I've just completed a ten week course on business blogging and SEO for websites and your analysis is spot on!

Content is king and while there may be ways to cheat your way to the top these will only be short lived. As you say text is the key in addition to building links coming into specific web pages within the site.

On our last lesson it was also pointed out that there are far more hand-held devices able to access the Internet than computers. This is certainly food for thought when as photographers we like to stick large high resolution images on-line.

Pat
http://www.patb-photography.co.uk/

@Melanie - Thank you for mentioning what you did. It forced me to go back and realize that I should have mentioned a something rather important regarding the use of keywords.

Do not target anymore than 3 or 4 (and that is really stretching it, I usually go for 1 or 2) keywords per page.

This was really intended to focus on what to do with the keywords rather than the research to find them and what to look for. Perhaps I should go back and write that one up too. And btw, I completely agree and want to emphasize, using your keywords too much (stuffing) will do much more harm than good.

Yes, *text* is critically important but the reason why text (and keyword use) is important is because it's about providing context for the site, as well as providing content that Google is going to think is relevant. (Hint: Using the word "DC photographer" 20 times doesn't make your site 20x more relevant than if you'd used it once.) In other words, the practice of "keyword stuffing" doesn't work.

You provide a great intro to SEO for photographers; I wouldn't want people glomming on to "keywords, keywords!" and missing the bigger picture. (I.e., do keyword/market research, target long-tail and attainable queries, provide context, go after the local market, write unique copy, make sure your site has multiple pages each optimized for something different, etc.)

Colin