Photography Sites

The Gallery Problem

A customer mentioned that his photography website, Volluzphoto.com, was not getting much traffic. He has some very good photography there. I looked at his web stats and he's only getting 1/20th the hits my gallery of amateurish crap gets. If photographic quality were the primarily traffic factor, his site would be getting the hits.

The reason his site isn't getting a lot of traffic is that there is little textual content and the textual content that is present isn't tightly associated with the images allowing search engines to identify image content. Humans can look at an image and, within about a third of a second, identify it's content and make associations.

Search engines can not do this and therein lies the reason for low traffic. Search engines are incapable of indexing the images themselves. Machines that crawl the web don't have eyes or visual processing capabilities. A cockroach possesses visual processing intelligence far beyond the best search engines.

Making A Gallery Visible To Search Engines

Add textual content tightly associated with your images. Textual content will be indexed. If it is tightly coupled to the image, it will allow the search engine to identify the image content.

The "alt" tag contents allow search engines to identify image content. When you have an image to display:

<img src="http://www.eskimo.com/imageurl" alt="description" height="height" width="width">

The words inside of the alt tag replace the image for non-graphical browsers. Search engines like Google and Yahoo that have image search capabilities use those keywords to identify the image contents and index the image.

Links provide an opportunity to include descriptive information using the title tag:

<a href="link url" title="descriptive title">text or image</a>

In this example, the descriptive title will be shown by many browsers when you mouse over the image or link text. It will also be picked up and indexed by search engines and help determine link relevancy which in turn affects search engine ranking.

The more relevant textual content you have, the better the odds that someone searching is going to find your site. Add descriptions to your photos, to your gallery sections, etc. Consider setting up a forum with relevant links back into your gallery. A blog is another way you can add textual content with links back to your gallery.

In your site; make sure text in the links to other portions of your site match the target that they go to. If they go to an image, make sure the alt tag text matches the link text.

Google doesn't reveal in detail it's internal workings but I suspect that photographs have to be human reviewed before they are visible in the index. I've noticed that while new text is often indexed by Google in days, sometimes hours, photographs often take months to be indexed, even when you structure your website with properly. If you don't provide textual content associated with your images, they'll never be indexed. Know that there will be a delay between the time you do this and the time your photographs are visible in image searches.

Coppermine is a popular free web gallery package. Coppermine alt tags are populated with the image filename. Unless you use very descriptive filenames, the search engines will not bring much traffic. Few people go to Google and search for "img0033.jpg" and that's what will show up in the alt tag by default.

Something I've done for my site is to modify Coppermine to use the description in the alt text. I would share this modification except that I haven't done an adequate job of sanitizing the description so it's possible someone could enter a description that would break things.

Either include height and width specifications in your img tags or alternately specify them with CSS code. This allows a browser to determine the layout of your page before it has downloaded all the image so it can display the page before the images have finished downloading with the final layout, rather than having to wait for all the images to download (old Netscape behavior) or re-format the page as each image completes (new Firefox behavior). This doesn't affect search engines, but it makes the page display faster so impatient humans don't hit the back key and go elsewhere before your page has finished loading.