This is a guest post by Zach Prez who offers 1-on-1 coaching and SEO workshops. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Everyone knows choosing the right keywords begins the SEO process (or at least you know now). After all, search engine optimization means optimizing keywords so you can rank for them. In this post I’ll refer to keywords as a phrase you want to rank for, and demonstrate how to find longer keywords where competition is less extreme. Even a new site or beginner can rank quickly.

Knowing Keywords is a Critical First Step

Without a keyword list it’s easy to optimize for the wrong words, repeat words, words nobody searches for, and words that don’t create new business. All of these take time away from your true talent (hint: not SEO) and are doomed for failure. Let me demonstrate some examples of what not to do. Feel free to bang your head against a desk for having fallen victim to one of SEO’s classic blunders such as:

1. Wrong words: optimizing for wedding binders won’t make you crazy cash like a successful rank for wedding albums. Go with words people actually use.

2. Repeat words: No need to put Los Angeles wedding photographer in all your blog titles and images. Do you really expect every one of them to rank for that phrase? A homepage will outrank a blog post for a main/primary phrase. Target one page per phrase please.

3. Words nobody searches for: Cool, you rank #1 for Arizona ocean photography but nobody has yet to search that in Google. Don’t waste time optimizing for that.

4. Words that don’t create new business: A #1 rank for celebrity photographer may build your online rep to Ashton Kutcher levels, but if you’re based in Minnesota and not willing to travel it probably won’t deliver new clients. Avoid the above by doing a little up front keyword research to find the most searched terms. We’ll put those terms into a list and map it to a content timeline.

How Longer Phrases Can Help SEO

Before you go picking the top 10 most difficult keywords in your niche, let me explain how Google works.
1. A user types a phrase into Google
2. Google looks for a page about that phrase
3. Google finds lots of pages about that phrase and ranks the page with the most authority at #1 (authority is mostly determined by the number of links pointing to the page or site)

Thus, Google looks for keywords on the page (in the title, then URL, then body copy and images). A phrase like Los Angeles wedding photographer appears on 3.5 million pages.

Rather than try to compete on authority for that phrase (or in addition to), find phrases like Hollywood Indian wedding photography ideas. No pages exist with that phrase, so if you optimize a blog post then you will easily rank very high. Plus you might even rank for different keyword combinations such as Hollywood Indian wedding, Hollywood photography ideas, etc. Even if only a handful of people search for that every month, that blog post provides exactly what they are looking for. Specific phrase + little competition = new client. Multiply the number of posts optimized for specific phrases and the traffic becomes significant. Look at this Google Analytics snapshot from a Sacramento Photographer. The main phrase Sacramento photographer was just 1 of 3,868 keywords that she ranked for and contributed to less than 1% of total traffic. Most of the few thousand phrases are very specific searches you would never imagine people would type.

Long-tail SEO is a strategy to find and capture search presence for the thousands of long phrases users will type to find you. Here’s how to locate and organize them.

Keyword List Worksheet

Start with a 4 column list on paper or spreadsheet using the following column headings

Adjectives: Indian best
Locations: Los Angeles Hollywood
Niches:  wedding photography
Nouns:  ideas

As the columns fill out, use various keyword combinations to develop the best phrases for your business.
1. Indian Hollywood wedding ideas
2. Best Los Angeles Indian wedding photography

Put the most important phrase at the top of the list. Next time you write a page or a post, take a look at the list and see if you can incorporate one of the phrases into your post idea. Or you can proactively start writing posts about each of your phrases. This week write about item 1, next week item 2, etc. Cross them off your list so that you don’t optimize for the same phrase twice.

Idea! Create a “best-of” post using content you already have written elsewhere. Take a paragraph here, and image there, and using old posts you can quickly create a new and optimized post.

How to Find Great Keywords

Two of my favorite 10 SEO Tools for Photography Keywords are free Google Keyword Tool and Traffic Travis PC software. Most everyone knows about the Google Keyword Tool for keyword research, but may be confused on how to get great ideas. I searched Los Angeles wedding photographer has 170 broad searches per month, meaning those 3 words were somewhere in the search criteria. Notice other keywords that users type as a part of their search phrase: Indian, top, ideas, photography. Add these to the keyword list worksheet for future use.

Yes, it is that simple. Looking up Hollywood Indian wedding photography ideas would not show any search volume, but we can see that users do search with those words in different combinations. If people are searching top wedding photographers, then they would also search for top in local searches as well. You don’t need 1,000 visits to grow your business. Rank high for something that 5 people search for each month and you can snag all of those clients ASAP. Traffic Travis just offers a second opinion. Another search uncovers more great keywords. I add the following keywords to my list: tips, best, destination, beach.

My next post might be something like “10 Photographer Tips for the Best Beach Wedding in Los Angeles” and capture users searching for beach wedding tips, best photographer tips, Los Angeles beach wedding, etc. The power of long-tail SEO gains a little traffic from a number of phrases.

