I'm not sure that is completely true. If you do an image search for 'Triple Arch' then one of Andy's pictures appear on the first page of results. If you click through then you find that Triple Arch is in the caption but not in the filename or gallery title. So as far as I can see it does actually work, just not well for you :cry
Taking a look at your site though I think there are a couple of things working against you:
1. Your pagerank is low (2). This means that if there are similar searches on other people's pages then they will appear higher than you. You have to work on getting that up (Moonriver is 5 which is about as good as most people get). For a start your site should be in your signature here. I don't know how much difference it makes but every little helps.
2. You don't have very descriptive galleries, at least in those that I looked at. So, for example, the 'insects-arachnids' gallery has no description and the photo of a spider just has a caption of 'spider'. My guess is that that isn't good enough to make your picture of a spider appear high in a list. It may also be that Google doesn't associate 'arachnids' with spiders so doesn't consider that photo relevant to the gallery.
My experience has been that you need good descriptive captions in the gallery, good titles for the gallery and then great captions for the pictures (but not too large either). So, for example, try adding the specific name of the type of spider if you know it, or the colour. Try adding 'spiders' in the gallery description as well. Do anything you can to help Google think your photos are relevant to the gallery that it is in.
Good luck - this stuff is horribly difficult
Rich
Hi Rich,
Wow, that's great info! Thanks! But you knew that would lead me to more questions, right?
1. Your pagerank is low (2).
How can I see what my page rank is? That would be great to know.
For a start your site should be in your signature here.
Excellent suggestion. I have added it.
You don't have very descriptive galleries
I considered that, but if I have a gallery that only has picture of Baltimore Orioles, for example, what else would I name it but "Baltimore Orioles?" Or do you mean I should have something else in the description as well? Don't know how else to describe them, though. Any suggestions would be a huge help.
...the 'insects-arachnids' gallery has no description and the photo of a spider just has a caption of 'spider'. My guess is that that isn't good enough to make your picture of a spider appear high in a list.
It not only doesn't appear high, it doesn't appear at all. I went through every page and the image just doesn't come up. That's true of ALL of my images, not just the spider.
Try adding 'spiders' in the gallery description as well.
I have "clean" chosen for my gallery settings because I thought it would look--well, "cleaner". I thought it only affected the view, but does it also mean the descriptions are not included in a search if they are set for "clean?"
One more question: If I have external links turned to OFF, would that prevent images from coming up on a search? I'm grabbing at straws here.
Thank you so much for your very detailed, helpful response!
I don't think indexing is a problem with SM. I think Google images is simply slower and tougher to get in.
I don't bother with filenames yet Google returns 4100 images for my site, even though I only uploaded 1100! There rest are different sizes made by SM. Actually, I wish we could opt out of nicenames for photos because they're anything but nice. I do like nicenames for galleries though.
Captions are used in three different places: Title tag, alt tags and text close to the images. That's three important keyword spots in one go, and that should be more than enough to feed Google.
Filenames aren't actually used as filenames but like a folder in the URL. That's one place only and I doubt it weighs much. Google always tries to be "humane", or "user-friendly" and geared towards content. URLs aren't content and I bet Google is well aware that making cute filenames and URLs for every file and pages is not humane.
Keywords are another place to put keywords. I use them mostly as a navigation tool.
You can only go so far with on page SEO. You could say that on-site SEO is for telling Google what's important within your site. But to pass others, your site needs credibility, stability, a reputation if you will. That is done with time and incoming links in both quantity and quality. Quality links are difficult to get. Directories are a good place to start for quantity. It's tedious work though.
How can I see what my page rank is? That would be great to know.
There's a little icon in the Google toolbar. It's a small white and green bar. There are also sites where you can type in your site's URL. Google "pagerank checker".
Jean, I took a quick look at your insect gallery. It would help if you had the full insect name. "Bee" is too generic. "Honey Bee" is better and "Yellow-bellied honey bee" (made up name) is even better. Better yet is to include the latin name.
There's a little icon in the Google toolbar. It's a small white and green bar. There are also sites where you can type in your site's URL. Google "pagerank checker".
Okay, I downloaded the Google toolbar. What's interesting is that my home page is ranked a 2 :cry and Andy's is ranked a 5 (his should really be a 10!). But then when I go through his site and my site, the gallery pages are not ranked high at all. Some of Andy's are not ranked at all, just like some of mine. I just don't get this stuff at all.
How can I see what my page rank is? That would be great to know.
www.prchecker.info I believe that the Google toolbar addin for IE also shows it
if I have a gallery that only has picture of Baltimore Orioles, for example, what else would I name it but "Baltimore Orioles?" Or do you mean I should have something else in the description as well? Don't know how else to describe them, though. Any suggestions would be a huge help.
I really wish that I had a good suggestion here. I know that I use big descriptions for galleries and photos with the result that in general I can search for words in either the gallery or the photo description and they tend to come up. However that may be due to page rank.
