Today's question comes from landlord in Colorado who asks, how would a photographer gain any significant page rank for his or her site when the subject that really matters images has no anchor text?
Often the photos alone will sell the photographer to hisor her clients.
How can we overcome this challenge?
That's a fantastic question, because Google doesn't really understand the content of images, yet we're getting better.
We have Google Goggles that can take a picture of a landmark and recognize it as a landmark.
But understanding in general, what an image is one of the hardest problems in computer science.
So the advice that I would give is look at ways that youcan incorporate data around the image.
It could be in the meta information within the image.
It can be the title.
It can be the name of the image.
It can be a paragraph of text around the image.
It can even be characteristics of the web page, like the title of the web page that has that image.
So there are a lot of places to put text.
One tip that I would recommend is introduce a place where people can leave comments.
Because if you think about something like Flickr, if you have a picture, we might not know what that picture is.
But then you've got 30 comments down below, down below it.
And people will say, that is a beautiful portrait.
That woman is so pretty or, oh, I love the light shining in from the side on the barn door or whatever.
And just in the process of users talking about the picture, you'll often end up with the keywords, whether it be portrait or woman or barn door or sunlight that you would like to show up for anyway.
So if you have the time to label your images or maybe label the images that you think are the best, maybe not all of
your images, but put some time in on just the images that you would really like to rank for.
That can make a difference.
And then introducing a functionality where people can comment on images can be another way where you can attract textual content that the search engines can understand.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that as a photographer, you can always promote yourself in all kinds of different ways, from having shows to talking to reporters about yourwork. All of that is ways to get links to your website.
And then the more links you have to your website, you candirect around within to the various photographs.
But naming your galleries having descriptive names for images.
All these sort of tricks are ways to not really tricks techniques to introduce more textual content so that search engines can kind of understand what's in the image, and you can sort of show up a little higher in the search engines.