Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a broad topic, and I am no expert. There are some who make careers out of SEO, who obsess over it and keep up to date on the latest in search engine trends and technologies. I am not one of these people. In creating TTG Highslide Gallery, however, I have done some research and have attempted to apply some basic SEO practices its galleries.

Of course, there is nothing automatic about SEO. TTG Highslide Gallery puts the tools in your hands to optimize your galleries, but will not do it for you. As with photography itself, it’s not enough simply to have the tools; you must know how to use them.

In applying SEO to photographic websites, it is important to first understand that search engines rummage through text, not images. Google’s image search does not search images, but searches the text associated with images. Therefore, in the world of search engines, your images are only as good as the words you attach to them, and the words you surround them with.

The components most likely to be recognized by search engines in TTG Highslide galleries are the page title, image filenames and image alt tags. Other elements on the page are of lesser importance, but can also play a role in SEO. In this article, I will address everything you can do in TTG Highslide Gallery to help your pages help you.

Filenames

Being a web photo gallery engine, it’s the images above all else that are important. Search engines first look at an image’s filename, much as we, as people, first look at a person’s face when meeting them. In most cases, the camera’s default filenames will be insufficient for our purposes; DO NOT post images to your gallery named _MG_0001.jpg. You may as well shoot yourself in the foot.

In Lightroom’s Library, give your files meaningful, descriptive names. This will help search engines to identify your images, and they will enjoy better placement. Also, for your own good, be sure to adhere to Lightroom file-naming conventions.

Ignore my words at your own peril. Photo hell is chock full of poorly named image files.

As an example, let us say you have taken a photo at the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. A descriptive filename might be Piazza_San_Marco_Venezia_Italia_001.jpg. An alternative might be the English language rendition, Saint_Marks_Square_Venice_Italy_001.jpg, or a combination of the two, Piazza_San_Marco_Venice_Italy_001.jpg.

With your files named in an intelligent fashion, take them to Lightroom’s Web module.

<title>

Once in the Web module, select TTG Highslide Gallery from your list of engines. Begin in the Site Info pane and locate the section labeled Page Title, and the input for HTML <title>.What you enter here is the most important bit of text in your page, and should be descriptive and informative.

The page title serves a number of functions. It is the most identifying piece of text in your page, it appears in the title bar of the web-browser when viewing the page, and it shows up as the page title in search engine results, as show in the below screen capture of Google search results for “The Turning Gate”.

The large purple hyperlink “The Turning Gate” in the above image is taken directly from the title tag of my front page, <title>The Turning Gate</title>.

I am sorry to say, however, that from a SEO perspective, this is a very lame title for the page. For those unfamiliar, it begs the question: What in hell is The Turning Gate? A better, more descriptive title might be “The Turning Gate – Adobe Lightroom Resources, Tutorials and Web Engines”. This title communicates to the searcher a better representation of what my website is about.

As a photographer, you should keep the same in mind. Your title should include pertinent information such as your name, your business name, your location and your specialties. For example, as a generic, site-wide title, I might title my pages:

Matthew Campagna Photography – Dallas, TX – Advertising, Life-style, Portraiture, Still Life, Location Photography

If I were posting a gallery of images from Venice, Italy, I might title the page something like:

Matthew Campagna Photography – Dallas, TX – Photos from Venice, Italy

Meta Tags in <head>

I have to come clean with you. I have included meta tags in the new TTG header primarily as a “feel good” feature to indulge those grown adults who still can’t sleep at night without their teddy bears. Speaking true, I must tell you that meta tags are almost entirely useless. Search engines mostly don’t look at them, and don’t factor them into search results at all.

Note that I said search engines mostly don’t look at them. The one meta tag search engines do see is the description. This is sometimes used as excerpted text in search results. In the above image, the description would take the place of the black text, directly beneath the hyperlinked page title. Of course, if your page lacked the description, that block of text would instead be snipped from page content, and probably all the more relevant for it.