For your galleries I understand the desire to have a 'clean' site but that may be making it too difficult for Google to work identify the photos (who knows). So, for example, in the 'Hawks/Vultures' gallery I would be tempted to have a gallery description saying something like 'A collection of photographs of hawks and vultures taken in xxxx over the last few years'. Then, for each photo, I would be tempted to extend the description slightly by adding 'in flight', 'through trees', 'on branch', 'pair' etc. You want to maximise your chance of being found if someone is looking for a pair of hawks on a branch. Be specific about the location - do anything you can to segment your photos a bit to increase your chances of being found.
Remember that every time someone finds you in a search and actually clicks though that the Google will think you are that bit more important.
We used to embed the keywords in the photo before uploading but they aren't preserved in the lower res display versions so that doesn't help
I have "clean" chosen for my gallery settings because I thought it would look--well, "cleaner". I thought it only affected the view, but does it also mean the descriptions are not included in a search if they are set for "clean?"
I don't know what Google sees when it searches your site unfortunately. However as far as I know they don't see what we see, there is a different version for search engines so I believe that it doesn't matter which of the views you pick for your site. I may be wrong though...
One more question: If I have external links turned to OFF, would that prevent images from coming up on a search?
As far as I know all that turning off external links does is turn off the fly out button that allows someone to easily grab a link to the photo to paste in a blog etc, it doesn't stop them actually taking the photo or looking at it so it shouldn't prevent it being indexed.
In my view you want to do everything that you can to allow external links to your photos so that people actually link to them. Google spots those links and increases your rank which is nice. Watermark your photos with your site name so that people don't just stick your photos on their site (I was able to get a 1427x999 of the spider without watermark as a test).
Google has no idea if your photos are any good or not - it relies on other people thinking that they are good enough to link to. You have to find ways such as the infamous blogs to get good, relevant links to your photos, even if you have to write the blog yourself.
Finally, if you haven't already done so sign up for Google webmaster tools. This will help give you an idea of what which sites link to yours, which searches have turned up your site, which words Google is indexing on your site, how often Google checks your site etc. Tracking this will give you an idea if what you are doing is making a difference but remember that it can take months to really get things moving.
Jean, I took a quick look at your insect gallery. It would help if you had the full insect name. "Bee" is too generic. "Honey Bee" is better and "Yellow-bellied honey bee" (made up name) is even better. Better yet is to include the latin name.
I'll try and re-caption my photos to see if that helps, but I'm still confused because I just Googled "bee" in image search, and lots of photos titled simply "bee.jpg" came up, but none of them are from SmugMug sites. (Surely there are lots of bee photos there!) I then did an image search on Google using advanced search, and entered "bee" for the search term, and specified "www.smugmug.com" for the site to search. This is all that came up, and you'll notice that almost every one is just a thumbnail! That's the same thing that happens when I try to search my own images. http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&tbo=1&rlz=1R1MOZA_en&imgtbs=t&imgtype=photo&as_st=y&tbs=isch:1&q=bee+site:www.smugmug.com&sa=N&start=0&ndsp=21
There has to "be" (no pun intended!) something else I'm missing!
In my view you want to do everything that you can to allow external links to your photos so that people actually link to them. Google spots those links and increases your rank which is nice. Watermark your photos with your site name so that people don't just stick your photos on their site (I was able to get a 1427x999 of the spider without watermark as a test).
Okay, so right now I'm hovering between suicidal and homicidal. :uhoh I thought it would be harder to capture my photos if I had right-click protection on. That's not the case? How did you get the image? Is a watermark the only way to safeguard your images?
Thanks again. I hope it's okay to keep asking all these questions.
I thought it would be harder to capture my photos if I had right-click protection on.
It's harder but not even close to impossible. If I can see it then it is already on my computer, it's just a case of finding it
How did you get the image?
Just picked it out of my browser cache
Is a watermark the only way to safeguard your images?
It's the best way. That and reducing the maximum viewable image size so that even if someone does nick it they can't get too big a copy. Trade that off against allowing people to really see what they are getting. It's not easy but I've found great sites before by following the URL on a photo that has been posted on a different site than the owner's so watermarking is good IMHO
Okay, so right now I'm hovering between suicidal and homicidal.
Don't do that. These are some of the most common questions that come up here as it really isn't that obvious
I'm still confused because I just Googled "bee" in image search, and lots of photos titled simply "bee.jpg" came up, but none of them are from SmugMug sites.
They are all from sites with VERY high page ranks
I then did an image search on Google using advanced search, and entered "bee" for the search term, and specified "www.smugmug.com" for the site to search. This is all that came up, and you'll notice that almost every one is just a thumbnail!
If people are using their own site name like you are then they might not come up under a search for smugmug. Even we get some hits for bees bees in Afghanistan although bizarrely the photos are of cucumbers as the word 'bee' appears in the gallery description
In your case I'm guessing that the gallery hasn't been up very long (Feb?) so there is a very good chance that it hasn't been indexed yet. It can take a VERY long time initially.
And, for info., I just discovered that Google Webmaster tools will allow you to see the page as the googlebot sees it (under Labs in the tools). What I see from that is that Google gets a page with all of the photos on it and all of the captions set as the title of the photo which is really nice.
What I didn't realise before though is that the keywords for each photo don't appear next to the photo. Therefore it is unlikely that Google will value them very highly although people searching your site will. The upshot is that it is probably important to put everything that you would like to index your photos by into the caption if you want it to be found by search engines. Personally I still use the keywords as well as they can be useful for creating virtual galleries as well.
Okay, so right now I'm hovering between suicidal and homicidal. :uhoh I thought it would be harder to capture my photos if I had right-click protection on. That's not the case? How did you get the image? Is a watermark the only way to safeguard your images?
Thanks again. I hope it's okay to keep asking all these questions.
I just got the google page rank tool and have a ranking of 2 but only on my main page. My gallery pages don't even rank.
Thanks for that. You made we have a wee nose around my site and I found something very similar. The top level of our site is pagerank 5 and that's great. If I check site : photos.miseast.org in google images I get lots of images. Great.
Then I go down a level to Nepal sub galleries (page rank 3) and check again. Still a lot of images but a bit less.
Down again to Nepal/2006 (page rank 2) and it's even less, but still all of the photos that appear at that level.
But, when I go down the next level to a final gallery I find that it has no page rank and no images appear for it even though it appears in the main Google web search so I know that it has been indexed. In fact these images have been there for years so I know they are indexed and have appeared in searches before. I've just moved them down the gallery tree to archive them a bit (maybe a bit too much)
You can only guess about this stuff and it may, in fact will, change. However, at the moment it looks like:
a. Images in galleries with no page rank don't appear in the image search
b. As you navigate down through the gallery tree your pagerank gets lower. If you are starting at 2 this isn't good
If I was to guess what to do I would suggest
1. Get your pagerank up, same as usual. However, if you are linking to your site I would suggest linking directly to subgalleries rather than always to your home page. This will help boost the ratings of sub galleries.
2. If your page rank is low then try not to use too have too big a navigation 'tree' to go through to get to your images as it looks as though your pagerank goes down a bit as you go through the tree
This is pretty much the same stuff as usual, lots of relevant links to different parts of your site from different places. I hadn't spotted the tree stuff before so I'm going to have to watch how I archive my photos if I want them found
Google image searches are getting better. It looks like I have 88 images being found from my site (out of well over 15,000 captioned, keyworded images in public galleries). But 88 is way better than the 0 I had a couple years ago and the one or two I had probably just last year.
Results 1 - 18 of about 330 for site :borealphoto.com. (11.90 parsecs)
Well spotted. I quite liked the 18.11 Jiffies
I just put the spaces in to stop the little camera icon appearing but well spotted there as well. However I wonder why you have managed to get such a huge number of images indexed? I'm wondering if it is from the 'Popular' photos slideshow on your homepage?
The other interesting thing I saw noted was that about a year ago I used to be able to find images in Google by the keywords that I had applied but no longer. You are still getting images appearing from keyword searches and my guess is that it would be because you link to the keyword cloud from your homepage. We used to have the cloud directly on our homepage but I pulled it in preference of the map. I might try sticking it back in for a bit to see what happens.
I'm not particularly worried about only 171 as it seems to be some sort of bizarre limit. I know that there are more photos than that which can be found
Thanks (especially for the bike touring photos... can never get enough of those)
However I wonder why you have managed to get such a huge number of images indexed? I'm wondering if it is from the 'Popular' photos slideshow on your homepage?
I don't really know. It used to hover around 500 images indexed and it went up sometimes during the winter. Note that I only have a little over 1100 listed images, so not only does Google finds most if not all my images, but also includes the different sizes made by SM. I doubt it's the popular slideshow since it isn't a standard link (javascript?). The link to the keywords page has been there much longer. They might have something to do with it. I don't use filenames and not doing anything esoteric.
I can see why people have problems getting at the top but I don't understand the indexing problem. Google has even indexed my "Other" category which only contains unlisted galleries. It indexed the category page, not the galleries and their content. I like to think I have a old and well-ranked site but yours is even better in that regard.
You are still getting images appearing from keyword searches and my guess is that it would be because you link to the keyword cloud from your homepage. We used to have the cloud directly on our homepage but I pulled it in preference of the map.
What is the keyword cloud? Can I have one? I don't know what it is, but I want one! Will that make my images found? :help
What is the keyword cloud? Can I have one? I don't know what it is, but I want one! Will that make my images found?
Just add 'keyword/' to the end of your address to see it. Yours is here. However, I think it is a bit of a red herring as I suspect that it will only affect the results of the very specific search that we were doing (site:...etc). In the case of the mission east site I know that we have way more photos than that in their index and that query only seems to show a subset for some reason. Other photos such as the bee one are available as well but don't show in that specific search.
If you wanted you could add a link to the keywords page somewhere on your home page but I would be surprised if it makes a difference to your images appearing in search. If you do a search for your page in the Google 'web' index then there are 11,500 hits from all over your site. This does suggest that all of your images have actually been crawled at some point. However what appears in the image search is different and it does seem to be related to the importance of the individual page.
So, it's back to the same old stuff. You have to put information on your page to help Google know what the photos are about. You have to keep similar stuff together so that Google thinks the page is interesting. Put a good description in the gallery as that seems to appear in the text for a Google web search which means that Google cares about it and what it says about your photos. Get good links in to your galleries if you can. Create good relevant outbound links as well if you can. There aren't any easy answers to this I'm afraid - just lots of small stuff that together make a difference.
If you do the web search for your site you get zillions of hits BUT you will see that the description for a lot of the hits is just the standard Smug stuff because you don't have a gallery description. Put the description in and you improve Googles chances of believing the the picture is relevant to the gallery and hence rating it.
When Andy says do all of the stuff on the SEO page - he really does mean all of it
(ps. sorry about the long replies - I never know how to say this stuff simply)
Holy mackerel, I don't know how you get so much info, but I'm sure glad that you do.
If you wanted you could add a link to the keywords page somewhere on your home page but I would be surprised if it makes a difference to your images appearing in search.
How would I add the link? I'm in the very early stages of learning customizing, and as you can see by my site, not at all competent in it.
If you do a search for your page in the Google 'web' index then there are 11,500 hits from all over your site. This does suggest that all of your images have actually been crawled at some point.
Yes, I'm happy to have tons of hits, but unfortunately to get those hits, people have to already know the name of my site and use that as the search term, which is not too helpful. Also, it does not appear to me that the images themselves have been crawled, but rather the keywords and captions have been crawled. Lots of those hits all return the keyword or caption somewhere in the result.
Get good links in to your galleries if you can.
I don't know what you mean. How do I get links into my galleries? Links from where?
Create good relevant outbound links as well if you can.
Same thing here. Am I supposed to be adding links somewhere? If so, I don't have a clue how to do it.:cry
...because you don't have a gallery description.
I do have descriptions on each gallery, but I had selected "clean" so that they don't show. Should I change that? I just thought that on the page showing all the galleries under the "birds" category it would look stupid because every description would be practically the same, i.e., "Cardinals Gallery--description: "Northern Cardinals in Wilmington, MA" "Wrens Gallery--description: "Wrens in Wilmington, MA", and so on. There's not a whole lot I can put in the gallery description. I'll have to think about that one and see if I can think of more to add that won't be identical on each gallery description. On each individual image, I'm going to start adding a better caption, but as you can see, I'm keyworded to death, and Google consideres that spamming. So from SmugMug's point of view, I should add lots of keywords--from Google's point of view I shouldn't. Aaargh!
When Andy says do all of the stuff on the SEO page - he really does mean all of it
I thought that's what I was doing. With the exception of making my captions longer and more descriptive, I don't know what I've missed.
New stuff I just found: I put in my site "www.jeanachang.com" and did an image search today. Yesterday there were only about 5 or 6 hits, but today there were 9. Only problem is they STILL ONLY SHOW THUMBNAIL images, not the images within the galleries. I just don't know why that happens.
(ps. sorry about the long replies - I never know how to say this stuff simply)
Goodness, don't apologize! The more info the better. I'm the one who should apologize because I'm probably driving you crazy with all the questions.
Google's Webmaster tools help said we should use "Alt text" for each image, but it doesn't say how to do it. Do you know how I can add this text on each image? They say if you have alt text, your image will be found easier. Here's the page I found the info on: About halfway down it has a video tutorial on which words to add, etc., but nothing about how to actually get them tagged to your images. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=114016
Try this, go to your control panel, customise, advanced-customiser then put the following in your 'Custom Footer' box - "<a href="http://www.jeanachang.com/keyword/">Quick links to all of my photos</a>". You'll need to play with it a bit to see how it looks.
Yes, I'm happy to have tons of hits, but unfortunately to get those hits, people have to already know the name of my site and use that as the search term, which is not too helpful. Also, it does not appear to me that the images themselves have been crawled, but rather the keywords and captions have been crawled.
Yes. The point was really that Google knows that your photos are there, it has just chosen not to include them in the image search results because it doesn't like them for some reason. Possibly because the page rank isn't high enough, possibly because it doesn't know enough about the photo, possibly because it doesn't think that anyone would be interested. Unfortunately we don't really know why, we can only guess . What we do know is that Google likes good photo descriptions, good gallery descriptions and likes it when other people like your photos enough to link to them.
How do I get links into my galleries? Links from where?
Ah, now that's the difficult bit. Really you want links from other sites with a similar interest which can be difficult. I know that for our site some of the galleries have been linked to by, for example, people who collect photos of Nepal. Wherever possible I try to persuade people I know to link to our site, other organisations like ours to link to our site etc. For you it will be more difficult but the classic ways of starting are often to write a blog about your work and to link to the galleries that you are working on. Or maybe post small collections of photos to more community oriented photo sites and then link back to your main site. Remember though to try and keep the links, galleries etc relevant to each other as google magic tries to put that stuff together ie. try to link to a relevant gallery rather than just your home page
As you are using Webmaster tools now you will be able to see all the links to your site that Google has found. That is one of the better ways of seeing who is linking to you.
If you want to find out where other sites are getting external links from then you can try this in google link:miseast.org with other sites similar to you. It doesn't show anything close to the full list of links but it can be helpful to give you ideas where to look.
As for links out, again I don't know - maybe try adding relevant links out to other websites specific to each particular type of bird. Keep the links relevant though as that matters.
I do have descriptions on each gallery, but I had selected "clean" so that they don't show
You don't have them on all galleries. All that 'clean' does is stop the description appearing next to the gallery description on the page linking to the gallery. I don't think it is bad.
I like the description in your Baltimore-Orioles gallery. That sort of thing is great.
I'm keyworded to death, and Google consideres that spamming.
.
I can't see your keywords for each photo but a handful of keywords for each photo is probably ok. Again, I don't really know but that is what I have and it seems to work just fine.
With the exception of making my captions longer and more descriptive, I don't know what I've missed.
I think you are doing that stuff fine. I suspect that google just doesn't rate your galleries highly enough to include photos it finds there even though you have named and described the pictures.
I put in my site "www.jeanachang.com" and did an image search today. Yesterday there were only about 5 or 6 hits, but today there were 9. Only problem is they STILL ONLY SHOW THUMBNAIL images, not the images within the galleries.
That search is a bit misleading as I think that it only shows images that it has seen on the homepage which is why it is just thumbnails. If you type in www.jeanachang.com/flowers/flowers you will see another photo that didn't appear in the search that you made. It's not clear why though
Google's Webmaster tools help said we should use "Alt text" for each image
The nice thing is that you don't have to worry about that. If you put a good caption in your photo, Smugmug will put that in the alt text and title of the photo for you. If you put a good gallery description in then Smugmug will put it in a good place for Google to associate it with your gallery.
I hope this stuff is helpful. I don't really know how it works, I can just repeat what is recommended here and what I do which seems to work. Personally I would also add Google analytics to my site for the simple reason that that gives Google a bit more information about how long people stay on your site once they click through from another link. I don't know that Google use that information but I can't imagine that they don't use every single piece of info. available to them. From your point of view it will also let you know how people are finding your site which is always useful.
Yes. The point was really that Google knows that your photos are there, it has just chosen not to include them in the image search results because it doesn't like them for some reason.
Sorry, this appears to be wrong. Google uses different bots for web search and images with the image bot not being as frequent. My mistake
Rich
Comments
Yeah it's just an example to show that images are being indexed.
I think it's important to do all the things that we say. Read richpepp's post just above. Awesome stuff.
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Wow, that's great info! Thanks! But you knew that would lead me to more questions, right?
How can I see what my page rank is? That would be great to know.
Excellent suggestion. I have added it.
I considered that, but if I have a gallery that only has picture of Baltimore Orioles, for example, what else would I name it but "Baltimore Orioles?" Or do you mean I should have something else in the description as well? Don't know how else to describe them, though. Any suggestions would be a huge help.
It not only doesn't appear high, it doesn't appear at all. I went through every page and the image just doesn't come up. That's true of ALL of my images, not just the spider.
I have "clean" chosen for my gallery settings because I thought it would look--well, "cleaner". I thought it only affected the view, but does it also mean the descriptions are not included in a search if they are set for "clean?"
One more question: If I have external links turned to OFF, would that prevent images from coming up on a search? I'm grabbing at straws here.
Thank you so much for your very detailed, helpful response!
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
I don't bother with filenames yet Google returns 4100 images for my site, even though I only uploaded 1100! There rest are different sizes made by SM. Actually, I wish we could opt out of nicenames for photos because they're anything but nice. I do like nicenames for galleries though.
Captions are used in three different places: Title tag, alt tags and text close to the images. That's three important keyword spots in one go, and that should be more than enough to feed Google.
Filenames aren't actually used as filenames but like a folder in the URL. That's one place only and I doubt it weighs much. Google always tries to be "humane", or "user-friendly" and geared towards content. URLs aren't content and I bet Google is well aware that making cute filenames and URLs for every file and pages is not humane.
Keywords are another place to put keywords. I use them mostly as a navigation tool.
You can only go so far with on page SEO. You could say that on-site SEO is for telling Google what's important within your site. But to pass others, your site needs credibility, stability, a reputation if you will. That is done with time and incoming links in both quantity and quality. Quality links are difficult to get. Directories are a good place to start for quantity. It's tedious work though.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
There's a little icon in the Google toolbar. It's a small white and green bar. There are also sites where you can type in your site's URL. Google "pagerank checker".
borealphoto.smugmug.com
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
www.prchecker.info I believe that the Google toolbar addin for IE also shows it
I really wish that I had a good suggestion here. I know that I use big descriptions for galleries and photos with the result that in general I can search for words in either the gallery or the photo description and they tend to come up. However that may be due to page rank.
For your galleries I understand the desire to have a 'clean' site but that may be making it too difficult for Google to work identify the photos (who knows). So, for example, in the 'Hawks/Vultures' gallery I would be tempted to have a gallery description saying something like 'A collection of photographs of hawks and vultures taken in xxxx over the last few years'. Then, for each photo, I would be tempted to extend the description slightly by adding 'in flight', 'through trees', 'on branch', 'pair' etc. You want to maximise your chance of being found if someone is looking for a pair of hawks on a branch. Be specific about the location - do anything you can to segment your photos a bit to increase your chances of being found.
Remember that every time someone finds you in a search and actually clicks though that the Google will think you are that bit more important.
We used to embed the keywords in the photo before uploading but they aren't preserved in the lower res display versions so that doesn't help
I don't know what Google sees when it searches your site unfortunately. However as far as I know they don't see what we see, there is a different version for search engines so I believe that it doesn't matter which of the views you pick for your site. I may be wrong though...
As far as I know all that turning off external links does is turn off the fly out button that allows someone to easily grab a link to the photo to paste in a blog etc, it doesn't stop them actually taking the photo or looking at it so it shouldn't prevent it being indexed.
In my view you want to do everything that you can to allow external links to your photos so that people actually link to them. Google spots those links and increases your rank which is nice. Watermark your photos with your site name so that people don't just stick your photos on their site (I was able to get a 1427x999 of the spider without watermark as a test).
Google has no idea if your photos are any good or not - it relies on other people thinking that they are good enough to link to. You have to find ways such as the infamous blogs to get good, relevant links to your photos, even if you have to write the blog yourself.
Finally, if you haven't already done so sign up for Google webmaster tools. This will help give you an idea of what which sites link to yours, which searches have turned up your site, which words Google is indexing on your site, how often Google checks your site etc. Tracking this will give you an idea if what you are doing is making a difference but remember that it can take months to really get things moving.
It's not easy but it does work
Good luck
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&tbo=1&rlz=1R1MOZA_en&imgtbs=t&imgtype=photo&as_st=y&tbs=isch:1&q=bee+site:www.smugmug.com&sa=N&start=0&ndsp=21
There has to "be" (no pun intended!
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
Okay, so right now I'm hovering between suicidal and homicidal. :uhoh I thought it would be harder to capture my photos if I had right-click protection on. That's not the case? How did you get the image? Is a watermark the only way to safeguard your images?
Thanks again. I hope it's okay to keep asking all these questions.
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
It's harder but not even close to impossible. If I can see it then it is already on my computer, it's just a case of finding it
Just picked it out of my browser cache
It's the best way. That and reducing the maximum viewable image size so that even if someone does nick it they can't get too big a copy. Trade that off against allowing people to really see what they are getting. It's not easy but I've found great sites before by following the URL on a photo that has been posted on a different site than the owner's so watermarking is good IMHO
Don't do that. These are some of the most common questions that come up here as it really isn't that obvious
They are all from sites with VERY high page ranks
If people are using their own site name like you are then they might not come up under a search for smugmug. Even we get some hits for bees bees in Afghanistan although bizarrely the photos are of cucumbers as the word 'bee' appears in the gallery description
In your case I'm guessing that the gallery hasn't been up very long (Feb?) so there is a very good chance that it hasn't been indexed yet. It can take a VERY long time initially.
And, for info., I just discovered that Google Webmaster tools will allow you to see the page as the googlebot sees it (under Labs in the tools). What I see from that is that Google gets a page with all of the photos on it and all of the captions set as the title of the photo which is really nice.
What I didn't realise before though is that the keywords for each photo don't appear next to the photo. Therefore it is unlikely that Google will value them very highly although people searching your site will. The upshot is that it is probably important to put everything that you would like to index your photos by into the caption if you want it to be found by search engines. Personally I still use the keywords as well as they can be useful for creating virtual galleries as well.
Rich
http://pro.blogs.smugmug.com/2008/07/04/right-click-protection-and-image-security/
thanks!
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Thanks for that. You made we have a wee nose around my site and I found something very similar. The top level of our site is pagerank 5 and that's great. If I check site : photos.miseast.org in google images I get lots of images. Great.
Then I go down a level to Nepal sub galleries (page rank 3) and check again. Still a lot of images but a bit less.
Down again to Nepal/2006 (page rank 2) and it's even less, but still all of the photos that appear at that level.
But, when I go down the next level to a final gallery I find that it has no page rank and no images appear for it even though it appears in the main Google web search so I know that it has been indexed. In fact these images have been there for years so I know they are indexed and have appeared in searches before. I've just moved them down the gallery tree to archive them a bit (maybe a bit too much)
You can only guess about this stuff and it may, in fact will, change. However, at the moment it looks like:
a. Images in galleries with no page rank don't appear in the image search
b. As you navigate down through the gallery tree your pagerank gets lower. If you are starting at 2 this isn't good
If I was to guess what to do I would suggest
1. Get your pagerank up, same as usual. However, if you are linking to your site I would suggest linking directly to subgalleries rather than always to your home page. This will help boost the ratings of sub galleries.
2. If your page rank is low then try not to use too have too big a navigation 'tree' to go through to get to your images as it looks as though your pagerank goes down a bit as you go through the tree
This is pretty much the same stuff as usual, lots of relevant links to different parts of your site from different places. I hadn't spotted the tree stuff before so I'm going to have to watch how I archive my photos if I want them found
Good luck
Rich
Dave
site : borealphoto.com = 171 results
site:borealphoto.com = 4100 results
EDIT: I think adding spaces is a completly different type of search. I get results from other sites with my photos on them.
I also get different results from .ca and .be.
Google has a sense of humor:
Results 1 - 18 of about 171 for site:photos.miseast.org. (0.48 times the velocity of an unladen swallow)
Results 1 - 18 of about 330 for site : borealphoto.com. (0.36 centibeats)
Results 1 - 18 of about 330 for site: borealphoto.com. (0.02 nanocenturies)
Results 1 - 18 of about 330 for site :borealphoto.com. (11.90 parsecs)
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Well spotted. I quite liked the 18.11 Jiffies
I just put the spaces in to stop the little camera icon appearing but well spotted there as well. However I wonder why you have managed to get such a huge number of images indexed? I'm wondering if it is from the 'Popular' photos slideshow on your homepage?
The other interesting thing I saw noted was that about a year ago I used to be able to find images in Google by the keywords that I had applied but no longer. You are still getting images appearing from keyword searches and my guess is that it would be because you link to the keyword cloud from your homepage. We used to have the cloud directly on our homepage but I pulled it in preference of the map. I might try sticking it back in for a bit to see what happens.
I'm not particularly worried about only 171 as it seems to be some sort of bizarre limit. I know that there are more photos than that which can be found
Thanks (especially for the bike touring photos... can never get enough of those)
I don't really know. It used to hover around 500 images indexed and it went up sometimes during the winter. Note that I only have a little over 1100 listed images, so not only does Google finds most if not all my images, but also includes the different sizes made by SM. I doubt it's the popular slideshow since it isn't a standard link (javascript?). The link to the keywords page has been there much longer. They might have something to do with it. I don't use filenames and not doing anything esoteric.
I can see why people have problems getting at the top but I don't understand the indexing problem. Google has even indexed my "Other" category which only contains unlisted galleries. It indexed the category page, not the galleries and their content. I like to think I have a old and well-ranked site but yours is even better in that regard.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
Just add 'keyword/' to the end of your address to see it. Yours is here. However, I think it is a bit of a red herring as I suspect that it will only affect the results of the very specific search that we were doing (site:...etc). In the case of the mission east site I know that we have way more photos than that in their index and that query only seems to show a subset for some reason. Other photos such as the bee one are available as well but don't show in that specific search.
If you wanted you could add a link to the keywords page somewhere on your home page but I would be surprised if it makes a difference to your images appearing in search. If you do a search for your page in the Google 'web' index then there are 11,500 hits from all over your site. This does suggest that all of your images have actually been crawled at some point. However what appears in the image search is different and it does seem to be related to the importance of the individual page.
So, it's back to the same old stuff. You have to put information on your page to help Google know what the photos are about. You have to keep similar stuff together so that Google thinks the page is interesting. Put a good description in the gallery as that seems to appear in the text for a Google web search which means that Google cares about it and what it says about your photos. Get good links in to your galleries if you can. Create good relevant outbound links as well if you can. There aren't any easy answers to this I'm afraid - just lots of small stuff that together make a difference.
If you do the web search for your site you get zillions of hits BUT you will see that the description for a lot of the hits is just the standard Smug stuff because you don't have a gallery description. Put the description in and you improve Googles chances of believing the the picture is relevant to the gallery and hence rating it.
When Andy says do all of the stuff on the SEO page - he really does mean all of it
(ps. sorry about the long replies - I never know how to say this stuff simply)
Holy mackerel, I don't know how you get so much info, but I'm sure glad that you do. How would I add the link? I'm in the very early stages of learning customizing, and as you can see by my site, not at all competent in it. Yes, I'm happy to have tons of hits, but unfortunately to get those hits, people have to already know the name of my site and use that as the search term, which is not too helpful. Also, it does not appear to me that the images themselves have been crawled, but rather the keywords and captions have been crawled. Lots of those hits all return the keyword or caption somewhere in the result. I don't know what you mean. How do I get links into my galleries? Links from where? Same thing here. Am I supposed to be adding links somewhere? If so, I don't have a clue how to do it.:cry I do have descriptions on each gallery, but I had selected "clean" so that they don't show. Should I change that? I just thought that on the page showing all the galleries under the "birds" category it would look stupid because every description would be practically the same, i.e., "Cardinals Gallery--description: "Northern Cardinals in Wilmington, MA" "Wrens Gallery--description: "Wrens in Wilmington, MA", and so on. There's not a whole lot I can put in the gallery description. I'll have to think about that one and see if I can think of more to add that won't be identical on each gallery description. On each individual image, I'm going to start adding a better caption, but as you can see, I'm keyworded to death, and Google consideres that spamming. So from SmugMug's point of view, I should add lots of keywords--from Google's point of view I shouldn't. Aaargh! I thought that's what I was doing. With the exception of making my captions longer and more descriptive, I don't know what I've missed.
New stuff I just found: I put in my site "www.jeanachang.com" and did an image search today. Yesterday there were only about 5 or 6 hits, but today there were 9. Only problem is they STILL ONLY SHOW THUMBNAIL images, not the images within the galleries. I just don't know why that happens. Goodness, don't apologize! The more info the better. I'm the one who should apologize because I'm probably driving you crazy with all the questions.
Google's Webmaster tools help said we should use "Alt text" for each image, but it doesn't say how to do it. Do you know how I can add this text on each image? They say if you have alt text, your image will be found easier. Here's the page I found the info on: About halfway down it has a video tutorial on which words to add, etc., but nothing about how to actually get them tagged to your images.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=114016
Thanks again for your help.
This is me: :hang lol
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
Try this, go to your control panel, customise, advanced-customiser then put the following in your 'Custom Footer' box - "<a href="http://www.jeanachang.com/keyword/">Quick links to all of my photos</a>". You'll need to play with it a bit to see how it looks.
Yes. The point was really that Google knows that your photos are there, it has just chosen not to include them in the image search results because it doesn't like them for some reason. Possibly because the page rank isn't high enough, possibly because it doesn't know enough about the photo, possibly because it doesn't think that anyone would be interested. Unfortunately we don't really know why, we can only guess
Ah, now that's the difficult bit. Really you want links from other sites with a similar interest which can be difficult. I know that for our site some of the galleries have been linked to by, for example, people who collect photos of Nepal. Wherever possible I try to persuade people I know to link to our site, other organisations like ours to link to our site etc. For you it will be more difficult but the classic ways of starting are often to write a blog about your work and to link to the galleries that you are working on. Or maybe post small collections of photos to more community oriented photo sites and then link back to your main site. Remember though to try and keep the links, galleries etc relevant to each other as google magic tries to put that stuff together ie. try to link to a relevant gallery rather than just your home page
As you are using Webmaster tools now you will be able to see all the links to your site that Google has found. That is one of the better ways of seeing who is linking to you.
If you want to find out where other sites are getting external links from then you can try this in google link:miseast.org with other sites similar to you. It doesn't show anything close to the full list of links but it can be helpful to give you ideas where to look.
As for links out, again I don't know - maybe try adding relevant links out to other websites specific to each particular type of bird. Keep the links relevant though as that matters.
You don't have them on all galleries. All that 'clean' does is stop the description appearing next to the gallery description on the page linking to the gallery. I don't think it is bad.
I like the description in your Baltimore-Orioles gallery. That sort of thing is great.
.
I can't see your keywords for each photo but a handful of keywords for each photo is probably ok. Again, I don't really know but that is what I have and it seems to work just fine.
I think you are doing that stuff fine. I suspect that google just doesn't rate your galleries highly enough to include photos it finds there even though you have named and described the pictures.
That search is a bit misleading as I think that it only shows images that it has seen on the homepage which is why it is just thumbnails. If you type in www.jeanachang.com/flowers/flowers you will see another photo that didn't appear in the search that you made. It's not clear why though
The nice thing is that you don't have to worry about that. If you put a good caption in your photo, Smugmug will put that in the alt text and title of the photo for you. If you put a good gallery description in then Smugmug will put it in a good place for Google to associate it with your gallery.
I hope this stuff is helpful. I don't really know how it works, I can just repeat what is recommended here and what I do which seems to work. Personally I would also add Google analytics to my site for the simple reason that that gives Google a bit more information about how long people stay on your site once they click through from another link. I don't know that Google use that information but I can't imagine that they don't use every single piece of info. available to them. From your point of view it will also let you know how people are finding your site which is always useful.
Have a peaceful Easter
Rich
Thank you for your very helpful (as usual) reply. I'll work on that. One more thing:
I've been trying to get Google WebTools to work, but they say they have to verify that I'm really the owner of my site and want me to put code in the head section of my home page.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/verification/verification?hl=en&siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jeanachang.com%2F&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2Fdashboard%3Fhl%3Den%26siteUrl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.jeanachang.com%252F%26sig%3DALjLGbMakNET8-WDLKW6aATBC1V6apYzLw&vtype=vmeta&showHistory=true&mesd=eyJtdCI6IlZFUklGSUNBVElPTl9FUlJPUiIsImN0IjoxMjcwMjI3MDkxNDAyLCJwcyI6WyJodHRwOi8vd3d3LmplYW5hY2hhbmcuY29tLyJdfQ%3D%3D
I've tried pasting in "head tag" and "CSS" but neither one works. I know I'm putting it in the wrong place, but where does it go?
After this, I'm through for today. Have to get cookin' for Easter.
Have a wonderful Easter!
Jean
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
It goes in the head tag so is it possible that you didn't paste it in correctly? It should include both the start '<' and ending '>'
Sounds as though you are making progress
Rich
Sorry, this appears to be wrong. Google uses different bots for web search and images with the image bot not being as frequent. My mistake
Rich