We have a large variety of Invoice Templates available to use with the Xero Accounting System.

Here is a screenshot of one of the templates called Long Black.

So if you are looking to spice up your invoice then have a look, l am sure you will find something you like.

If you would like to know how to customise your Xero Invoice’s, here is a video to show you how. It is easy.

Xero customised invoice templates

But I’ve just gotta take a second to gush about the newest feature Zendesk offers. If you have a Facebook fan page for your company, Zendesk will search through all of the comments to find the ones that might be from customers needing support. It then takes those comments and automatically builds support tickets around them so you don’t have to. Now we no longer need to look through Hypnotic Zoo’s Facebook page to find customers who might need our help. We just go to Zendesk, and it’s saving us a lot of time.

If you’re a medium sized web design firm like ours, it pays to use this service. We’re based out of Melbourne, but we have clients all over the world who need our help. Zendesk makes it easy for us to keep them happy and coming back for more.

Full details from the Press release – Zendesk Delivers The Most Efficient Way To Engage With Customers On Facebook

Pictures are something that we humans naturally “get.” We look at them and instantly understand what they’re about. The same can’t be said for the programs Google uses to search the web for useful content. They can’t “decode” an image in the same way we naturally can.

Put simply, we need to help the programs figure out what’s in our images.

That’s why images also have alt and title tags. By saying something relevant to the image in either of these tags, you ensure that Google knows what your image is about. You don’t need to jam every possible search query into these tags. By merely using them at all, you’re miles ahead of the crowd.

So, do you want to know how I got traffic just by posting an image? I put the following description into its alt tag:

subaru HDR 3 by exxx2005 HDR Photography Tutorials by Paul Stamatiou

This description hits on a lot of different searches people might enter into Google. Maybe they want to learn more about HDR photography. Maybe they’re interested in Paul Statmatiou’s work or Subarus. By placing these keywords in the alt tag, I’m giving myself the best possible chance of ranking high for these common HDR-related search terms.

Here’s where you need to enter it if you’re editing the HTML directly:

You’ll want to place the description in the “ alt = ” section. If you’re a WordPress user, you can place the same description in the Alternate Text box of the image editor. Be sure to fill in the caption and description sections too. The more written content surrounding your photo, the better.

Surprisingly, that was nearly all I had to do get the image to appear whenever people search for the term HDR photography. Want me to prove it? Here are the recent stats from my website’s search engine analytics.

As you can see, the search “blinq hdr” counts for nearly 3% of my total traffic. Imagine that! All I did was put an image up on a website and properly describe it. Easy.

Do be careful, however. You still need to follow all of the other rules of SEO. You need to write solid content around the images you’re putting on your website. That means writing an article that’s at least 350 words long. Don’t forget to provide your audience with substantial content, not just a bunch of images with links.

Here’s the big takeaway. Google can’t read images any better than you can read binary code. They’re one big blur of pixels. Help Google out. Properly describe your images by using the alt text and other tools WordPress offers. You’ll soon find yourself getting a lot more traffic from the images you post.

Continuing on with some of the themes I discussed on Talking Technology earlier this month, I’d like to talk about another concern among small to medium business owners. What do you do to take care of all the people out there using mobile phones and other devices? Should you build an app for your business, and if you do choose to go down that road, how should you do it?

There is a difference between a business app and a mobile website. A mobile website is a scaled down version of your website, made to look good on a mobile phone. It includes everything normally found on your website, just in a smaller form. As a matter of fact, more web designers and developers are including mobile and tablet websites as a package with the websites they sell to their clients. People who walk through the door get everything in a one stop shop.

Apps are different. Apps live on your mobile phone (or iPod or whatever you like), and they work totally fine offline. Because they have more access to the resources on your phone, they can do a lot more interesting things. A good example of an app is a video game like Angry Birds. The graphics are sharp and crystal clear, and the animation runs flawlessly. You’d be hard-pressed to find the same experience with a mobile website.

