SEO on SmugMug

Mike Lane

Hey all, I just ran across this site and thought that some of you might be interested.

http://photographers-seo.com/2009/09/15/smugmug-seo-tips/

It's a basic run down about how to get your SmugMug site higher in the rankings on the search engines. And let's face it, we all want to be higher up in the search engines don't we? :thumb

Cindy

Hi Mike. I posted a thread also asking "Has anyone seen or read this book? Comments? Critique's? Worth the $$$?" at: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=143989
What's your thoughts? If your ordering, will you paste a review after you've had a look?

James H

Mike Lane wrote:

Hey all, I just ran across this site and thought that some of you might be interested.

http://photographers-seo.com/2009/09/15/smugmug-seo-tips/

It's a basic run down about how to get your SmugMug site higher in the rankings on the search engines. And let's face it, we all want to be higher up in the search engines don't we?

Just a quick glance at the 5 ideas on that page makes me very suspicious, and very unlikely to hand over 40 bucks for what is likely more of the same general information with questionable value. It appears some of the 'information' is even wrong when talking about SmugMug...

Specifically item 4:

4. Comments Offer “Natural” Photo-Specific Text
SmugMug offers photographers a comments function that can be turned on or off for a gallery that will potentially add lots of moderated text surrounding the images to help search engines understand what the galleries are about.

It appears that SmugMug comments are completely hidden from searches, Google & otherwise. I've tried and tried to find comments on my own and other's SmugMug sites by searching specific text and I keep coming up empty. I've WISHED it was possible to search on user comments but so far I've never been able to locate any, not even through SmugMug's internal search. Given that I've never been able to pull up a SmugMug gallery by searching on specific text in a comment, I can't see how the comments can possibly help increase search ranking. Of course I'm always open to being educated, so if someone has proof that comments on SmugMug are being indexed and contribute to search ranking then I'd love to see an example. Though I'm not willing to pay 40 bucks for the opportunity.

smugmug seo guy

Comments and Googlebot
Hi James,

You have an excellent assumption. I too have been unable to find specific comment strings within search results.

SmugMug support tells me that comments are seeable and crawlable by Googlebot. They are trying to find out why they don't index well. Will let you know what I find!

So the question is - can something Google sees, but does not retun in results, still carry SEO value?

But the comments issue is about one paragraph among 25 pages in the book, so I hope the rest can be beneficial to beginning SEO-ers in explaining how search engines work and using key phrases and links to your advantage.

TuttleImages

SEO on SmugMug
My frustration with SmugMug SEO is the lack of ability of the pro photographer to create a "unique" place on the internet. The SmugMug site embeds so much metadata, keywords, and basically "grabs" any possibility of becoming a top result for a search. Yes, I can keyword my images and enter descriptions on galleries, but that does me no good on my home page using just a bio entry to gain any ground as a "local" photographer.

Yes, a large part of good SEO is also inbound links, a blog (make this easier, SM!), and a contact page. SM doesn't make this easy.

So I am now spending money on a separate site as my space and use SM as just my holding place for large numbers of images.

Want to see what your site looks like in an example SEO grader? check out http://www.websitegrader.com/

(I have nothing to do with that link, I just have used it as one metric for my SEO)

smugmug seo guy

Appears that Engines Ignore Text in Comments
Congrats to James H, I consulted with seomoz (trusted source) saying they did a study recently and it appears search engines ignore text in comments. I will be updating my original post! Free copy of my book to you if you want to send me a note or ping me through my SEO ebook website. Nice work!

lynnesite

My concern is that the meta tags offer nearly nothing to describe my offerings and everything to describe smuggy's:

Meta Keywords: online photo albums,photo sharing,photo hosting,photo storage,video,videos,online video,video sharing,albums,photo albums,photo,sharing,picture sharing
,share photos,photo galleries,photo gallery,photos,photographs,online gallery
,picture gallery,picture galleries,online galleries,smugmug gallery,smugmug
,smug mug,smugmug photos,images,image galleries,image gallery,gallery hosting
,galleries hosting,hosting

Andy

lynnesite wrote:

My concern is that the meta tags offer nearly nothing to describe my offerings and everything to describe smuggy's:

Meta Keywords: online photo albums,photo sharing,photo hosting,photo storage,video,videos,online video,video sharing,albums,photo albums,photo,sharing,picture sharing
,share photos,photo galleries,photo gallery,photos,photographs,online gallery
,picture gallery,picture galleries,online galleries,smugmug gallery,smugmug
,smug mug,smugmug photos,images,image galleries,image gallery,gallery hosting
,galleries hosting,hosting

Lynne:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

scwalter

Andy wrote:

Lynne:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

So why are they there?

lynnesite

Thanks, Andy, that's nice about the rankings.
Google says:
>>Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.<<

When you google Lynne Glazer Imagery it returns:
SmugMug Photo & Video Sharing. You look better here.
The ultimate in photo & video sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print.