Compare Two Keywords

The other time a keyword tool comes in handy is when comparing the search volume of two or more keyword phrases. If I’m a wedding photographer in Southern California it would help to know which cities have the most searches. After typing a few phrases (at the same time) into the Google Keyword Tool I find that Orange County is very highly searched. Optimizing for that location has a lot more potential than Beverly Hills, while Hollywood and Burbank have very few searches. The keyword list should reflect this priority with the majority of phrases going after Orange County and maybe only 1 or 2 for the other locations.

For the creative and visual learners out there this video speaks to some of the tactics above.

Take Keywords to the Next Level

Keywords are a small portion of search engine optimization strategy. My Photographers SEO Book and Blog SEO Zen ebook are quickly becoming the standard do-it-yourself guides for ranking photo and wedding businesses. Learn about site structure, link strategy, and tools with no technical knowledge needed.

This is a guest post by Jen May Pastores, a lifestyle photographer and portrait photographer based in Los Angeles, California.

There’s a window by my desk and outside are two elementary boys peeking in with their smiles eagerly anticipating my returning glance. “Teacher! Study? 4?” is the question I heard everyday from them. “Chaa, chaa,” I reply with a nodding yes. The boys run over to their friends practicing headstands on the side of the center’s building and bring them over to my window. “Can I study, too?” asks a new student. “I’d love that,” I say to him. I check my watch to see I have only a few minutes to prepare the cameras for the next class, so I quickly download the rest of the memory cards to my laptop and head upstairs to the classroom.

This was my typical afternoon at the Tiny Toones center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Three times a day 15-20 students met me in a classroom to learn and practice photography with each class split among age groups from as young as 10 to 24-years-old. The majority of the youth barely knew English, so the center hired a local translator to communicate for me. Imagine trying to explain f-stops and shutter speed to a translator who was new at photography, then having her explain it to the class! It was a month-long experience with lots of picture drawing on the chalkboard and grand gestures, but it led to creating images and capturing stories that no language barriers could trap.

One of my students once asked me, “Do you take pictures and get money for it?” My class knew I was a photographer in Los Angeles, but they were curious as to why I was there teaching them for free. “Yes, people do pay me to take their pictures. Why do you think they’ll want do that?” I asked. “Because they want to remember something important or special. They want you to tell their story,” answered a student. “So why are you here?” they asked. “Because no one wanted me to tell their story this summer. And, I love teaching others that photography is more than making money. It’s about showing who we are and what we care about.”

Last summer, I ran into my first season where I had no weddings or sessions booked. I decided to look at it as a season of opportunity instead of as a failure. I had never considered visiting Cambodia before, but–as timing can work out perfectly–I was invited by Tiny Toones to offer a photography program at their center. The only thing asked was that I needed to provide everything, including cameras and my airfare, and do it all voluntarily. I looked into who the organization was and discovered that Tiny Toones uses the elements of Hip-Hop like break dancing and djing as creative tools to empower the youth, especially so they could live healthy lives apart from drugs and violence. I then realized that photography could be a complimentary, creative class to educate the youth.

My decision to go happened only a couple months before my program start date. A season with a seemingly bleak outlook turned into one of the busiest, but fulfilling season I’ve lived out so far. My main obstacle was raising funds to buy classroom supplies like digital cameras, memory cards, rechargeable batteries, and chargers for the batteries. This led me to announce my first workshop held in L.A. (which so happens to be the same place where the L.A. Smug group meets every month) where all proceeds went directly to my endeavor. I also reached out to industry professionals requesting donations and out of this Shootsac, Dane Sanders, and local camera stores and photo labs gave items for my workshop and program in Cambodia. In less than a month I was able to raise enough money to purchase 10 cameras, my airfare, and other necessities to main the program for a month.

After the completion of my program at Tiny Toones a gallery in Phnom Penh invited to exhibit the student’s work where 100% of proceeds from sold prints were donated to the center. This began the international tour of what is now known as, “The World Through Our Eyes.” Since last year, the exhibit traveled to Philadelphia, is currently in California, and has plans to continue in Hawaii this fall. None of this would have happened if I didn’t take advantage of an opportunity to give back, especially during a time when I could have easily given up.

The program covered the basics of photography such as composition, lighting and finding good backgrounds for portraits. More importantly, the workshop encouraged students to exercise their voice in telling their story and how they see the world around them. A series of photographs taken during that workshop, “The World Through Our Eyes” is a vibrant statement by youth countering stereotypes of artistic, emotional and urban desolation in the developing world.

To further read up on this cause and how you can help please visit http://cambodia.jenmayphotography.com. You can also watch a documentary on the site that interviews students who participated in the photography classes and find out about upcoming exhibits to see the photos in person.