As a developer, it’s a lot more fun to build native apps. The tools are a lot nicer, and you get more control over the experience. It’s funny. People complain about Apple’s iPhone being a “closed” environment, but your opinion will change rather quickly once you start using their developer tools. Superior doesn’t even come close to describing it.

What’s with web apps?
There’s a third category that’s somewhere in between. It doesn’t quite know what it is. I’m talking about web apps. Web apps are mobile websites that are built to look and feel like a native app. Most of them only work when you’re online, but some of them also work when you’re offline. The idea behind them is to create a single app that works on every imaginable smartphone or tablet-like device.

Is a web app really just a mobile website? I think you could make a pretty good argument that it is. I’m more inclined to think that if it’s just a website masked as an app, then who are we really kidding? Shouldn’t an app be something that does a unique thing? Shouldn’t it have some sort of usefulness that separates it from a standard website? You, of course, are free to draw your own conclusions.

Which one to choose?
I think all businesses need to have a mobile website. Whether they need to have an app is up for debate. A mobile website will make your website viewable to anyone anywhere with practically any device. That’s incredibly useful, especially as the world continues to adopt more and more of these devices. Pretty soon it will be an absolute necessity (if it isn’t already).

For an app to make sense from a business perspective, it needs to do things that a mobile website can’t do. If you’re building an app just to get your name onto the App Store, you aren’t building it for the right reasons. You need to have a feature in mind, something that taps into the power of the mobile device itself.

So maybe you’re a law firm and you want a simple app that your customers can use to send a voice recording or video of their legal plight to your offices for review. Maybe you’re a bank that wants to offer a quick and easy way for your customers to view their latest transactions. These are great reasons to build an app.

If you already have a great mobile website, and you want to turn it into an app without adding any extra value, why bother? Your website is fine. People will find you through that. And if somebody downloads your app, they’ll think it’s a farce because it doesn’t do anything interesting. Don’t create an app around your already existing website. Create an app that’s actually useful, and use it to advertise your business. That’s the best way to leverage the true potential of apps.

The topic came up during a conversation I had when I appeared on RMIT’s Talking Technology in mid-October. I was asked how we get our clients to commit to a mobile app for their business. The truth is this. There is no coercion involved. By the time our clients are ready for a mobile app, we’ve been working with them for quite some time. At that point, it’s a natural next step for both of us.

This is the way we’ve been operating for as long as we’ve been around, and we think it’s the right way to do business. We like to think of ourselves as website physicians. When you come to see us, we do a quick health check first. We have a look at your current website, see how you’re doing with SEO, and then we ask you a series of questions to see just how far into this you’ve gotten. Only after a thorough assessment do we start offering treatment options.

To be quite honest, you might not need us. We’re okay with that. We’d rather you be comfortable taking the next step than having any reservations. Some of our clients are excited to continue on with us, and others are happy where they are. We’d rather be the doctor. We’d rather tell you what your situation is and what you can do to improve it. If you want to work with us, great. If not, that’s fine too.

After we take enough baby steps, we’ll take off the training wheels and hit our stride. By then, you’ll be comfortable enough with the direction we’re going together. In our view, it’s a lot better than trying to sell every client who comes into our sights.

Now we’re going to switch gears and have a look at internal linking and XML sitemaps. You can find those setting in the same toolbar on the bottom left of your WordPress dashboard.

What is an XML sitemap? Without getting too technical, it’s a list of all the pages on your website. You send this list to search engines so they don’t skip over the pages hidden under several layers of links. At least, that was the old way. These days, Google scans through the web so fast that you don’t really need to submit an XML sitemap to them. You just need to generate one and tell them to come and look at it. That’s what we’re going to do.

If you just check the boxes I’ve checked and click “save XML sitemap settings,” you’ll be good to go. By doing this, you’re doing everything I said earlier. WordPress will generate an XML sitemap every time you make a new post. It will then get Google to come and look at your website right away. This is the best way to ensure that as soon as you make a post, it will become available in Google’s index.