Andy, that's what I am really trying to say, that I don't want a few galleries and this paragraph to show. I would rather see a snippet from my bio! I can't be alone in this?

Erick L

lynnesite wrote:

Thanks, Andy, that's nice about the rankings.
Google says:
>>Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.<<

When you google Lynne Glazer Imagery it returns:
SmugMug Photo & Video Sharing. You look better here.
The ultimate in photo & video sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print.

Andy, that's what I am really trying to say, that I don't want a few galleries and this paragraph to show. I would rather see a snippet from my bio! I can't be alone in this?

You're not alone. I've asked SM to remove their description for two years. Actually, Google was smart enough to figure the description doesn't fit my site and it uses the one I wrote for DMOZ. But it's still a problem for galleries.

denisegoldberg

lynnesite wrote:

...I don't want a few galleries and this paragraph to show. I would rather see a snippet from my bio! I can't be alone in this?

Go to http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Flash+Slideshow, scroll down to the GOTCHA, and follow the instructions. It looks like you put descriptive information after the flash slideshow in your bio. It must be placed before the slideshow code. The search engines pick up the text from your bio box, and the words you want to use must be first in that box.

--- Denise

Baldy

I re-wrote our SEO help page here:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/search-engines

I've used smugmug seo guy as a consultant for a few pro sites and so far the results have been very impressive. John Harrison, whose amazing yosemite firefalls print hangs on our walls, approached me at last night's Silicon Valley SMUG amazed that he got on Google's page one for these searches:

yosemite nature photography
yosemite landscape photography

Here's what's happened to our overall traffic since NiceNames were launched in mid-August (the kick in this graph):

Erick L

scwalter wrote:

So why are they there? (meta-data)

Can we have an answer to this?

Another thing, I get a lot of traffic directed to single image views, even though I don't use it anywhere. I like the traffic but it looks like a mess when the page should be the old journal style instead of single-image. Is there a way to redirect to the correct style?

Thanks.

Andy

Erick L wrote:

Can we have an answer to this?

I don' t have any new or different answer yet, I'm sorry. But we are discussing it internally.

Another thing, I get a lot of traffic directed to single image views, even though I don't use it anywhere. I like the traffic but it looks like a mess when the page should be the old journal style instead of single-image. Is there a way to redirect to the correct style?

Thanks.

I don't know how Google favors such pages, will try and find out.

tatteberry

I've found that using an external blog, such as one hosted on wordpress.com, with links back to my smugmug site is much more effective than hosting one on my site itself. Keep the photos small on your blog, with a caption stating "to view large or order prints click here." Not only do my blogs come up higher than my smugmug site, but they provide inbound links as well.

Also, get your keywords into your captions. Making your captions as descriptive as possible, as well as your file names for your photos seems to help quite a bit.

Andy

lynnesite wrote:

Thanks, Andy, that's nice about the rankings.
Google says:
>>Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.<<

When you google Lynne Glazer Imagery it returns:
SmugMug Photo & Video Sharing. You look better here.
The ultimate in photo & video sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print.

Andy, that's what I am really trying to say, that I don't want a few galleries and this paragraph to show. I would rather see a snippet from my bio! I can't be alone in this?

Be sure you have gallery descriptions in every gallery - and google will use that instead of our default stuff. These meta keywords are there, so that we get categorized correctly in automated
directory services. But again, if you put your own description in the gallery description, then that will be what Google displays.

Erick, yes, this means that for now, until and if we ever change it, you have to put something in your album descriptions if you want this to change on the search engines. I know you don't want to do this, but I'm simply saying this is what you should do if you want not-our-stuff to show up in the results.

FWIW, we have been advocating gallery descriptions for a long time, and this is one reason why.

timk519

Baldy wrote:

Here's what's happened to our overall traffic since NiceNames were launched in mid-August (the kick in this graph):

Do you have a graph which would compare this to the same period the year before?

Andy

New SEO Feature
Up till now, google would get META Description info from words in your bio box. This led to problems with folks having a slideshow and other code in their bio...

So, we made a control panel entry - Homepage Meta Description - 255 characters for you to describe your site, your business, whatever.



