Sisson Product Photography

Hey I just realised that clicking these images opens them bigger - try it you'll like it!


The sisson - beautiful pictures of New Zealand - website is finally nearing completion* - thank God!!!

Countless hours have been spent grovelling to the over-lords at google - optimising pages, renaming images and re-working the descriptions for each of our 310 products into uniquely tempting metadata morsels for the 'spiders' and 'bots' to feast upon.

If any of the preceding sentence:

a) sounds remotely interesting to you.
b) made any sense.

I suggest that you sign up on this website for uber-dweebs that I found myself languishing on yesterday. Just don't expect to see The Autocrat trolling the forums with biting witticisms about metatag refresh rates, referring to google and yahoo as simply G & Y, or making suggestions on Alt- Tag optimisations - for the first time in weeks I found a site that I didn't subscribe to.

As usual I digress.

The final barrier to completion has had nothing to do with this techno-babble, it has had everything to do with our photography, more specifically, photos of our finished products deployed in the home.

We genuinely thought that this would be easy - given that we used to earn our living as commercial photographers. We also think that our products actually look pretty snappy.

Unfortunately after three or four attempts at shooting our fine-art prints, photo blocks and photo magnets at home we had exactly zero shots that successfully represented our work.

Both of us were suffering from a crisis of confidence. So we sat down together to analyze the shots. It rapidly dawned on us that our toddler-infested suburban residence was holding us back.

Although it is a nice house, not a single room will ever grace the front cover of architectural digest - or, for that matter, the back pages of remotely interesting homes weekly.

So today we loaded up the car and headed around to Mark & Sharon's house (yes the same Mark that seems to appear in 50% of these posts) to try out our luck there.

I am happy to report that three hours in their beautiful home yielded all the shots we needed and partially re-inflated our sagging egos**!

Now that's more like it! - one of Sarah's shots displayed in a snazzy environment

There are many more shots on the home page slideshow over at sisson fresh New Zealand photography - check them out :)

Cheers! TA


* to our dismay, we have learned that a good website is an 'ever-changing, dynamic organism' that is, by definition, never completed. For more information spend a week or two on the forums at webmasterworld.com :)

** despite outward appearances photographers have notoriously fragile egos - hence the abnormally high incidence of leather jacket wearing press photographers (its a metaphorical thick skin thing).

How Google May Save The Species

I now know what it means to be a googly-eyed monster. I have been practically living inside google for the past two days in an attempt to improve our search performance at sisson.co.nz

The new site has been live now for about a month and we have seen some stratospheric improvements in some of our keyword/phrase results. For instance we are now ranked #6 globally for this exact phrase: 'We are excited to finally have our online store up and running'. Just don't type shop instead of store - or its page 17 for that one.

Likewise, entering; 'Todd and Sarah Sisson photographers queenstown NZ' finds us on pole position - that's right baby! #1 on the whole world wide web!

Unfortunately, we have found that not a single new customer has had the inclination or foresight to enter these rather obvious query strings into google. No, instead they seem hellbent on searching for things like 'landscape photos NZ' or 'photography of New Zealand' according to google's excellent keyword analysis tool.

Our old site had us firmly seated on page 9 (no, not 9th place - page 9) for those types of search phrases. Yesterday I gave up at page 22 of 'landscape photos NZ' - apparently we have been doing something wrong.

So I spent last night testing searches out against our 'metadata' and found the problem - I won't divulge the details, but the unfortunate result was a day spent in excel inventing key-wordy type stuff for each product (not keywords mind you, as google's all persnickity about them thanks to overabuse by Croatian Pornographers).

I have attached this screenshot for you though, as it reminded me of my first job out of University - ya reading this Angus???


So now to divulge my unified theory of google goodness - by which the world may be saved by a search engine....

OK, here we go, quickly:

I noticed quite a few Germans coming to the site. This is to be expected for, despite their well publisised attempts at global domination, they do seem to have a soft spot for ferns, penguins and seals - hence they like NZ.

Right let's do a google adword tailored to Germans I figured

I researched some common keywords for NZ and had a good laugh - seems most of Europe thinks we live in NZ Zealand or Zeland or SouthNZ and any combination thereof......

OK back to the ad - staying with google here, lets bang it out in google translate, no worries.

::Turning point::

The Germans have at least 16 different ways of writing 'landscape photo', about 5 distinct words for 'Penguin', 'photo' alone must have 25 options and the moment you type in a sentence it looks like the minutes of the Geneva convention.

So how does this save the species? Simple really, I gained healthy of understanding and respect for those people on the other side of the planet who are curious enough about nu Zeland to click on my ad for 'New Zealand landscape bandsaw penguins'.

Think about it. Tonight thanks to a few grams of code housed on a server farm the size of Westport we are 1/4 billionth more compassionate as a species - what can google teach the other 6 readers of this blog eh? - anyone?? Angus???

Auf Wiedersehen - TA