Feel free to fill in your name as author; it never hurts to put your name on your gallery, although it will be redundant here if you’re done as I’ve told you and put it in the page title.

And you can pretty well ignore the keywords; meta keywords are dead, and have been dead for a very long time. Google’s official blog states: “…we generally ignore the contents of the “keywords” meta tag.” Meta keywords persist on the Internet only as a type of undead, and should be staked clean through the heart. Seriously people, put them to rest and let them be dead. Zombies suck.

The gist of all this: you will suffer not a bit if you just leave the meta tags disabled.

The ID Plate

The ID Plate, in and of itself, has absolutely nothing to do with search engine optimization. But just as one might use an ice pick not as an ice pick, but as a weapon — and just as Alex J. Murphy was reborn as Robocop — I have leveraged the ID Plate for SEO.

HTML headings are used to designate snippets of text in a hierarchy of importance within the page. The most important text is tagged <h1>, this tag usually being reserved for the title of the page content. In TTG Highslide Gallery, the <h1> tag is hidden behind the ID Plate using CSS and is filled in from the Page Title field, identical to the <title> tag. Thus hidden, the page title and the information it contains are reinforced in the page content. Hidden using CSS, it does not interfere with the page layout, but is seen by search engines. In TTG Highslide Gallery and SEO, if the <title> is a hard left hook, <h1> is the follow-up right uppercut.

Although TTG Highslide Gallery allows you to disable the ID Plate entirely, it is in the best interest of SEO — and of knocking your opponents flat out, and of defeating ED-209 — to keep it enabled.

Hyperlinks / Menus

Search engines see hyperlinks. Menus are hyperlinks. Therefore, search engines see menus.

Like everything else, it is important that your menu items be descriptive and informative. A bad menu might be:

Gallery 1 | Gallery 2 | Gallery 3 | About | Contact

While a better, more descriptive, more informative menu might be:

Portraiture | Still Life | Aerial Photography | About Matthew Campagna | Contact

Search engines aside, it’s just good practice to give your visitors a good idea of where they might end up when they start clicking on your page. Descriptive menus are better for everyone, search engines included.

Gallery Description

The gallery description provides you an excellent opportunity to riddle your gallery with keywords. Let us review what we know.

1) Meta keywords are dead.
2) Image content is irrelevant to search engines.
3) Search engines look at a page’s textual content.

Just because meta keywords are dead, does not mean that keywords are not important. Instead of looking for keywords in meta tags, Google and other search engines intelligently identify keywords within your page content. Writing an intelligent, grammatically correct and strategically formed gallery description can help your pages and your images earn better search engine placement. Let’s break it down.

I’ve already told you that HTML heading tags help to identify text as important. In the gallery description, the title is given <h2> status, and the subtitle <h3> status. Making use of the title and subtitle give you two additional opportunities to tell the search engine, “Hey, this here is important stuff!” Again, use titles that are descriptive and informative. Keeping with our Venice, Italy example, you might title your gallery:

Photographs from Venice, Italy (Venezia, Italia)

In this title, the words “photographs”, “Venice”, “Venezia”, “Italy” and “Italia” all become important keywords. You might then designate additional keywords by subtitling your gallery with some of the landmarks you have photographed:

Piazza San Marco, Basilica di San Marco, Ponte di Rialto, Campanile

As Uncle Ben once told Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Know when you reign yourself in, and please don’t use keywords that are not represented by images in your gallery. If you didn’t photograph the Campanile, for example, don’t list it in your content.

In the descriptive paragraphs, keep your keywords in mind. Write grammatically, but reiterate your keywords where possible, as this will help to reinforce their importance for the search engines. You might also refer to yourself in the third-person, as search engines will not recognize “I” as you. Use your name. An effective descriptive paragraph for SEO might read:

Photos from Matthew Campagna’s trip to Venice, Italy. Matthew visited many famous landmarks, including the Basilica San Marco and the Campanile. The Piazza San Marco was full of pigeons, making for some fantastic photographs of tourists feeding the birds. Venezia’s picturesque architecture and beautiful canals made for great photography.

