Image SEO worpress

[Blasted]

Hi there,

I’m trying to improve the SEO for the images on my photography website to get some of them to show up in Google images and hopefully bring in a few visitors. It’s pretty poor at the moment.

With regards to SEO, I’m a bit confused as to whether I should be filling out the wordpress edit media section and the Yoast SEO section, plus should I be using the same information in both parts? Are there any parts that don’t get counted?

Here is an example for one of my images and the text I have used

The current wordpress media section for an image contains the following parts to be completed

Title – Tower 42, London

Caption - (Do I need this?) Currently blank

Alternative text - A black and white picture of Tower 42 in the Square mile London, overshadowing the surrounding buildings.

Description - (Do I need this?) Currently blank

Attachment tags - London

The SEO by Yoast section has

Focus Keyword - London

SEO title – Tower 42, London

Meta Description – Tower 42 in the square mile London, overshadowing the surrounding buildings and shot in black and white.

In addition I have also named the file tower-42-london.jpeg

Can you please help? Google barely knows I’m there and if I’m going to invest the time updating my images I would like to know I have got it right.

 

[Lyonspride]

It takes time.....

I've looked at your sites source code and your not blocking search engines, so that's a good start.

Your robots.txt at http://benleephotography.co.uk/robots.txt is only blocking the WP admin interface, which is good.

You don't have any keywords though (meta name="keywords") on the main homepage, this won't go down well with search engines. You need to sort that out ASAP, get lot's of keywords in there.

You do have a description (meta name="description"), but this isn't comprehensive enough, use sentences to describe what you do, the sort of sentences people would search for on Google.

An example taken from the TP homepage source code (please don't shoot me, it's public domain):

<meta name="keywords" content="Photography,photograph,photo,photos,image,images,photograher,photographing,photographed,forum,forums,chat,discussion,community,friendly,camera,cameras,lens,lens,lenses,tripod,flash,shutter,focal,focus,aperture,zoom,wide-angle,telephoto,macro,SLR,DSLR,Canon,Nikon,Sigma,Olympus,Tamron,Sony,450D,500D,40D,50D,5D,1D,1DS,EF,EFS,D5000,D40,D60,D90,D300,D700,D3,D3X,Speedlite,Nikkor" />

<meta name="description" content="A free photography forum, community and resource with discussion forums and chat along with a friendly and helpful atmosphere. We have tutorials, tips, tricks and reviews. We are the friendliest photography forum on the internet and it's all 100% free." />

To see this in IE, select the view menu and "source", in Firefox right click the page and select "view page source".


You need descriptions and keywords on ALL pages.
Remember not to try any "cheeky tricks", keep it accurate, Google in particular are very good at spotting dodgy attempts at SEO.

Other than that your not doing anything wrong, so it's a case of fix the above, then do regular updates (so search engines don't see a stale site) and then get enough traffic to get noticed.

It'll take around 3 to 6 weeks to really notice any change.

 

[Phil V]

...

You don't have any keywords (meta name="keywords") on the main homepage, this won't go down well with search engines. You need to sort that out ASAP.

Other than that your not doing anything wrong, so it's just a case of doing regular updates (so search engines don't see a stale site) and then getting enough traffic to get noticed.

I thought search engines lowered the importance of meta keywords and descriptions years ago

Certainly Google don't really recommend it in any of their current guides and my very good for SEO Wordpress template doesn't even include it (P1 for my chosen search term).

That said, it's not really what Ben has asked about:shrug:

Sorry Ben I don't use Yoast, I rely on the standard Wordpress fields and they work quite well.

For more general SEO advice - it's not obvious to me why you want visitors , if it's to drive print sales, you need to concentrate some effort into 'we sell images of...' which isn't obvious enough yet from your site, which is a bit 'this is a site where I share some images, if you're interested in purchasing some they're available'.

 

[Lyonspride]

I thought search engines lowered the importance of meta keywords and descriptions years ago

They did, but it's now about the whole package, no one single thing will put you up on the search results. But getting one single thing wrong could remove you completely.

Actual page content is probably the most important, but that's hard to do when your just displaying images.
Hosting the images on a popular image sharing site and then hotlinking them into your main site, would be really good. Take advantage of their SEO.

Certainly Google don't really recommend it in any of their current guides and my very good for SEO Wordpress template doesn't even include it (P1 for my chosen search term).

That said, it's not really what Ben has asked about:shrug:

Without good SEO on the various pages, you won't get good SEO of the sites media content.
Linking to the images on an open Facebook page or on Twitter would certainly boost SEO massively.

 

[Blasted]

Thanks for taking the time to reply guys, some good points for me to think about. I can certainly add more to the pages. I have yet to improve the picture content as I have been busy trying to get things feeling right for me.

What is the purpose of the website? in all honesty to get people to look at my images. I just see learning and building a website as another facet of my interest in photography and all things digital. Its also a simple way for family and friends to get to see them without having to go logging into all sorts of things.

If someone local sees a nice picture of the local park then they have the option to buy, but I'm not really fussed about that aspect.

 

[Deleted sulking member 63079]

Google completely ignores Meta Tags these days. So they're irrelevant. Yoast is pretty good if you follow all the options on analysis. I've got my others half's business ranked on page 1 for searches for our chosen terms. It's easy enough with a little patience.

Alt tags are important, if you have headings with the search terms in then google likes that as well. The page title is also important for ranking. But you have to be careful not to mention the keywords *too* many times, or you get downranked for spamming keywords.

It also likes it if you have over 300 words on a page.