Hello,
This is my first post - I'd really appreciate some advice on improving my website/marketing.
Some background: I shoot stock and an occasional assignment (hopefully more in the future). My website,
www.ottertrack.com, was designed to be used as a portfolio. It's of limited value for marketing as it isn't geared towards SEO. It also lacks practical usefulness for my clients, as all they can do on the site is view samples and see a stock list. I use iView/Expression Media software and all my images are keyworded but not captioned nor titled (besides a unique I.D. number).
Well, no surprise, I'd really like to increase my presence on the web (and my sales) and I'd really appreciate some advice on several matters:
1. Are there any services or software you'd recommend for adding a keyword searchable image library on my website? It's not vital to me that clients be able to purchase rights or download files directly from the website, but it is important that they could do an advanced search using keywords and save their selections on some kind of lightbox or gallery.
2. Would any of the above services or software be compatible with iView (Expression Media) so that the keyword searchable image library could be created by a simple export from iView or some kind of batch process?
3. Currently, as far as I know, about the only way for someone to find my website via a search engine is to use my name in the search, so of course it'd be much better to improve the website so that people searching for a specific image subject or location would find images on my site. Would adding a keyword searchable image library on the site take care of this need also? And would I need to add titles and captions to all the images or would keywords suffice (for SEO)?
4. If I want to go the route of using a stock agency, are there any you'd recommend? And would adding captions and titles to the images be vital for submission to a stock agency or could I get away with using my current image numbers as titles?
5. I also shoot an occasional wedding and post images on SmugMug to take care of print fulfillment. Would any of the services or software recommendations from the prior questions also include this feature? This isn't as important to me as the other needs, but it'd be nice to have.
6. Anyone recommend any webmasters experienced with these sorts of matters who are good to work with?
I'm game for any additional advice, suggestions and/or feedback.
Many thanks!
Leon