There are a couple things to think about when you are setting up your photography web site.  First is your target market.  Do you want to target your local market?  A destination market?  Or perhaps a market wider than that and outside of your current region?  The point is, you need to tell the search engines if you are a wedding photographer in grand rapids or somewhere else.  And if you don’t want to be associated with grand rapids wedding photography, where do you want search engines to associate your page?

Search engines can only parse through the information on your page and make assumptions based on the words you use.  And if you’re using a Flash website, forget it.  Flash files are not human-readable, so any text or keywords you have in there will be invisible to the search engines.  Knowing this, it’s important that you make your site both pleasing in content and design, and also relevant to the search terms you are trying to attract traffic from.  It’s a delicate balance.  If your site has content that is too tailored to keywords (often called keyword stuffing), people will naturally find it objectionable to read.  No one wants to read a website designed for a search engine.

The other thing to keep in mind is your alternate text and titles for images contained on your site.  Those contribute to search engines understanding your content and target audience as well.  An added bonus is that the better a search engine can classify an image from alternate text and tagging, the higher the image will show up in image searches.  That means exposure for you as a photographer, particularly if you describe your images well.

These two things together will help search engines determine when to return your site in their result list in a more accurate manner.