Plastic Pipe on Textured Brown Wall and some SEO Tips

Minimalism as Less Elements

Photo By © Prakash Ghai
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First things First, This photo is Minimalism as Less Elements 

I focused on the pipe and therefore you can see some blur on the left. If you want everything in focus from left to right and the pipe as well, then use a high aperture number probably like F11 and accordingly adjust the rest of your camera settings. I was very close to the subject and to get your photos to be decently sharp and clear, shooting them from a closer range is a must. 

Pro Tip: Avoid Zoom Lenses and Prefer the Prime ones.

More about the Composition: 

As you can see a lot of empty space has been added on the left. Empty space is very useful, especially if you want to use/license such photos for commercial use. Lets say, there is a XyzPipes company out there. They would love to have this as background for their print ads or PowerPoint presentation. There is ample copy space to write about the company or its product's information. Similarly, ad agencies would love to hire photographers who could shoot such photos for them. Imagine, there is a new clothing line and instead of the pipe there is a model in a red gown standing there. And you have the beautiful brown textured Indian wall on the left for a write up. Wouldn't that be interesting for an advertisement? 

Next time, you are in talks with a client for a product shoot, tell them that you could shoot something similar for them i.e a Minimalistic photo-shoot with lots of Negative Space. You never know, maybe they love the idea and you get that long awaited conversion.

Now lets get to the SEO Tips part.

After my previous post "Open Door and Water Outlet on a Red Wall", which too had some SEO information, I finalized on my new posting structure. 

i.e Photo First and Detailed Information under it.

I conducted two experiments in my last post:

a) The Title of the post was not an Art Title, like I generally keep in most of my posts. It was SEO optimized.

b) I posted the photo first and wrote the text under it. This is the exact opposite of what I do. (barring a few posts/now I am also updating the old ones to this new structure)

Both of these experiments were done to find out If I could get more traffic than usual, to the post. The results were good and Yes, I did get that extra traffic, that I was looking for.

Point a) explanation: When the title of the post is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimized, your post ranks higher for those keywords. Yes, it is that simple. But also make sure that you use the same keywords in the labels section of the post and in the file name of the photo you upload. Another good practice is to get all your individual post links crawled by Google's robots. This can be achieved by submitting them in the Google Webmasters Tool, under the "Fetch as Google" head.

Point b) explanation: Keeping the photo first, really helps in the voting that happens for a photo or article on StumbleUpon. I always submit each of my posts to it. 

StumbleUpon is the best social bookmarking site in the world and it sends you tons of traffic, if you use it the right way. If you have a website/blog, do open a StumbleUpon account and submit your  content. I would also like to caution you. Don't just submit your own content all the time, or else you will be banned. Be a genuine user. Add articles that you generally like on the web and arrange them by creating topic wise lists. Like or dislike others content while you Stumble and that's it, you're done. 

Note: If you like this article and photo, please copy the link to our post and submit it to the StumbleUpon Directory under the Photography Category, so that other users can discover it. (Thank you for the favor in advance.)

Now-a-days, I deviate a lot from the central point or the photography in my posts.

I tend to talk more of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. You must be wondering why such an emphasis on it. The answer is, that you can shoot the most wonderful photo in the world or write the most brilliant of all articles but, if that post does not reach the right audience and the right quantity of audience in numbers, then that post/photo/article might just end up going un-noticed. 

5 minutes back, I was on the phone with another Photographer friend of mine and we were debating something similar. Whether to write long articles or not, or just to focus on clicking good photos. We realized that both of us are Photographers and NOT writers. My friend's latest blog post contains, merely one line of description. Well, that is his style. And I appreciate it. But Internet and SEO work very differently. You have to have long write ups with photos, for your work to get noticed by search engines.

In Short, If you have a blog/website, you must write at least one long post a week for it to get indexed properly by search engines. Do not forget to include photos. If you are not a good photographer, you can license some photos from Shutterstock.
 

Do check out their subscription plans (disclosure: I am a both a Shutterstock contributor and an affiliate)

To conclude, I would say shooting minimalist photos is fine, less is more is fine, but when it comes to getting your website/blog out there to be seen by others, you have to follow a maximalist approach.