Sell Your Photos Online - Step 3
Search Engine Optimization...
There are lots of good sites on the internet that specialize in SEO, detailing different ideas and techniques. We are not trying to duplicate those sites here! We will focus on a few key areas that we feel are important for a successful image gallery website.
In order to achieve good rankings in SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages), which ultimately results in increased visitor’s and revenue you need to start thinking about things before starting to build your site!
Register a Suitable Domain Name
Whether you already have an established brand in the marketplace or you are just starting out you need to register a suitable domain name. The domain name that you pick can have an effect on your success. You should use a name that is not only easy to remember, but one that contains the main keyword or keywords that you wish to rank highly with.
During the process of deciding on your domain name you should have compiled a list of keywords or key phrases. Include these wherever possible within your sites text content. But, be careful not to over use or over emphasize them, otherwise you may be penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing (your not just trying to create a list of keywords). Only use them in a contextual way that adds to the current content.
Friendly URL's
Friendly URL's are a must - not only do they look better for your human visitors, but all the search engine bots, visiting your site like them better too! Some of the more obscure URL's generated by some scripts don't perform very well with search engines - in particular URL's which contain a SESSID. A SESSID (session ID) is unique per visit meaning that although a search engine is visiting the same page on different occasions they may see it as a different page with duplicate content.
Lots of pages with duplicate content is a great way of being penalised. Your gallery script should have a nice easy admin interface for setting friendly URL's.
Gallery Structure
The most important part of your optimization involves creating a meaningful and scalable album structure. If your gallery is going to grow to thousands of different images in lots of different categories you need to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find what they are looking for.
You might be thinking what does this have to do with SEO? Well, the short answer is nothing! Well, not directly, but if you have a poor gallery structure and decide to change it in the future this may cause you some problems. Getting your images indexed and displayed in Google Images takes time - from my experience normally around 6 months. Once indexed, you can obtain a substantial amount of traffic from Google Images.
One image gallery site that I maintain has around 3 times more traffic from search engines than direct links. Of this traffic coming from search engines around half of it comes from Google Images. Can you afford to have such a high percentage of visitors coming to your site and not finding what they are looking for?
To help your images rank highly in image search SERP's you should have good alt tags on all your images and appropriate descriptions near the picture. Some claim that naming your images with the image title may also help. Personally, I use an image naming convention that makes this impossible and still achieve good rankings!
Next we will be talking about getting traffic to your site!