I think you need around 20 posts to be able to send a private message. I'll shoot you a PM if you can receive them, with my email address in case any more questions come up, although asking in here, you'll get a lot of good advice from other people ... who tend to know a lot more than I do about search engines.
The way I look at articles is that they don't improve my ranking for existing pages, but they make my site come up in searches I would have missed out on without them. Plenty of traffic for things like "how to Photoshop black and white" or "make a portrait soft focus." The articles tend to work better as link bait than normal pages; I have links from forums in several different languages I can't understand, pointing at my articles, to go along with photos someone else is posting. Now, the goal is for people to find my site through the articles, and then go look at the photos ... if they learn a neat trick and then leave, it doesn't help me all that much. Although it does help get my name out.
I lived in Bernal Heights for a few years. The San Francisco Craigslist expires ads after seven days, so you can create a temporary link, but it's going to vanish pretty quickly. Those won't help much or at all with search engine ranking. I haven't advertised on CL in a while, but I've done a number of portraits there. Again, it can bring good traffic, people who are interested in buying a specific print or having something photographed as a service, it just doesn't help SEO.
On the other hand, you can go to
http://www.aboutus.org/ForrestCroce.com and create a listing pretty easily, and the same with other directories. These are low quality links, but maybe better than not having them. I'd also look into
http://www.photosig.com/go/photos; you can upload a photo to be critiqued by the community, and you're allowed to put a link in the photo's description. They use pop-ups, though - I have a blocker, so it doesn't bother me, but buyer beware...
You should watermark the photos you post on Craigslist, or your friend should. That comes from personal experience, someone grabbed some of my portraits, put them on MySpace, and claimed to have shot them. On a PC, holding down alt and typing out 0169 on the numeric keypad gets you a copyright symbol.
It sounds like your friend does photo safaris, or guided tours, in addition to more normal stuff like weddings? If that's the case, typing out what he looks for in an imgae, and what it was about a subject that attracted him to set up the camera and hit the shutter would help in a couple of ways. Apart from just giving GoogleBot more content to chew on, that would also show viewers ( aka potential customers ) that he knows what he's talking about and makes a good teacher. I try to put a couple of paragraphs about the day I shot an image, why I composed it the way I did, a little about the location, and some general background info. Sometimes I get lazy and come up with something too short, but I at least try to touch on those things, and plan to go back over the site and fill all of this in. But for the pages / photos I've done this, people find me for searches I would never have thought about. "Yosemite in December," "Canon 5D ISO 3200," "16-35 L night landscape" and others. Obviously they aren't very competitive if I come up for this stuff without optimizing for it, but that's traffic I didn't have to plan or work for, and on the pages I want people to see. This isn't what you asked, but I've found people who come into my site on a page hosting a photo are likely to click around and visit other pages, but people who land on a gallery are less likely to stick around. A friend of mine once told me she just looks at the thumbnails and that's enough for her.
Oh, and thanks about my photos!
