Increasing Traffic to Your Gallery
With so many images on The Lens Flare, it's no wonder that some images might not be viewed as much as they should. In this document, I will describe several easy techniques that will help increase the traffic to your galleries and the images within them through better placement in the search engines and a more likely chance that they will be linked to from other websites.
Traffic from Google is far greater than any other search engine. Currently, over 30% of all visitors to TLF originate from one of Google's search engine result pages. After adding in the traffic from MSN and Yahoo, this accounts for around 40% of all visitors to The Lens Flare. Chances are good that you originally found out about TLF the same way.
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Google's Search Engine
Understanding the basics of how Google works will help you understand how to increase the number of visitors to your images; however, these tips can be applied to any website on the Internet.
First, nobody except the Google programmers knows exactly how Google's search engine thinks and operates. All we can do is look at the pages that are displayed among many different searches, analyze data that Google provides, read their press releases, help files, and blogs, and hope for the best. Below is a compilation of what I've found through my own research and articles on the Internet.
There are two main aspects of Google's search algorithm: PageRank and Page Content.
PageRank
This is a way to determine a web page's popularity on the Internet. Google examines several billion web pages, looks at where each page is linked to and linked from, and determines which pages are the most popular. They assign a value to each web page based on their findings, which they call PageRank.
The main factors that are believed to affect a web page's PageRank are:
- Number of links pointing to a particular page
- Number of links on a page
- How well the two pages are related to each other
- How well the rest of the links on the page are related to each other
- The words in each link (i.e. the words that you click on)
Fortunately for us, Google provides a very useful browser toolbar that helps with this which displays each page's PageRank on a scale from 1 to 10. However, it should be noted that many people believe that this isn't the true score, but rather a simplification of the actual score and since their database is so large, updates to the toolbar may be slightly out of date with what is showing up on the search result pages.
What this means is that links, referred to as "Backlinks", from other websites are important, especially pages that have a lot of links pointing to them, but of even more importance is how closely related the two pages are. Not only does this help improve the page's ranking, but people will visit directly from those links as well.
PageRanks are updated about every 3 months, which means that it's important to leave images on TLF for a while so that they have time to be indexed properly. Their first ranking is usually 1 point lower than they should have, which is added back after the page has been up for 6-8 months. This is one of Google's ways of limiting people's ability to spam the result pages.
Backlinks
Backlinks refer to any links on the web that go to your image's webpage. Regarding backlinks, the quantity and quality of the referring pages determine the page's PageRank value.
Some suggestions to increase the amount of links to your pages are:
- Post in related message boards and forums asking people to comment, critique, or take a look at your image.
If the board will allow it, post a link to the html page rather than hotlink the image into their forum and include a link to your gallery at the bottom of the message or in your signature. Most art and photography boards will have a place set aside for comments and critiques; however, any board that is related to the subject of your image is a good place to try. For example, you could post a link to a picture of a fish on a forum about fish.
Be sure to follow the rules and guidelines set by the particular forum and post in the appropriate section so that your message is not considered as spam. To make sure, read several other topics to see how people communicate on that particular website. - Add a link to any websites that you control such as blogs, groups, galleries, and other websites. You should link to specific images and your main gallery page.
- Post comments on other people's blogs and guestbooks with a link to your gallery page. Make sure that your comments will not be considered spam.
- Add a link to your gallery at the bottom of your emails.
- Ask friends and associates with related websites and/or blogs to add a link to your gallery.
- Submit your gallery to related web directories. When you do this, pay careful attention to the directories policies. Some will not link to anything but the website's homepage. Before submitting, make sure that your page is not already listed.
Page Content
The content of the page is extremely important for several reasons. Search engine companies use special programs, called web spiders, crawlers, or robots, to read web pages and parse out their specific elements to determine how relative a webpage is to a keyword search.
Specifically, they look at:
- The page's filename, which is influenced by the keyword that you use when uploading an image.
- The page's title, which is displayed at the top of your browser window, and is generated from the title that you give the picture.
- Meta keyword and description tags, which are under debate as to how much they are looked at any more, but this is automated on TLF so that you don't have to worry about it.
- Heavier weighted text such as larger fonts, bold text, headings, and links, which is automated for you.
- The document's body text such as your picture's description and comments
- Text in the links to your pages.
What all this means is that you need to make sure your filename keyword, image title, and description are written well using descriptive words that somebody might search for. Where people fall short is the image's description.
Image Descriptions
Once you've included a good keyword and title, the next thing is to provide a good description.
The best descriptions:
- consist of 2 or more paragraphs describing the picture.
- contain information about the subject that is interesting to a visitor.
- use good grammar and spelling.
- use descriptive words (aka keywords) naturally in sentences.
- don't use the same keywords more than twice.
- use synonyms of keywords.
- contain related words and phrases.
You should write your descriptions for people, rather than robots. Each of the bullet points above are geared towards making the description more interesting, and the search engines have been programmed to rank pages with good writing better than pages that simply contain a list of keywords and phrases.
To come up with a good description, do a little research about the subject of your image and answer who, why, what, when, and how. For example, if it's a landscape, you could describe the location, interesting history, vacation hotspots, and photographic information such as camera settings, time of day and year, etc. Not only will it benefit your visitors more, but it'll be fun to learn more about your subject matter.
Here's an example of an image of a lily (http://www.thelensflare.com/gallery/p_lillypond_1735.php) with a good description. I documented its common names, where it was found, historical and present uses, its place in the ecosystem, and other tidbits of useful information. This took me about 15 minutes to search other websites and write the description.
Recommendation
If you would like to see more traffic to your photos and artwork, one of the best ways is to include valuable information about your subjects. This may prompt more people to link to you, and will help the Search Engines figure out what your image is all about.
I'd recommend that you:
- Download Google's toolbar and turn on the additional features such as the PageRank bar and the blue info button, which allows you to easily see how many pages are linked back to your image page.
- Browse your gallery and pick your favorite images
- Look at each of these pages and write down their current PageRank.
- Start at the picture with the highest PageRank and edit the description to include 2 or more paragraphs of useful information about the image's subject.
- Remove all gibberish and unreadable comments
- Use the suggestions above to increase the number of links to your pages.
Summary
The art of search engine optimization is a fluid, ever-changing field. Major search engine companies have large teams of programmers that do nothing but think of ways to make their databases better and more user-friendly for those using it. They change their specific formulas often as they learn more about how people use the web, and how websites abuse their algorithms for personal gain.
Search engine companies and good, trustworthy websites have the same goal, which is to deliver quality content to their visitors. Because of this, websites don't have to fully understand the complex formulas behind search engine rankings. However, they do have to understand what makes up a quality page, and by applying some simple suggestions, they will benefit from a lot more visitors to their pages.
If you have any questions about this, please post them on the message board (http://www.thelensflare.com/galleryforum).
About the Author
Brian Broderick (http://www.brianbroderick.com) is a semi-pro nature photographer and the creator of The Lens Flare. His hobbies include hiking, skiing, and computer graphics, and is currently a web programmer.
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