Next, we’re going to have a look at some of the internal linking settings, namely breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs make it easy for your visitors to navigate through your website from wherever they happen to be within it. They also show up in Google’s search engine rankings, making your website listing appear more clear and understandable. Instead of seeing a bunch of gobbledygook, your visitors will see a clear path to the page being displayed.

By default, you should enable breadcrumbs. For most of you, that’s all you’ll need to do. You can also customize your breadcrumbs however you want, adding in your own kind of separator ( a || instead of a :: for example), anchor text, and prefixes. It all depends on how you want them to look.

For a more professional perspective, let’s have a look at Yoast’s own breadcrumbs. Here’s what he does.

Those are Yoast’s breadcrumbs at the top of the page. You’ll notice that he uses the prefix “you are here,” before launching into the actual breadcrumbs themselves. The same breadcrumbs also appear when you search for his plugin on Google. Let’s have a look at that.

It’s pretty much the exact same thing. When you enable breadcrumbs in the WordPress SEO plugin, they’ll appear on your website and on Google. The text you use in your breadcrumbs isn’t what matters. It simply matters that you use them in the first place. Yoast, by the way, organizes his breadcrumbs by category (you can pick this option from the “taxonomy” dropdown menu). For most photographers, that’s exactly what you’ll want to do as well.

Be mindful of some themes.
Not all themes allow you to use breadcrumbs. Let me rephrase that. You can still enable breadcrumbs, and they’ll show up on Google, but they won’t show up on your website. Whether you pick a theme with breadcrumbs or not is an aesthetic choice you’ll have to make on your own. I’ve been known to pick a better looking theme over one with breadcrumbs, but that’s my personal taste.

It wasn’t that hard, was it?
If you’ve done everything in this guide, you should be completely sorted for SEO. Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin truly is the culmination of his work. It’s every plugin put together, and it does a lot of the technical stuff for you. Just tick the settings I’ve mentioned and have a closer look through your individual posts as I detailed in the first [intlink id="wordpress-seo-for-photographers-installation-guide-for-photographers" type="post"]Wordpress SEO for Photographers[/intlink] post. So far as SEO is concerned, there isn’t much more you can do but that.

I hope you’ve found this useful, and as always, if you have any comments or questions, please let me know.

I gave you a homework assignment in the last post. If you haven’t done it yet, please don’t continue to read this. What we covered in the [intlink id="wordpress-seo-installation-guide-for-photographers" type="post"]previous post[/intlink] is more important than what we will cover in this one. You need to get it done first. The rest is important, but it’s mostly the icing on the cake. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down before you can use it.

What’s left to adjust on the individual pages?
Let’s go back to the post we were working on. You’ll remember that we looked at the page analysis tab to see how well our individual pages were doing. Once we nailed every issue, it was on to the next page. But what about the Advanced tab? Is there anything useful in there?

For most pages, the answer will probably be no. But that’s not always the case. The sitemap priority menu is important if you want a particular page to get visited and crawled first. I tend to give a higher priority to the pages that have links coming in from higher ranking sources. Generally, those are my most popular and well-liked posts.

Tools for handling duplicate content:
Duplicate content arises when you have two pages that are very similar to one another. In photography, this can sometimes happen when you’re selling your images online. Some of you might end up creating many similar pages for the same photo in different sizes, print styles, or formats. If you don’t tell Google about it, Google will assume the pages are duplicates of the same page.

Duplicate content isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t harm your rankings. There’s just one problem. If you start getting links to all the slightly different pages, it effectively dilutes the overall ranking for the photo you want to sell. You basically lose links you could have gained by having a single page.

So, if any of your pages are just a slight variation of one page, set the canonical URL to the main page. That way, Google will understand that any links to this particular page are really meant to go to the main page. It’s a nice clean way to consolidate your links and improve the rank of your main pages.

301 redirects do something similar, but they actually redirect your viewers to the URL you specify. You’re probably not going to use them as photographer, so they aren’t really worth looking at.

WordPress SEO Plugin Settings. Which are important?
The awesome thing about Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is how much it handles on its own. You really don’t need to interfere with most of what’s going on, but there are a few settings you should check. The most important ones are indexation, XML sitemaps, and Internal links. We’ll skip over the rest.

