Google SEO Tips #57 – How Can A Photographer’s Image Focused Site Gain PageRank?
Matt Cutts: That’s a fantastic question because Google really doesn’t understand the content of images yet. We’re getting better. We have Google Goggles that can take a picture of a landmark and recognize it as a landmark, but understanding in general what an image is, is one of the hardest problems in computer science.
The advice that I would give is look at ways you can incorporate data around the image. It could be within the meta information within the image. It can be the title. It can be the name of the image. I can be a paragraph of text around the image. It can even be characteristics of the webpage like the title of the webpage that has that image. So there are a lot of places to put text.
One tip that I would recommend is introduce a place where people can leave comments because if you think about something like Flickr, if you have a picture we might not know what that picture is but then you have 30 comments down below where people will say, “Oh that is a beautiful portrait. Oh that woman is so pretty. Oh I love the light shining in from the side on the barn door,” Or whatever.
Just in the process of users talking about the picture you’ll often end up with the keywords whether it be portrait or woman or barn door or sunlight that you would like to show up for anyway. So if you have the time to label your images or maybe label the images that you think are the best, maybe not all of your images but put some time in for the images that you would like to rank for that can make a difference.
Then introducing functionality where people can comment on images can be another way where you can attract textual content that the search engines can understand. Of course this doesn’t change that fact that as a photographer you can always promote yourself in all kinds of different ways from having shows to talking to reporters about your work; all of that are ways to get links to your website. Then the more links you have to your website you can direct around and within to the various photographs.
But naming your galleries, having descriptive names on your images, all these sort of tricks are ways that are not really tricks. Rather techniques to introduce more textual content so that search engines can kind of understand what’s in the image and you can sort of show up a little higher in the search engines.
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Good article James. Keep that awesome Martell/Cutts photo advice coming……
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The thanks goes to Matt.
Twitter: JamesMartell
Would the same advice apply to webpages that have multiple product images such as Amazon aStores affiliate pages selling a range of physical products like Barbecue Grills etc?
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I would think it would apply in the same way. I would say Matt’s answer “…look at ways you can incorporate data around the image. It could be within the meta information within the image. It can be the title. It can be the name of the image. I can be a paragraph of text around the image. It can even be characteristics of the webpage like the title of the webpage that has that image. So there are a lot of places to put text.”
As for images surround products such as your comment to “…have multiple product images such as Amazon aStores affiliate pages selling a range of physical products like Barbecue Grills”.
I would say follow Matt’s advice and to be sure your text is unique and not the same text as other sites might be using to describing the same products.
James
Twitter: JamesMartell
Doing SEO, I still run across web designers who name their clients images something like img17.jpg. I guess that’s just part of what keeps me in business.
Yes, I think as well that even many that do know better don’t because they couldn’t be bothered. It does take time and because they don’t own the site and the client doesn’t really understand they take the shortcut.
Twitter: JamesMartell