Maximize Search Engine Findability

We often get asked, "how can I increase my search engine relevance?" Here are some tips.

• Keywords, keywords, keywords.  Add keywords to the photos on your site. All of them.
• Add gallery descriptions and photo captions.
• Post and contribute to forums and blogs. Link your website in your post.
• Get other sites to link to you.  (Be careful of link farms, though - they'll get you banned from a search engine!)
• Start a blog, and post to it frequently. See examples from Barb Gates and Mike Lane.
• Register your site with Google and the other search engines.
• Link your images on websites (forums, blogs, etc).
  • Google
  • Yahoo
• Put descriptive information in your Bio box. That will be picked up as Meta information. For example when viewing source, it would show:

  <meta name="description" content="blah blah blah blah" />
  

  • to hide tihis text, wrap it in a <div> like this: <div id="bioText">blah blah blah</div>  then use CSS to hide it if you want

  • #bioText{display: none;}
    

• Do NOT put keyword spam in your head tag, or other parts of your site.  It could get you blacklisted, having the opposite effect.  Use instead, SmugMug keywords, and don't forget the biobox descriptive text above

If you do these things, and keep up with them, your search results will greatly improve.

Another question that is often asked, "Can I put in my own META tags on my SmugMug site?". The answer is no, that information cannot be changed. The good news, though, is that modern search engines largely ignore META tags because people use them to try to spam search engines. The search engines have gotten wise.    In addition, the "powered by SmugMug" in the search results on Google can't be changed at the present time, we're sorry.

Google Image Search: Your images will be found via GIS if you link them with meta info in blogs, forum posts, and other websites.   Search for the word firescape in google image search, you'll find an image of mine linked on www.moonriverphotography.com. 

Some references:

• A little bit of PageRank revealed

• PageRank explained

• 10 things SEOs don't want you to know

There is a great discussion on Dgrin that may also help.