If you have tried to get into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your photography site, you may have been stumped by the fact that search engines, Google included, cannot recognize an image. The first tip we probably received is to put a descriptive text in the ALT and/or TITLE tags. But there’s more that you can do to ensure that your pictures, whether those on your blog or on Flickr or other photo galleries can be found more readily by your target audience.
Google has some advice in the following two videos:
Good advice there on how to surround your image with SEO-relevant text. However, Google is being a little disingenious there because if you followed this advice to the letter, you won’t really get too far. Why? Because it is extremely difficult to rank well based on a key word and, even if you could, everyone who has watched these videos and followed that advice will rank the same as you! Ranking well in a search is more than throwing a “barn” here and a “woman” there. Optimizing your image on one or more key words is a sure way to fail in your search engine optimization effort, Google’s advice notwithstanding.
Follow this simple rule: you want to optimize your image with relevant key phrases that your target audience are actually searching on. Instead of just sprinkling words like “barn,” “door” and “woman” around and relying on your readers (which we are trying to attract in the first place, thank you very much, Mr. Google) to hopefully intelligently [ho, ho, ho] comment on, use descriptive key phrases that people who are searching for a photo such as yours may type into a search engine. For example, they may search for a “red barn door” — then use this key phrase around your image. The more descriptive your key phrase is, the better you’ll rank. Other key phrases you may use around that particular picture: “places to photograph in (insert location here),” “beautiful barn pictures,” “red barn with blue sky,” etc. The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and figure out why they may want to find a picture with a “red barn door,” or “cat playing with a yarn string,” or a “child running and blowing bubbles,” etc. This is really what Google wanted to say but didn’t quite get to it: surround your picture with the key phrases that your traget audience will be using to search for it.
When we say put your key phrases “around your image,” understand this is figurative speech. We don’t mean it literally. In fact, search engines will use a combination of the title of your post, perhaps the meta keywords and name of your image, and certainly the first 250 words or so to figure out what that post or page is talking about. It does not care whether you have images in that post/page or not. It does not rank the image itself (as yet) but the page the image is on. So you optimize your image the way you optimize any page: key phrases targeted to your audience, and getting quality links back to the page.
We keep repeating “target audience” above and you may be wondering just what we mean by it. Unless you are in the numbers game and just want to put up pictures of cute kittens and get lots of page views back — that works! Many sites have built a following on that very strategy. These sites are, for all practical purposes, serving as placeholders for ads. If you can attract lots of visitors to your site, publishers will want to place ads on your site and pay good money to do so, plain and simple. You can make a living this way.
But, if the purpose of your site as a photographer is to attract buyers of your pictures, you do not really want the whole world beating a path to your door. You want qualified buyers, serious buyers. You want every visit to count. In fact, you do not necessarily want your pictures to be so well known that prospective buyers shy away from it because it’s, umm, too well known.
So, follow Google’s advice but go one step further and use key phrases instead of randomly sprinkling words here and there and hoping your readers will comment intelligently on your picture. Which means each picture has its own page. This does not preclude your having a page of thumbnails, just that when they click on a thumbnail, it leads to a page with a single image and you will have optimized that page for that particular picture.