Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it is be called. I having been reading about this and there seem to be something I have to get to grips with if I want my web sites to be successful. My reading seems to show two views on SEO; firstly that it is all rather calculated and mechanical (read time consuming and costly), or conversely that it is a black art requiring a crooked pointy hat and mystical potions.

Considering I like photography and that my Derbyshire walks site www.RTB2Walks.co.uk also contains a fair amount of images this seems like a good starting point. So just how do I get Google, Yahoo, Ask and other Search engines to show my pictures in their searches, and how do I get them onto results page one preferably near the top?

My issues are:

1. I don’t have money to throw at this; i.e. register with a SEO promotion company.
2. I don’t have masses of time to devote solely to SEO.
3. As for the pointy hat and potions, that would just make me look silly and possibly rather smelly!

From what I can understand each search engine has it’s own method of working out rankings, these methods and algorithms are closely guarded secrets, so much so it would probably be easier to get hold of Colonel Sander’s original recipe for KFC! Breaking this SEO business down to it’s basics, it’s all down to visibility, as photographers and web admin’s we want visibility for our sites to attract visitors, but to achieve this we need to provide visibility to the search engine web crawlers (processes that read websites and index their findings). Here is the catch what is visible to the web crawlers may not be what we think they are looking at, and in all probability isn’t even seen by our visitors.

A. It’s a nice big image for someone to download and use, or manipulate to their hearts content without paying you a penny (USA read dime).

B. It’s going to take a while to load.

In these days of Broadband (ADSL) speed is irrelevant it can be argued, again may be not. Google for instance is known to be looking at taking page speed into account when calculating rankings, two or three 10Mp images and even with moderately quick ADSL it’s going to take a while to load. So pick a medium resolution, big enough to be representative, but not so big as to cause page load speed to slow noticeably. As to the image having no title or name, well there is one in the HTML (visible if you hover the mouse over the image) this one is called 40D_B_IMG_7320D.jpg, the only thing that makes any sense to is my image archive database, not even I would search for it using that name. Search Engines may be very clever but they can’t as yet look at an image and say “Oh look a Gray Seal pup in the dunes at Donna Nook”.

You may at some time in your past have come across the 80-20 rule of effort, or Pareto Principle. It states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. Given that I said earlier in this blog that I don’t have bucket loads have time to throw at this, but it is my guess that if I fix these two things I will get that 80% reward, or somewhere near.

First lets fix the image, this is a matter of personal choice but a reasonable size for most applications is between 800 and 1200 pixels on the longest edge this can be scaled to fit the page easily enough and gives enough detail for both viewers and search engines to judge. It also is of a size that loads quickly enough to keep most current search engines happy.

I have to admit I think it looks much better at the bigger size, and it has a caption to say what it is.

Now to fix the file name and description, if you hover your mouse pointer over this larger image you can see that I have renamed the file “Atlantic seal pup 1200×800.jpg” This gives the search engines a usable quick win to link to, even though it can not be seen be the casual viewer. With out much more effort we can give the search engines more information. Not only do we have the file name available to us but also the “alternate text” attribute if the HTML image reference, this attribute allows us more hidden text to use to pass information to the search engines. The primary use for this is to be displayed should the image be unavailable when the page loads for any reason, I suggest it can be used as a free text “key word” field, use this with care as some of the references I have read suggest it should be no more than 50 characters in length. If any of those of you reading this have submitted images to stock agencies, you will no doubt be aware of IPCT key-wording which encrypts descriptive keyword tags directly into the meta-data of the image file. Logically if the web crawlers are making judgements on image quality I would not be surprised if they are reading IPCT tags too, although I have no proof that this is the case. If you are uploading images through a web form and it gives you additional fields, use them you have nothing to loose.

Do these things make a difference, I believe so as I have applied them to some of my images, and lo and behold they have moved from the fourth page of UK google search for to a position on the first page of results, even those that have not been promoted to the first page of results have improved their position.

For more information on the HTML image tag and it’s attributes see W3School’s Img tag reference.