What To Do For A Website That is Mainly Images
-
I have a website that is a desktop wallpaper script.
People can come and upload 100's of wallpapers to share with the community.
This is were the problems comes in.
Files are normally called 27636dark.jpg or whatever and come with no description.
This leads to 2 things.
-
no text content that google can use to know what the page/image is about.
-
Meta descriptions, URL's just look like spam.
Example: /car-wallpapers/7636dark.jpg
If a text description was added, it would still only be like "Green Trees in the distance". Which as you may guess, with 1,000's of wallpapers... would end up having a lot of descriptions the same.
Is there any advice for sites that focus on image driven content?
-
-
Go to the http://www.gumtree.com/ and create an ad for a house (or whatever), the in field help they give to get users to give indepth information is great without seeming forced.
If you incentivise your community via "likes" or rankings, then they will want to provide this information i.e. make it in their interest to provide you with information
-
image sitemaps is the way to go, Google is loving that lately
-
1st of all, make an image sitemap and submit to Google. Here are the guidelines to do so.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636
Then, do some default tag and category definition. As Barry pointed out, it makes a lot of sense to categorize. That would add relevance to your website in searches.
Then, at the backend, assign default tags for the categories. Like for cars, the default tag could be automobiles, for scenery it could be nature so on and so forth. That would help in your optimization.
-
Yeah, I'm not a fan of tag pages in general, but I often see these image sites and especially site themes (for WP, Joomla, etc) using them to very good effect. Certainly if there's 100 new wallpapers a day being added I think they can be beneficial.
However, please do look very carefully at how you make them and link to them. Consider no following links to those pages and even perhaps no indexing the pages themselves.
I don't have enough experience with using tag pages to give you any definitive advice, maybe someone else can jump in
-
Barry is right, I would suggest to wait before puttin tag pages online (or making them indexable), this can lead to huge amount of very similar pages.
Apart from asking user to put a description (or any other UGC like comments, tags, etc.), you compute some data from the images if you have the technical capacity : compute the colors of the wallpapers to have 2 or 3 main colors, size of the wallpaper, file format, etc. This will allow you to display "raw" data or even generate text patterns to fill the blanks.
-
Well, it depends how much forcing users to add a description would negatively effect you I suppose. Hard to get something out when there's no data being put in
They must already choose a category (car), can you get them to name the image (ask them to be descriptive 'Red Ferrari on an Italian mountainside') and tag it with items in the wallpaper (red, Ferrarri)?
If so then you can improve your URLs a title tags
URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/red-ferarri-italian-mountainside-3/
Title: Red Ferarri on an Italian Mountainside Car Wallpaper | Computer Desktop WallpapersAdd the tags on the page with links to tag pages (which I don't always like but would be useful for your users and internal linking).
URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/tag/red
Title: Red Car Wallpapers | Computer Desktop Wallpapersor
URL: site.com/tag/ferarri
Title: Ferrari Car Wallpapers | Ferarri Computer Desktop WallpapersUnfortunately unless you want to do all this yourself you will have to get users to give you more info at time of upload. As I say, no real way to get something out without putting something in
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
How i get link to my website
hi i'm very new in seo want to have links to my website:www.warningbroker.com how i can get links to my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing660 -
No images in Google index
No images are indexed on this site (client of ours): http://www.rubbermagazijn.nl/. We've tried everything (descriptive alt texts, image sitemaps, fetch&render, check robots) but a site:www.rubbermagazijn.nl shows 0 image results and the sitemap report in Search Console shows 0 images indexed. We're not sure how to proceed from here. Is there anyone with an idea what the problem could be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Google not indexing images
Hi there, We have a strange issue at a client website (www.rubbermagazijn.nl). Webpage are indexed by Google but images are not, and have never been since the site went live in '12 (We recently started SEO work on this client). Similar sites like www.damenrubber.nl are being indexed correctly. We have correct robots and sitemap setup and directions. Fetch as google (Search Console) shows all images displayed correctly (despite scripted mouseover on the page) Client doesn't use CDN Search console shows 2k images indexed (out of 18k+) but a site:rubbermagazijn.nl query shows a couple of images from PDF files and some of the thumbnails, but no productimages or category images from homepage. (product page example: http://www.rubbermagazijn.nl/collectie/slangen/olie-benzineslangen/7703_zwart_nbr-oliebestendig-6mm-l-1000mm.html) We've changed the filenames from non-descriptive names to descriptive names, without any result. Descriptive alt texts were added We're at a loss. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, and do you have any advice? I'd be happy to provide more information if needed. CBqqw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Our website is not being indexed
We have an issue with a site that we can't get to the bottom of. This site: (URL removed) is not being properly indexed. When we do a search for (URL removed) in google.com.au. The site appears as the 4th listing with the following title and description: (Title removed) A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We have checked the site's robots.txt and can see its been now implemented correctly: (URL removed) About a week ago, we also went into Webmaster Tools and submitted a request for Google to recrawl our site. We are unsure what the issue is that is causing the site to not be properly indexed and how to resolve it. Any assistance on this topic would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
How to know website is hit with panda or penguin?
My Website traffic and keywords dropped day by day. How can I know website is hit with panda or penguin. Website is - 24hourpassportandvisas. com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
SEO Ideas for B to B Website?
Hi, I am running SEO for a medium-sized B-to-B website. We sell cloud-based software to other businesses/organizations. Our site currently consists of static product-related pages that already have been highly optimized (correct tags, rich content etc) and a blog that we updated regularly. For 2012, I've been tasked with coming up with ideas to significantly increase SEO. Assuming no budget constrains, what are some other general content ideas / other strategies to increase SEO for a B-to-B website? Some of my current ideas include: starting a keyword-targeted YouTube video series and acquiring more links. What are other tactics that could work for a b-to-b site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0