SEO best practices

fabthi

Hi all
I'm looking for tutorials, guides, threads and any other source of informations on how to make the best SEO practices for a website on the SM platform.
Thanks!

Hikin' Mike

There is no difference between Smugmug and any other site for best SEO practices. You need a good on your pages and content. By content you need text not just pretty pictures. In the context of Smugmug keywords, those won't help. I personally think of Smugmug keywords as 'tags'.

I wrote a short article about SEO for the photographer several years ago. You can see it in my signature below. Hope this helps.

Ferguson

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

There is no difference between Smugmug and any other site for best SEO practices. You need a good <title> on your pages and content. By content you need text not just pretty pictures. In the context of Smugmug keywords, those won't help. I personally think of Smugmug keywords as 'tags'.

One aspect that does seem different is that images posted on Smugmug (or any photo sharing site) seem to be largely ignored by Google, at least in comparison to images posted in more traditional sites. I can have an image up on some blog site and frequently find it in hours, but cannot find the same image on Smugmug at all.

Now (using absolutely no knowledge of Google's algorithm) that makes sense, as photo sharing sites tend to be a huge heap of... well, everything from trash to jewels. But the emphasis is on "huge" and lack of context. An image (say) in a newspaper article has context, and likely selectivity by the author. So what they do is probably correct.

But it does beg the question -- what can one do to get IMAGEs (not web pages) more highly rated when you are starting from a deficit by being on a photo sharing site?

rainforest1155

Hi there,

We suggest the free SEO guide from Moz.

fabthi

Hi Mike
thanks for your help.
Only, I'm not sure to understand what you mean with this

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

In the context of Smugmug keywords, those won't help. I personally think of Smugmug keywords as 'tags'.

Are you referring to these keywords? Are you saying they are useless and it's not worth adding them?

Also, reading Ferguson's comment leaves me with the idea that image captions are not very helpful as well on SM in regards of Google

Allen

Keywords can be very valuable on your site depending how you use them. They seem to be completely useless elsewhere
at least for images, the do help with pages some though.
Photos I embed on my blog show up on Google images very quickly, almost never show from my Smug site. But they are
completely useless from my blog unless I switch the link to my domain. Nothing worst then MY images all over the net without
my domain showing. Smug gets 100% of the credit and me none. :pissed

fabthi

Allen wrote: »

Photos I embed on my blog show up on Google images very quickly, almost never show from my Smug site.

Just to keep the focus around SEO "for Smugug": you're saying keywording images published on our SM sites is useless for SEO results?

Allen

fabthi wrote: »

Just to keep the focus around SEO "for Smugug": you're saying keywording images published on our SM sites is useless for SEO results?

Not for images but the /keyword page does show in Google search along with other pages.

I have extensive keyword/photo tags and I have found not one used for image search outside of my Smug site.

Hikin' Mike

fabthi wrote: »

Hi Mike
thanks for your help.
Only, I'm not sure to understand what you mean with this

Are you referring to these keywords? Are you saying they are useless and it's not worth adding them?

Also, reading Ferguson's comment leaves me with the idea that image captions are not very helpful as well on SM in regards of Google

Those tags (keywords) are great for finding like-minded photos within your Smugmug site, like Allen said. Outside of Smugmug, they are useless, IMO.

I use them, but I don't spend a lot of time with them. For SEO, I rely on my Portfolio pages (Folders/Galleries) to get people to find my images.