It seems odd that writing a good description of your pictures would get more people to view them, but it’s true. The first reason is because The Lens Flare uses your description as part of its process to determine which categories the picture shows up in.  The code behind TLF looks at all of the text on your picture’s page and ranks each word according to where it shows up.  For example, the title is ranked the highest, the description comes next, and finally the content within the comments.  It looks at the highest ranked words and puts the picture into the categories for that word.

By writing a good description of 1-3 paragraphs, you’ll have much more content working for you to place your image in the appropriate categories. When your picture shows up in the right places, more people will view them. Things that could be written in the description could be the location of the picture, information about the subject, what you were thinking when you took it, what you were intending, how you produced the results of the image, etc.  It could become a mini tutorial, informative, funny, etc.

If your description is too short, the picture will show up in less categories or irrelevant categories.
There are a lot of pictures in the “lovely” category simply because somebody wrote a comment saying that picture is “lovely”. These pictures clearly don’t have a long enough description because there are far more descriptive words that the TLF code could have picked up on, if the content of the description was longer.

In addition to showing up well in TLF’s category pages, it’s also important because Google and Yahoo will read the page and try to decide what the picture is about.  If there is a good body of text that describes the picture well, they will reward that picture by putting it higher in their list of search results.  For this reason, the description should describe the picture and use several synonyms for the main theme of the picture.  If the picture is of an eagle, it should use words like bird, flying, avian, or whatever else makes sense.  It should be written with good grammar, and words should not be repeated.  If you need to use the same word twice, think of a synonym that would work instead. This will make it possible for your picture to show up for your main word along with all the synonyms that you used as well including combinations and phrases of the words.  In our example, somebody might search for “flying bird” or “avian eagle”.  In this case, you have a far better chance of appearing on the first page of the search results and many more people will visit your picture.

There are pictures on the site that receive hundreds, even thousands of visitors a month.  I have a picture of a statue that looks like the loch ness monster that had over 2000 visits last week alone.  This is because it ranks well for certain search terms in Yahoo and Google.

If you use the tips in this article along with a good title, you’ll start to see a larger number of visitors to your pictures.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 4:58 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.