Photo recently posted…The Golden Rice Paddys of Bali
Thanks for good article! I quite recently started being engages in the blog seriously. It is sure that your article will render me the big help in it.
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Thanks for the great article! I think all photographers struggle with SEO at one time or another. My page is only visited by a limited number of people. So, I am just starting to learn about SEO, attracting people, etc.
Interessant cet article, je suis bien d’accord, il est tres difficile d’aller en page 1 de google, le numérique a favorisé et augmenté le nombre de photographes, nous constatons ainsi un grande concurrence parme les photographes professionnels, et difficile de tirer son epingle du jeu.
This is a great article! I have been an avid Marketing Grader fan for years and for a free service it gives some great information. Thanks for some great insight!
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I really liked reading youre post. Thank you for a good blog. keep it up
Best regards
Thomas Mikkelsen
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Hi Captain Photo! Great advice and Ive just installed the “dofollow” plug in to my word press site where Ive only just started but there are plenty of things people can comment on to get a few backlinks. I have a site rating of 1 so hopefully will help a few micro nudges in the SEO world. There is also a topic on choosing a photographer so happy for people to blog away!
I now have to battle my way to Manchester to do a wedding reception in a rear wheel drive car so wish me luck and happy blogging, kind regards Lewis Romane@wedding photographer
Can you tell me how I use the comment love tag it appears i wrote it wrong in my comment ;(
Lewis, I didn’t understand comment luv the first time I ran across it either. If you have your own blog, by commenting on mine ( or any other comment luv blog) you get a link WITH KEYWORDS back to your own blog. This is really helpful for SEO. If you have no blog, then it’s just the same as leaving a comment the regular way. I’m trying to help people get more google juice if I can. SO, to use it for a do-follow link, in the “name” field put your name and the keywords you want your blog to be found for. It will also allow you to show your most recent blog post at the end of your comment on my blog.
(dofollow)
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Hi thanks for the reply hopefully it works this time if u want to put a link on my site visit the news section thanks again!
While I appreciate you allowing photographers including me to get a valuable backlink. What’s a shame is the fact that we have to or feel compelled to spend our time getting links to our websites when we could all be spending it on more creative activities. I have two sites. My site http://www.pjphoto.co.uk is a PR4 site where as my site http://www.pjpportraits.co.uk is 0 right now hence getting links.
Wish you well.
Paul
I feel your pain Paul.
Besides getting links, something you can do is write unique and interesting blog articles that will get you readers/visitors! It works for me my boyfriend who is a web designer.
I hope this will help my sites http://www.pjpportraits.co.uk thanks for the seo help very kind
Paul Johnson photography recently posted…Farnham Castle winter wedding photography reception of Kim & Steve in Surrey
This is great! I see by my SEO quake toolbar that your site is now a PR:1. As a newbie it seems that I put more effort into learning and applying SEO than anything else. It can get quite frustrating so thank you so much for this.
Tampa Wedding Photographer recently posted…Danielle and Larry, St Petersburg Wedding
Great post, with some great ideas to drive traffic towards everyones website.
Thanks so much, and for the obligatory cute baby picture please click below!
http://www.yourperfectmoment.co.uk/cg-4.html
When so many photography blogs are now nofollow it is nice to see a dofollow blog. Keep up the good work.
thanks for the great article and the link
I did the transition already, from regular job to my photography and 3D business. But now I’m facing all of this SEO web challenges and how to use my website better. Personally I’m finding it hard as I don’t really enjoy spending too much time on that kind of stuff but to the end of the day it seems like this is just part of how the business goes now days. I found some helpful links and information here on your blog page and I will give them an tray latter on hope they will help with something .
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Lots of great information here. I’ve been getting the Hubspot books for a while now and concur that they are a great resource for marketing info. i’ve also been on Kimberley’s email list for a while but have to say I haven’t really read much of her blog till now and it’s now bookmarked, as is yours. My site is currently ranked around pages 4/5 in Google so I’m doing a fair bit of backlink building. The dofollow plugin will be installed withiin the next 2 minutes.
I made a genuine comment here about 4 days ago but it still doesn’t show up, so maybe it got lost in cyberspace?
I wanted to ask whet you thought about the latest Google update of Feb and whether you think this has anything to do with dofollow blogs. I personally don’t think it does, and i’ve kept my blog a dofollow blog.
Some other people have stopped using dofollow. Do you have an opinion or advice about this?
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I’m no expert on this stuff. Just a photographer doing my best to give & get google juice where I can. What I see around the web is that dofollow is still worth something. Until I hear otherwise, I’ll keep this blog open to linking to related sites with dofollow links.
I don’t know what may have happened to your previous comment. Akismet snags thousands of spam comments which i never see. It’s possible that Akismet isn’t 100% accurate. Glad we got you this time.
(dofollow)
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heya! thanks for the info, i am subscribed to hubspot and you are def right they have amazing articles to help build your seo and backlinks. i will def check out the other website just ask kim. i have a photography business that deals with virtual tours, food and interior photgraphy and this is excatly what i was looking for! thanks again.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing. I agree that switching wordpress from “nofollow” to “dofollow” is a great idea to get more backlinks from commentators. However, we may get more spam comments or worthless comments which come from backlinks hunters. To fix the problem, we may need to add specific comment rules.
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Yes that does happen to a certain extent Wilma. And the Askimet plugin does a stellar job of handling most of them. Still, a few get through. Not enough to be troublesome so far. For me, it’s important to be able to give out good link juice to other photographers and websites related to what we talk about here. Thanks for stopping by.
(dofollow)
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Thank you for the info. I’m off to see whether my blog is a “dofollow” now!
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It is so awesome to see so many photographers start to do this! Your article did a great job explaining the benefits – so thank you for sharing that1
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Hi El Capitan! Give us a shout sometime, we’d like to send you a free sample of our photo mounting on either acrylic, bamboo or aluminum.. perhaps one of your HDR photos. Let me know!
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Hi and I’m glad you found me. My photos, I’ve found, look great on aluminum or printed on metal paper. Your acrylic process I read about on your blog is intriguing. I will have to try that.
Cheers!
Thank you for the post! Hopefully, it will help my website! I really appreciate it
Awesome post! So much valuable information, thank you! I need to check my blog to see if it is a “do follow”!
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Thanks for the great tip on the dofollow! I’ve just recently started looking into this for my blog to help encourage people to comment!
Thanks again!
Great article and nice tip on the DoFollow links, keep up the great work!
Hi Thank you very much for your nice post.
I was searching for 1 hour to find such a post.
Sure, just give me a shout at that email!
Bumblejax Photo Mounting recently posted…Acrylic Printing Services: What To Look For
Cheers! I’ll do that.
(dofollow)
Captain Photo recently posted…Photo Blogging with WordPress Responsive Themes
I’ll do that. Cheers!
(dofollow)
Captain Photo recently posted…Photo Blogging with WordPress Responsive Themes