Running a photo blog is exciting but the sustainability generally comes from feedback, success and interest. Add your latest photographic masterpiece to your blog and you are going to want it to be seen by as many people as possible.
We recently covered a guide to the best WordPress themes for photobloggers and a list of the top WordPress plugins. Part of the problem photobloggers face is the often lack of text for search engines to index and many photo blogs actually don’t feature any text at all. So how do you make sure the search engines are looking for way?
Well one trick is to make sure your photos are SEO optimised. I hastily add I am no expert in SEO and can only speak from experience on my own blog (www.flixelpix.com). Over the last few months I have been experimenting with a range of photo posts. Some photos I leave as img456.jpg others I have named as “old-boat-northern-ireland.jpg”.
I have also experimented with the Title and ALT fields in WordPress with a range of different successes and to be honest I still haven’t quite worked out what works and what doesn’t. Is the success of a post down to great SEO or simply it is a better post than the others in terms of content.
1. Image Name
I personally feel this an important aspect of image SEO. Naming your images with a relevant description definitely helps the photo to be more search engine friendly. In actual fact I wish I had of introduced this policy from day one as I sometimes remove old posts and often struggle to identify which images to delete.
2. ALT
alt=”image alternative description”
Alt Images tags are the next area where I see a contribution to the search rank of a post. This is especially relevant if the alt image tag also appears in the body of the post as a text reference.
In 2005 the alt image tag of an image started to play a role in the SEO ranking algorithms and I have to confess I often forget to add the information to images in a rush to get them online.
Photo posts that offer ALT tags definitely score higher in SEO terms than those without although some SEO experts suggest than a long alt tag (eg 100 characters) is seen as spam by the search engines.
3. Title
Title attributes don’t seem to be relevant on text links but appear to contribute to SEO when they are used with images. In my experience Title attributes that hold the same information as the ALT attribute bring little benefit but making the Title more descriptive offers greater indexing opportunity. E.g. alt=”old boat on beach” and title=”A photograph of a grounded boat, Dundrum” allows both attributes to work together.
If you are using the photograph to link to a different post of external website the Title attribute can be used to inform users where they will be directed if they click the link.
Conclusion:
I am still experimenting with a mix of ALT, TITLE, and IMAGE NAMING but even when use together they don’t beat the inclusion of text with the photos. On my own blog I try and add as much text content as I can relevant to the photo or photography experience.
The next stage is try and link words in the text with the ALT and TITLE attributes but to be honest it is the process of taking photos that I enjoy the most, the rest is just additional learning. Interestingly some photographers believe that a photo’s meta information is indexed by Google. What do you think?
I highly recommend to you and all photographers to check out the blog of Photoshelter.com. They do an awesome job regarding SEO and marketing. They even have downloadable free guides to help photographers educate themselves.
http://www.photoshelter.com/mkt/research/
http://blog.photoshelter.com/
One of their latest post gives a video presentation about SEO for photographers. Since the beginning of this year when I started to read their guides, I’ve reorganized my workflow and all those things you mentioned (keywording, captioning, renaming) are the first steps during/after copying my images to my computer. I save tons of time with it, for instance if you fill the description/caption field in the IPTC data, you dont need to repeat it, when you upload your images to your blog.
I also created a metadata template what is embedded into my images during copying them from my memory card to the computer. It fills the IPTC fields with copyright info, contact details and a few basic keywords what all my photographs get like camera model, lens what I used for the image and my name. After this automated process I rename my images and then backup them. I have a standard renaming scheme: DayMonthYear_CameraModel_SequenceNumber.Extension
It just makes me easier to find them later on if I need to dig them out from archive.
Next stage is culling and image post-processing/retouching. Before I start to edit the selected images, I add more specific keywords, what makes them visible to search engines. All the embedded metadata remains in the images during post-processing/retouching, but if you wanna add or change something you can do it anytime before posting them, but not after.
It may sounds tremendous work and actually it is, but after a few weeks or month it becomes a routine work. Mostly these are automated steps so you only need to get used to it, that’s all. But it worth to embed it in your workflow, cause that’s what makes your images visible for google. Google reads, but can’t see. Very important fact!
With that being said, it may makes it clear why flash based websites are useless. They are usually a few lines source code what includes all the images, texts what the site contains. So why we expect Google to understand that source code, when we know Google is „blind” so it just skips the content (including all our breathtaking images), it’s not visible for it. So it gets less chance to show up in search results unfortunately.
As for file renaming, I highly recommend to think about it from the user side. You wanna find some specific photographs in google, on flickr or anywhere on the web. What keywords do you use to get the best result? After seeing the importance of proper keywording from the other side, it will give you an idea how to keyword and rename your images. Because basically the name of your image and the keywords in it has pretty much the same purpose, but together they are more efficient to convince the search engine that your content is the right one what the user look for.
Also I highly recommend to all photographers to visit stock photography sites like Gettyimages and read their guides (keywording, etc.) regarding their requirements for the submitted photographs on their site. If anyone master SEO on this globe, they are the ones.
This is a nice post, thanks for sharing, Also Gyula, comment is quite extensive and add’s to what you have to say, thanks guys for sharing all that info.
Informative post and detailed comment by Gyula!
I agree that adapting a streamlined workflow is one of the most important aspects of post-processing work. Keywording used to be a chore for me. I searched high and low for an easy and straight-forward method to add IPTC data and in the end I settled for Lightroom. I’m in no way affiliated, but one great thing about this software is that you can import your files and have it embed metadata (eg copyright, title, description, keywords etc) on the fly!
Other independent programs I have used either has to be used separately from my workflow, or there were obvious bugs that rudely disrupts the user experience. Lightrooms also allows me to create keyword sets such as words related to Architecture, Food, Landscape, Portraits so that I can just click those keywords to add to the images!
Another issue which I have struggled with was a file renaming scheme. I tried different naming conventions to see which one works best and came up with one that works for me, at least until now.
What I came up with in the end is to sort all files starting with year, month, and lastly with a sequence number. In this way, I would be able to have a unique filename for my entire catalogue of images and still have space for more. Here’s the detailed post if you are on the lookout for a solution: http://www.truphotos.com/2011/10/25/post-processing-failproof-file-naming-system-for-all-your-photographs/
I sort all my images in physical folders by Year-Month, and within those folders, I create subfolders together with the event name. Apart from these physical folders, Lightroom allows me to create virtual collections, which I did for all the shoots I did, and so ended up with virtual collections with the same name as the physical folders with event names.
Thanks so much for the post. Its great to hear feedback from your own experience vs regurgitated theories.
Just wanted to add that I have also seen a massive improvement after adding titles and alt tags to images, particularly when they echo the context of my posts. Furthermore images imbedded directly onto the page show up a lot more often on google image search and help to identify my site in regular search than images (properly titled and named ) within a slideshow. I used WordPress with Photocrati theme and even though Photocrati Galleries allow you to set the Meta for each image ( although alt tags are set to equal title ), they are still not indexed nearly as well as directly embedded images from Media Library. My Parties page, for instance http://www.dumplingsphotography.con/childrens-party-photography-london, shows up a lot more often as its got directly embedded photos as well as a gallery, vs ones w just the gallery.
Thanks again for the info! -Liya
Photocrati is working on improvements to galleries for SEO – thanks for the comment!
Thanks Scott!
Looking forward to the new Photocrati release.
Just realized I submitted a broken link above. The page I was refering to with embedded photos is:
http://www.dumplingsphotography.com/childrens-party-photography-london
sorry about that.