SEOing Images

[Amp34]

I have a Gallery (gallery 2, although not accessable at the moment) and a blog (wordpress) and was wondering what are the best ways of optimising images (and posts) for them to be found and brought up early in google. Now I know a lot of image placement in google is through site popularity, but it's also through optimisation.

So far I have what is actually written in the blog post, tags at the bottom, and names of images? How important are these, and any others? At the moment I generally write a load of drivel to go with the photossuspect, without any specific aim for keywords, will changing to include important words make any difference? Tags, I try and include a few of the most common atributes (manly for my own blog useability), should I be using more and tailoring them more for search engines? Finally image names, my images are either hosted on my gallery (older ones) and flickr (newer ones), but the names are generally just IMGxxxx, should I be making an effort to describe them in the name?

From past experience google doesn't trawl my gallery, but it does my blog (when it was up, just been put up again after a year so I assume it will take a few days to catalogue it).

Last of all, is this all just pointless, and a waste of time?

 

[Richard King]

Gallery - you can use Mod Rewrite to make the URLs and structure more appealing to search engines. You can actually name images correctly. Eg call a picture of a lion lion.jpg. You can make sure there is the correct info in the exif and keywords, including colour, location etc.. You can make sure that the gallery template you are using encourages google to follow links (remember gallery security will prevent google from directly accessing images with the wrong permissions). bearing this in mind, you may need to adjust your .htaccess to allow google access. You can also write descriptions in all your albums, and for each image.

Wordpress - there are some excelent SEO packs available as add-ons. There are also excellent rewrite and security engines, which deal with pretty much everything (all you need to do is add keywords)

 

[Amp34]

Thanks for the reply.

So google indexes keywords in the exif too? That could be very useful to know. I need to get my gallery software working again as at the moment I am using flickr to keep my new images, which I doubt will help my site. As for wordpress I have installed one of the SEO packs, and i'll have a look at the rewrites add ons and see what I can find.