You can access the WordPress SEO plugin settings from your Worpress Dashboard. They are at the bottom of the toolbar on the left.

Indexation.
This list of settings controls how Google will index the pages on your website. Interestingly, you don’t want all of your pages to be in the index. To explain why, we’re going to talk about water pressure and Pagerank.

Pagerank is what Google uses to determine the placement of a page in its index. A page with a lot of incoming links has a high Pagerank, and a page with zero incoming links has a very low Pagerank. The interesting thing about Pagerank is that it flows from high Pagerank pages to low Pagerank pages much like water flows from a high pressure source to a low pressure area.

As you know, a pipe with a lot of holes in it loses water pressure pretty fast. The same applies to websites with a lot of unnecessary outbound links and links to pages that don’t contain any content. By shutting off some of those links, we can improve the overall Pagerank of your photography website. That’s the basic premise behind the indexation settings Yoast provides with his WordPress SEO plugin.

Open up your indexation settings and scroll down this section:

Most of you should check the ones I’ve checked. There’s simply no need to have your login and registration pages in Google’s index (they provide zero content). Admin pages aren’t necessary either. They only siphon away valuable Pagerank. The others are up to you. But as Joost says, if you already have a thorough sitewide navigation system, there really is no need to put subpages of subpages into Google’s index. Keep them out and keep it clean.

Let’s move onto the next set of indexation settings:

You’ll want to check all three of these. By nofollowing the links, you ensure that they don’t “leak” Pagerank. The same goes with comments. If you get too many comments on a particular page, and they all have outbound links, you stand to lose a little bit of Pagerank per link. Every link you add adversely affects your Google ranking. Be highly selective of the links you decide to include. Make sure they add value to whatever is being discussed.

Here’s something I’ll do if I get a lot of comments on one particular post. I’ll create another post discussing whatever my commenters have brought up. If I find their links relevant to the discussion, I’ll use them. That way, you get the best of both worlds. You aren’t haphazardly giving away external links, and you’re keeping the conversation going.

We don’t really need to discuss the rest of the indexation settings. They aren’t particularly useful for most photographers, so we’ll skip them. In the next installment, we’ll talk about XML sitemaps and internal links, covering what’s left.

If you have any questions or comments about Yoast’s plugin, go ahead and ask away. Seriously, even if you think it’s a dumb question, just ask. This stuff can be difficult to pick apart when you’re seeing it for the first time.

As most you would know, Photography and SEO, the two are rarely uttered in the same sentence. Photographers and other creatives often eschew the technical stuff like maintaining websites so they can do the awesome stuff like taking amazing pictures and pleasing their clients. I can’t blame you. I am you. And that’s why I’m so excited about Yoast’s new WordPress SEO Plugin.

This plugin helps you spot all of the little SEO mistakes you might be making on your WordPress website. The concept is simple. You tell the plugin which keyword you want to focus on, and it tells you whether you’re hitting the mark. If everything checks out, you’re good to go. But if there are a few bumps in the road, you’ll know about them.

With Yoast’s plugin, you don’t have to spend a lot of time wondering what you’re doing right or what you’re doing wrong. As long as you know which searches you’re trying to target, the plugin does all of the hard work for you. Plus, with all of the other settings and features it offers, you’ll find yourself spending less time figuring out things like Robots.txt files and more time being creative with your content.

So, without much fanfare, let’s rip open the box one this one. In this guide, you’ll learn how to install, configure, and use Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin. I’ll show you all of the features that are important to you as a photographer, and we’ll gently skip past everything else.

Getting Started
If this is the first time you’ve ever installed a WordPress plugin, this part is for you. In the past, you used to have to download a plugin, upload it, and then install it. Now it’s a lot easier. You can install Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin directly from WordPress. We’re simply going to login into WordPress, click on plugins in the left menu, search for Yoast’s plugin, and go from there.

You’ll want to click “Add New.”