It's what will show up here:



You'll find this in your control panel, settings tab.

When you enter something in this new box, it'll trump whatever's in your bioBox (text, divs, code, anything). Enjoy!

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Up till now, google would get META Description info from words in your bio box. This led to problems with folks having a slideshow and other code in their bio...

So, we made a control panel entry - Homepage Meta Description - 255 characters for you to describe your site, your business, whatever.



It's what will show up here:



You'll find this in your control panel, settings tab.

When you enter something in this new box, it'll trump whatever's in your bioBox (text, divs, code, anything). Enjoy!

Woohoo! Finally the Bio text slurp hack is dead and we can control our own meta description.

AFBlue

Andy wrote:

Up till now, google would get META Description info from words in your bio box. This led to problems with folks having a slideshow and other code in their bio...

So, we made a control panel entry - Homepage Meta Description - 255 characters for you to describe your site, your business, whatever.



It's what will show up here:



You'll find this in your control panel, settings tab.

When you enter something in this new box, it'll trump whatever's in your bioBox (text, divs, code, anything). Enjoy!

ivar Wonderful!!! Smugmug is great, but seeing what amounted to a smugmug ad on Google search results was a bit much. Very glad to see this change.

Jerry

Andy

AFBlue wrote:

ivar Wonderful!!! Smugmug is great, but seeing what amounted to a smugmug ad on Google search results was a bit much. Very glad to see this change.

Jerry

To be clear, you could always change this, but you had to have read our help page on SEO and findability.... Cheers!

denisegoldberg

Andy wrote:

...we made a control panel entry - Homepage Meta Description - 255 characters for you to describe your site, your business, whatever.

Awesome!

But you know me, I do have one suggestion. Can you change the entry box for this to a multi-line box? I find it rather difficult to maintain an entry in a single line box that doesn't display the maximum number of characters.

Yes, I did revert to a text editor and copy/paste, but that really shouldn't be necessary in today's UIs.

--- Denise

Andy

denisegoldberg wrote:

Awesome!

But you know me, I do have one suggestion. Can you change the entry box for this to a multi-line box? I find it rather difficult to maintain an entry in a single line box that doesn't display the maximum number of characters.

Yes, I did revert to a text editor and copy/paste, but that really shouldn't be necessary in today's UIs.

--- Denise

I asked this and the answer was no, because Google doesn't want line breaks. Sorry!

timk519

Andy wrote:

I asked this and the answer was no, because Google doesn't want line breaks. Sorry!

So have your code strip out carriage returns.

Erick L

That's great.

So the next step is something similar for categories and galleries, right?

Andy

Erick L wrote:

That's great.

So the next step is something similar for categories and galleries, right?

We'll surely consider it but to be clear to all other readers, in your gallery, if you add a description in the existing gallery description field, google will use it:



Erick, we know you don't wish to fill out the gallery description - I'm sorry but for now that's the way to do it.

Erick L

Andy wrote:

We'll surely consider it but to be clear to all other readers, in your gallery, if you add a description in the existing gallery description field, google will use it:

I know how it works for now. If I insist so much, it's because I firmly believe removing the SM description would do good to both Smugmug and its customers. Like the bio trick, not everyone knows about the gallery description. Some like me don't want a description on the page. And some gallery types don't even have an option for a description. I don't expect SM to change that overnight but you'll probably hear about it in few months, when I flip out again.

Take a look at this one:

bstrong

Andy wrote:

I asked this and the answer was no, because Google doesn't want line breaks. Sorry!

I didn't want people to think they can put in a ton of text with line breaks, etc. But it's no biggie, I can just strip them out anyways!

I'll make the change.

-Brian

Andy

Erick L wrote:

Take a look at this one:

Yup, and you could put a feature request in that for things like popular, categories, etc where there's no description, to use the homepage description (sitewide description, if you will).

I'm doing the same thing internally.
EDIT: Brian says he's gonna try!

LichtenHansen

Will Smugmug ever get SEO-friendly?

Andy wrote:

Yup, and you could put a feature request in that for things like popular, categories, etc where there's no description, to use the homepage description (sitewide description, if you will).

Yes, and completely ignore Google's advice to write unique meta descriptions that accurately describes the content of the page.

Personally I think that all these Smugmug generated meta descriptions and keywords is a bug in Smugmug.
Actually it should not be nessesary for anyone to put a feature request for any official SEO advice from Google.
I give up now - I have realized that Smugmug will not be SEO-friendly in the near future.