Search Engine Optimization Books

[paulr]

Ah ahahaha can we start making fun of people's website using the page rank system?!

Finally a purely objective way to critique photographs. And economical ... no tedious essay, just a number.

[Jack Brauer]

It is important to have keywords for each page, repeated in the title (top of the browser), in the meta keywords, and of course in the text itself. The keywords MUST be in the text on the page. Putting keywords in the meta description and image alt tage couldn't hurt either.

I think it also helps in search engines if you have a narrow focus of subject matter, because you then end up having lots of related keywords that get repeated over and over again throughout your site.

The biggest challenge I find, as a photographer, is that I would prefer to let my images "speak for themselves", and don't want to go on and on blabbing about the photos, how they were taken, related stories, etc, etc. However as far as search engines go, the more text the better.

[Frank Petronio]

That may have BEEN the case but I know the search engines are much more sophisticated. Your entire site needs to be popular, not just that one image of "Populars in SnowStorm, Northern Montana" or whatever. And nowadays the search engines really rather read real text in sentances -- objective, real writing -- than anything that seems like keyword spamming. Of course brute force will work to a degree, but you sacrifice credibility and higher quality visitors in the process.

Also, the title of your site is very important to people who bookmark your site -- so if it is a bunch of add keywords it makes it harder for people to revisit your site when they scroll your bookmarks. And it is another good reason not to do that "Welcome to XXX" or "Photos by XXX" and instead just be literate and objective.

[Jack Brauer]

I have found from experience that positioning your keywords correctly (i.e. - in the title & meta tags & hidden tags) DOES matter, at least with Google. For instance I decided a while back to add a certain word to my keywords, and now it's one of my top search words for search engines, even though it's hardly in any of the text. Go figure.