I am not a professional photographer nor am I in
travel business. However, I stay very busy these days taking scenic photographs and featuring them on my web site because my "not so" professional travel photos are bringing serious traffic to my web pages. I consider myself a serious hobbyist when it comes to photography. It's a hobby because so far no one is willing to pay for any of my pictures. I know it's a serious hobby because I am never totally honest with my wife when she wants to know just how much I spend on photography. Over years I have been privileged to see and shoot a few of spectacularly scenic locations that exist in U.S.
When I started designing web pages I was constantly on search for fresh images. One afternoon my search for a waterfall took me into basement of my home where my wife had stored dozens of shoeboxes filled with hundreds of ordinary vacation snapshots. I found perfect scene for my project among many photographs I had taken of Niagara Falls.
I scanned several of Niagara pictures into my computer and tweaked them slightly with an image editor. I was very pleased with results and decided to post images on my personal website. I made a mistake when I typed words and file ended up as "NiagraFalls". I didn't think that much about it because I only planned to publicize Niagara Falls pages to a few friends and relatives so they could enjoy pictures also.
A few weeks later I was checking stats for my website and noticed that a number of guests had surfed in through search engines. To my surprise 30% of my visitors had come through a search for "niagrafalls". I went to one of major search engines and keyed in that phrase and was amazed to see that my site was in top ten returns.
