Welcome to Espresso brought to you by your friends at Photography Blog Sites. You can just imagine how stylin’ your blog posts and client sessions can look as you blog about them here. Upload videos, display a slideshow, create a buzz…it’s your blog!

Once upon a time, it was only necessary to have a website. Then blogs became important. Now you need to think about social media with tools like Twitter and Facebook.

If your business has a second or third off-shoot with its own site and own blog, you could easily have 4 or more places to login and update. Add to that an order fulfillment service or payment gateway and all the social media sites… That’s too much.

You should no longer consider these things as separate entities but should consider them different pieces of a web presence. The more we can consolidate the management of that web presence, the easier your life will be.

Our Goals

There a few things that we should aimed to accomplish for in our all-in-one site Photography Blogsites

• They are easy to use.
• They can handle any type of content – video, photos, text, etc.
• They have great search engine visibility.
• They allow visitors to connect via:
  • Ability to leave comments
  • Accessible links to social networks and other sites.
  • Feeds from twitter, etc.
• They publish an RSS feed, which:
  • Allows people to subscribe
  • Can push content to directories and aggregators (great for building links)
  • Can push links to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Some technical considerations:

• No Flash.
  • Search engines can’t read Flash sites.
  • Flash elements, like an animated logo or header are okay. Not the whole page.
• HTML and CSS based.
  • Makes it crawlable by search engines.
  • Makes it visible to iPhone (and now iPad) users
• Includes a Content Management System (CMS).
  • allows a user to update content
  • No need to know anything about HTML code
  • No need to call a web designer every time something needs updating.

WordPress is all of those things.

Google Loves WordPress

Perhaps the biggest reason to use WordPress is that it takes care of most of the on-page SEO issues that you need to worry about right out of the box. With the right plugins and settings, it can be made to work even better and is in fact recognized by Google as the #1 CMS to use for SEO.

Matt Cutts is the head of the spam (actually anti-spam) department at Google, which makes him basically THE authority on SEO. Why is the head of spam the authority on SEO? Because to combat spam, you need to know the difference between good content and spam and then tweak the Google process for discovering good content. There is probably no one more directly connected to the process of how and why sites rank or don’t rank in Google.

In this video, he does a great job of explaining what Google looks for, why WordPress is ideal and why he uses it himself. He gets into some tech talk but makes it very accessible. It is well worth watching for anyone interested in blogging and/or improving their site’s SEO.

With all our sites here at Photography Blogsites, we use a combination of amazing WordPress plugins, including a trio of SEO plugins that are freely available and highly recommended for any WordPress site.

• The first one is the famous All in One SEO Pack, the most downloaded of all WordPress plugins. It is very powerful and does too much to explain here. But follow the link to get it and find out more.
• The second is SEO Friendly Images, a great plugin that adds ‘alt’ attributes to each image in your blog posts, all behind the scenes, just install and let it work.
• The third was designed for photographers, and created by our developers here at Photography Blogsites called SEO Image Galleries. It is an alternative to flash based image galleries. It is all CSS and HTML based and loads every image with SEO information.

Here is a look at the SEO Image Gallery backend: