By using a good descriptive title, your chances of people visiting your pictures increases dramatically.  You’ll want to keep the title short, perhaps 5 words or less.

Think of a keyword or keyword phrase that you would type into a search box to see a picture just like yours.  Naming your picture “yellow lily” instead of “flower” is much better because it is more specific and thus there are far fewer images on the Internet to compete with.  Most people will visit a picture if it shows up on the first page of search results, and it’s far easier to show up for specific terms than generic ones.  Also, don’t forget to use the location in the title or something else that makes it more unique.  “Uinta Mountains Yellow Lily” is even more specific.

The title is used as part of your image’s filename, the page’s address, and a few times on the page.  Because of this, it’s the most weighted phrase on your page, and the most important if you want people to visit your picture. Not only does it help your picture show up higher in The Lens Flare’s galleries, but it helps it show up better in Google’s search pages for your title.

We have a few images on the site that get hundreds, even thousands of visitors from Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. For these images, the phrase that people searched for was almost always the same as the title of the image so give it a try and see what happens.  However, keep in mind that it takes a while before Google and the others download the page and put it in their system, so it might be a month or more before you start to see traffic from them.

Tags: getting more traffic to your picture, promoting your pictures, seo

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Help, Promoting Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.