Take note of my use of keywords in this paragraph: photos, photographs, photography, Matthew Campagna, Matthew, Venice, Italy, Venezia, landmarks, Basilica di San Marco, Campanile, Piazza San Marco, pigeons, birds, tourists, architecture, canals.

That’s one loaded paragraph! But it’s a paragraph, not a list, and that’s important. Like Santa Claus, Google knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake! If Google thinks you are flagrantly stringing keywords together in an attempt to flaunt the system and cheat your rankings, it will actually punish you, giving your site lesser placement or blacklisting it from search results altogether.

The Footer

The footer provides you yet another opportunity to place keywords into your page. I wouldn’t go overboard in the footer, but would probably try to keep it consistent from page-to-page, and relevant to the larger site, rather than the individual gallery. For example, a good footer might include your name and location, and reference the fact that your website contains photographs:

Photographs by Matthew Campagna – Dallas, TX. Copyright 2009.

The Alt, Image ID Tags and Image Captions

The Image Info pane offers several additional opportunities for search engine optimization. The Image Info pane allows you to select a metadata source for your images, the data from which is then applied strategically throughout your gallery page. Before creating your web gallery, it is important to fill in the metadata for each image, so that each image’s unique information can then be drawn into the gallery for use in SEO and to better inform your visitors.

First up is the <img alt= content. HTML <img> tags use the “alt” tag to attribute textual identifiers to an image. Basically, every image tag comes with a built-in description. Your visitors will not see this on the page, but search engines rely on the image filename and the alt content to identify and index images, making both of these things very important. The IPTC Title is usually a good choice for metadata source, assuming you have given your images descriptive and informative titles in the IPTC metadata.

The Image ID tags are next. TTG Highslide Gallery gives you the option to include a one-line identifying “plate” beneath each thumbnail image. Enable and configure the plates here, in the Appearance pane:

Image ID tags present you with yet ANOTHER opportunity to riddle your gallery with keywords. Do I really need to explain to you at this point why that is a good thing to do? See keywords and Image ID tags in action:

Not only do the image ID tags function as search engine implements, but they also identify the images to the visitor. Again, useful for all. The image ID content is set from within image Metadata in the Library module. The metadata source is defined using the “Image ID” item in the Image Info pane. Again, the IPTC Title is a good source for this, though you can use whichever metadata field(s) you prefer.

Finally, every image gets a caption. The metadata source for image captions is configurable from within the Image Info pane, and the IPTC metadata Caption is usually the logical choice. Again, this assumes you have filled in captions for each image in the Library’s metadata. Captions are displayed to the viewer when Highslide is engaged to display a large rendition of the selected thumbnail.

From the search engine point-of-view, the captions are seen as additional HTML textual content in the page, and are thus scanned for relevant keywords. And so, writing descriptive and informative captions for your images is all for the greater benefit of your gallery, and of your website.

Coda

As you can see, TTG Highslide Gallery provides you a wealth of options for feeding content to search engines. What’s more, the TTG Highslide Gallery generates valid, well-structured pages according to W3C specifications. This means your information is formatted and organized, allowing search engines to easily identify all of the above components. All of this works to give you a competitive edge in getting your galleries and images indexed by Google and other search engines.

My final tip is to rotate your gallery content regularly. Pages go stale in search engines when they are not updated for lengths of time. Pages and sites that are updated frequently will rise to the top of the heap. Help yourself by keeping things fresh. Change out your images, add new galleries, update your information pages, start a blog. Dangle shinies to draw the attention of the barricuda. Update at least once a month, more frequently — weekly! — if you’re able.

I hope you’ve found this both interesting and helpful. I’ve worked hard to make TTG Highslide Gallery as powerful a tool as can be. Like any tool, though, it’s up to you to make use of it. Good luck.

Tagged as: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, TTG Highslide Gallery