As you can see, I’ve already installed WordPress SEO. Click “install now” to get yours up and running. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for most of you.

Once you’ve installed WordPress SEO, you’re only halfway done. You also have to activate it. To do that, open the plugins menu again, and click on “plugins.” You should see the WordPress SEO plugin listed. Click “activate,” and you’ll immediately start reaping some of the rewards.

Step 1: Seeing if you’re hitting the mark
If you’re like me, you’ll probably want to see how well you’re doing already. So let’s get right to it. We’re going to view one of my previous posts for Blinq Photography to see if it’s fully optimised for search.

A quick aside about photography and SEO:
As a photographer, my work has to come from my local area, which is Melbourne. Simply put, that’s where all of the paying clients are. Nearly all of my website’s pages are centered around Melbourne, and there’s a good reason for this. I know that my potential clients will by typing “Melbourne photographer” into Google, and if some of those people see Blinq’s website, some of them will book shoots.

You should be thinking along the same lines. There’s no sense in trying to become the number one photographer right away. That’s just not how it works. You need to be strong in your local area first. After that, you can branch out and attempt to become the Walter Iooss of your generation. Start by focusing on searches like “(Your region) photographer” or “(Your city) photography”

Okay. Let’s look at a blog post I wrote about a photo shoot I did with pro triathletes Luke Bell and Matty White. After you’ve installed Yoast’s plugin, the following WordPress SEO information should appear just below every post (well, not exactly the same information. It will be different because it will be populated with different content).

All of this stuff can seem confusing at first, but there’s only one important thing to pay attention to: the focus keyword section. That’s what tells us how well we’re doing. The focus keyword is something you have to enter on your own. I chose Melbourne for the reasons I listed earlier. Like I said, most of your focus keywords will either be your region or your region + “photographer”.

As soon as you select a focus keyword, the plugin does its magic. It tells you how good you’re doing. In this particular case, I’ve pretty much got everything taken care of. “Melbourne” appears in the article heading, the page title, the page URL, the content, and the page’s meta description. If your keywords don’t appear in any of those places, the plugin will definitely make you aware of it.

How to get a more in-depth analysis
Of course, no page is perfect, and we can always do better. To get the specifics, just click on the “page analysis” tab at the top, and you’ll get a laundry list of things to do that will keep you busy for days. If there are any red ones, get those done right away. The yellow ones aren’t as important.

You can see here that I’ve still got a few things that need to get taken care of. When Yoast talks about slugs, he means titles. I’ve got a few unnecessary words in my title, words that search engines like Google will automatically filter out. Yoast suggests I use the kinds of words Google won’t filter out, thus improving my chances of showing up for related searches.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, all of the green ones are the things I’m doing correctly. For SEO, it’s really important to have readable website copy, keywords in the URL, title, first paragraph, and meta description, and a reasonable keyword density above 1.38%. You also need to be above the minimum word requirement of 300 words per page.

We’ll stop right there. I’m going to give you a homework assignment. I want you to install the WordPress SEO plugin and go through your pages with a fined-tooth comb. Pick a focus keyword relating to your local area and photography. Once you’ve done that, make the suggested changes. There isn’t much more to using this plugin, but I’ll go over the more advanced features and settings in the next post.

He shared some key stats about a survey that was conducted some months prior. Here are the key takeaways;

• The survey of 18,000 WP users revealed some interesting data, like a median hourly rate of $50 and that 6,800 of the self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally.
• WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.
• WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads, and we’re doing a lot of work to make the plugin experience more seamless.
• 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.
• 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.

According to Napkin MathTM by core developer and Audrey Capital Tech Ninja Andrew Nacin, shipping 3.2.1 (the update that came right after 3.2) as partial builds saved WordPress.org approximately one terabyte in bandwidth costs compared to the previous full download upgrades. Additional savings are expected in later versions as well, since a lot of people upgraded to 3.2.1 from 3.1 instead of 3.2.

This was one aspect of the move to partial downloads that I hadn’t really considered. Had you considered this benefit when you first found out about partial download upgrades?