Online Photo Gallery: drive traffic and increase social media activity

[pharcydeabc]

I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events.  One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery.  We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com.

I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com.  I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family.  So my questions are:

1. How do I get visitors to spend more time on my website vs. leaving to go to the www.smugmug.com website?

2. How do I get visitors to share our website/gallery/photos via social media like Google+, Facebook, etc... and bring traffic to our website?

[pharcydeabc]

Hi Mark,

I took a look at 2 of my competitors who have professional looking websites and who also use www.smugmug.com to host their online galleries. This is what I found.  Are either one of them doing this correctly?

Company 1:  http://companyname.smugmug.com/SF

Company 2:  http://photos.companyname.com/San-Francisco

[pharcydeabc]

Thanks, this is exactly what I'm looking for!  I checked out www.smallpetselect.com and I can't believe how many Facebook "Likes" they have and how many Twitter followers they have, for such a small website.

Do you have any plug-ins or photo gallery embedding software that you can recommend?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Great question.

Get rid of smugmug.com and use a simple plug in for your site to keep the photo gallery on the site. You are sending all the value over to them......or create a plug in that allows them to view the site but they have to stay on your site.....

Another option is with some photo gallery sites you can embed the technology and make it part of your site structure.....so it would be at www.yoursite.com/photo gallery

Once you do that the ability to get people to share your site becomes a no brainer because all they need to do is send them to your core photo gallery to look at pictures...and when they click the link they are on your site.

Onc eother thing you missed.....if you can figure out how to upload the photos with met descriptions and seo value you will generate seo value for each picture. For example: the picture should be uploaded as:

persons name_wedding_name of your company_possibly a keyword

Then you will start to get seo value from each picture related to the core keyword (wedding) and your other keywords.

If you want to see some of our stuff in action go to smallpetselect.com. All those animal photos are driving huge social media likes and shares and huge seo value.....

Hope this helps.

Mark