On Page SEO for Photography Websites

One of the biggest challenges in optimising a photography website for google (or any other search engine) comes in creating quality on page content that search engines can read. Unlike you and I google's spiders don't see the internet with the human eye. They read it the same way that a computer reads it, as a set of instructions.

Unfortunately this means that google doesn't read your photo of a beautiful sunset as a photo of a beautiful sunset. Instead it reads the name of the file that contains the beautiful sunset, the written information on the rest of the page, and any other code that is built into your website. As such if you want your photography website to be found on google it isn't enough to load your page up with plenty of lovely photos, you must also load it up with plenty of words describing those lovely photos.

Filenames/Image Titles

At the simplest (and most overlooked level) you can rename your photo files (the .jpegs, .pngs or whatever you're using) to reflect their content. Instead of having a file called DSC00042.jpg use a file called Sunset.jpg. You can use underscores or dashes to break-up the words in your image file titles as well. For example you might like to call your file Auckland-Sunset.jpg if your photo shows a sunset in Auckland.

Alt Tags

The next level is the alt tag. the Alt tag is what is displayed to the user if the image cannot be displayed. Here you can include a description of what the photo is of. For example you might like to say something like "A golden sunset in Auckland New Zealand". As a side note this is also what will be read out to vision impaired people who visit your website.

Image Captions and On page text

With those out of the way we break into what people typically think of when you say on page content: image captions and on page text. Captions are spatially linked to images and this can be reflected in certain coding languages. It is likely that google will use image captions to identify what an image might be of for indexing in image search. As such image captions should describe the content of the image they are closest to. You may like to reword your alt tag and use it here.

On page text is less directly related to individual images. It is the written content on the page and often provides information related to some underlying theme between the photos on the page. For example if I post a gallery of property photography images like this one I include information about the property itself while mentioning that I am available for real estate photography in Auckland. In that body of text I signal to google and other search engines that the content on that page relates to property photography in Auckland increasing the odds of getting listed in google search for relevant search queries.

You may also notice that there are a few keywords on those pages. Those keywords are there because those are the words that I am interested in ranking for (property photography, real estate photography, and Auckland). You may also notice that those words are mentioned as naturally as possible. While they may be repeated from time to time I am not trying to ram them down google's throat. Why not? If google wants words and I know which ones I want to feed it surely more relevant food would be better right?

Wrong.

Remember that google is trying to simulate human search using computer algorithms. In order to do this they pay a lot of very clever people a lot of money to teach google to read like people do. If you stuff your page too full of keywords google will pick up on this now or in the future. Watch the Matt Cutts Google Webmaster Help video below for a clearer explanation.

Comments

The final option is comments. One of the key benefits of comments are that they can be generated by other people. As such you are essentially outsourcing your SEO work. One of the key downsides is that they are generated by other people and can actually do nothing for or damage your SEO if implemented and moderated incorrectly.

Recall that google can only read what is written on the page itself. This is important if you are using an external  method of generating and collecting comments. The Facebook comment box being the clearest example. If google is unable to see the comments they might as well not exist for SEO purposes.

Now also recall that google does read what is on the page and uses it to decide what your page is about. If you end up collecting a lot of comments that don't add to your page's content or accurately reflect or describe what is on the page they might as well not be there. To make matters worse if you get a lot of irrelevant comments than can lead google to believe that your page is less about what it would have thought your site was about than if the comments weren't there. For this reason it is good to be able to moderate your comments. This allows you to control the quality of the content that users are supplying and also helps stop any spam getting through.

The Standard on Page SEO tips

Beyond this the standard on-page SEO tips still hold true. Use page titles and headings sensibly. Use them to highlight your keywords but avoid using them for spam. Use the meta description to suggest a relevant snippet to google. While google might not use it many other search engines will and google will check it out in the same way that it looks at your page content, page titles, headings etc. Meta Keywords on the other hand are less useful for google but may still be useful for other search engines.

Quality Content

Finally (but arguably most importantly) focus on producing quality content. If you produce content that people will find useful they are likely to share it. If they share it they are likely to do so by linking to it. If they link to it someone has just created a backlink for you and backlinks are what will really bring google's spiders to your site. In terms of quality content for photography you may like to consider the following options

• How to articles
• Reviews
• Descriptive galleries of your personal work
• Blog posts detailing some aspect of your business (blogging of images from individual weddings is a popular example)
• Clear information for your clients (such as details around pricing - an often overlooked element)

If you aim for qaulity content the keywords should come fairly naturally meaning you won't need to worry about sending your content into spam land.

The Next Step

The next step is off page SEO. This revolves primarily around link building and can apply to different pages on your own website as well as pages built by other people. In most cases you will get the most bang for your buck by targetting inbound links from other people's pages. Off page SEO will be covered in more detail in a future post.