I've gone through a bunch of SEO plugins to get the descriptions of the images automatically added to the meta tag description and wasn't successful with that.

Now I have a SEO plugin installed is SEO Ultimate and all I can do is add the description manually for each image in order to get the image description added into the meta tags.

How do you do it in order to get optimal SEO results?

I would say: "none"

latest versions of wordpress are very well optimized anyway..

the most important thing would be to write unique titles and meaningful descriptions.. postname option in the permalinks section which symbiostock utilizes will create a nice url..

I would keep it as clean as possible..

Quote from: cidepix on March 29, 2013, 17:03
I would say: "none"

latest versions of wordpress are very well optimized anyway..

the most important thing would be to write unique titles and meaningful descriptions.. postname option in the permalinks section which symbiostock utilizes will create a nice url..

I would keep it as clean as possible..

I wanted to do what you suggest - use no SEO plugin whatsoever.

But when I run meta tag checkers on the product pages with my images on Symbiostock it won't display the descritpion that is shown on the actual page but not in the meta tags - so the search engine won't display the page with a description as far as I can tell.

I'm not a SEO Pro by all means - I heavily depend on Google searches to find out what makes sense and what is necessary and I found this tool:
http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

in order to check my meta tags and search result previews for each of my pages. That's when I noticed that the raw installation of Wordpress wouldn't show me the image descriptions.

Maybe I'm just asking a stupid and unnecessary question but with this SEO plugin the page preview (for search engines) looks "good".

I highly recommend Wordpress SEO by Yoast - http://yoast.com/

This guy really seems to know his stuff, it's updated very frequently and has helped me hugely with improved SEO on www.microstockman.com

I will definitely be using it on my new Symbiostock site.

I agree, Yoast is great. I have it installed on my Symbistock testing site and it seems to work well with the theme so far. I used it on a few other sites with good results.

Is this something that should be learned and set up when the site is started or is it something that can be done later as I have looked at it but don't have a clue what most of it means and if I stop to learn more about that it means that it is longer before I get my site sorted

You can learn it at your leisure. As you continue using wordpress and watching everyone else you'll know what direction to go in.

That is a relief, have enough to learn/do at the moment

Quote from: Microstock Man on March 31, 2013, 07:22
I highly recommend Wordpress SEO by Yoast - http://yoast.com/

This guy really seems to know his stuff, it's updated very frequently and has helped me hugely with improved SEO on www.microstockman.com

I will definitely be using it on my new Symbiostock site.

Agree.  Excellent plugin.

A question for you SEO experts out there!

I already have a reasonably well indexed blog that comes up in the Google searches. I keep it up to date with weekly/fortnightly posts. Would it be advantageous to add my stock photo site as a part of this existing site - ie use stock.backyardsilver.com or create a new site/url altogether and just link the two together?

Would my images get a higher placement in Google searches in one option or the other?

Steve

Interesting question.. Current best practice SEO is to have your company name as your URL, http://www.backyardsilver.com/ - you're trying to establish an internet brand in effect.

Option 1  If you add it as stock.backyardsilver.com to your existing site, then it will benefit from your current search position and legacy.

Option 2 would be to establish it as a new domain linking to a more established one (your blog). This would benefit your new site, but not your existing one.

Option 1 would be the best way to get a higher initial ranking IMO. The only downside is if having a stock. extension in front of your domain name in any way hinders ranking; not come across that one before.

It can take up to 6 weeks to get a new site indexed if you decide on a new URL. It's probably more important that whichever way you go you get plenty of good links in and out. Funnily enough I was reading your blog last week, which is why it seemed fair to chip in here as I enjoyed it, not come across it before..

Oldhand

Thanks for the kind comments about my blog!!

I'm struggling at the moment with various issues around this new site - it doesn't work with 1and1 where my main blog is housed, so I'm trying to build it on a new host. Moving all my stuff from 1and1 would be quite a project and I want to make sure that I only do the move once. I think I'll play around for a bit and then decide how to best do this. I suppose I could also have the stock photos as a new element under my main blog - eg backyardsilver.com/stock and that new folder is where the stock agency occurs.

That would be easy to do once I have sorted out my hosting!

Steve

Hmm, I tried Yoast as it looked super promising but it didn't create the meta description tags for my image pages...

It might work well with auto generating meta tags, meta keywords regarding blog posts but not with the Symbiostock theme - at least for me and I could be doing many things wrong as well.

I'm using SEO Ultimate right now and get a nice, clean meta titles and meta descriptions - all I was looking for so I stick with it.

I've been testing the Worpress SEO by Yoast and have some questions.  The image analysis shows I'm failing on these counts - the first two are red and the others are yellow.  Any tips to point me in the right direction would be appreciated.

>There are 32 words contained in the body copy. This is far too low and should be increased.  I'm used to keeping descriptions reasonably clean and direct.  Is it better to add additional or more detailed description of what is being viewed? 
>No images appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.  Seems like this would be for a blog page but doesn't apply to this situation unless we could add clickable thumbnails to other images from the series. 
>No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.  Again, maybe clickable thumbnails or a link to a lightbox if we could have that as a feature someday?  (maybe one of those Plugins to purchase Leo?)
>The page title contains keyword / phrase, but it does not appear at the beginning; try and move it to the beginning. How critical is this?  I don't want all my images from a series starting with the same word and it may not be the best description.
>No subheading tags (like an H2) appear in the copy. I'm not sure what an H2 Subheading tag is.  I'd happily consider including if I knew what it was!

Quote from: klsbear on April 10, 2013, 00:54
I've been testing the Worpress SEO by Yoast and have some questions.  The image analysis shows I'm failing on these counts - the first two are red and the others are yellow.  Any tips to point me in the right direction would be appreciated.

>There are 32 words contained in the body copy. This is far too low and should be increased.  I'm used to keeping descriptions reasonably clean and direct.  Is it better to add additional or more detailed description of what is being viewed? 
>No images appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.  Seems like this would be for a blog page but doesn't apply to this situation unless we could add clickable thumbnails to other images from the series. 
>No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.  Again, maybe clickable thumbnails or a link to a lightbox if we could have that as a feature someday?  (maybe one of those Plugins to purchase Leo?)
>The page title contains keyword / phrase, but it does not appear at the beginning; try and move it to the beginning. How critical is this?  I don't want all my images from a series starting with the same word and it may not be the best description.
>No subheading tags (like an H2) appear in the copy. I'm not sure what an H2 Subheading tag is.  I'd happily consider including if I knew what it was!

Regarding the outbound links...once I get all my images loaded, I will go back and link to others that are similar.

Regarding subheading tags like H2  in your first line of your description, whatever focus words you are using, type this

Quote< h2>Focus words< /h2>

except remove the spaces (didn't want to break this page) Search engines love h2 tags.

Quote from: klsbear on April 10, 2013, 00:54
I've been testing the Worpress SEO by Yoast and have some questions.  The image analysis shows I'm failing on these counts - the first two are red and the others are yellow.  Any tips to point me in the right direction would be appreciated.

>There are 32 words contained in the body copy. This is far too low and should be increased.  I'm used to keeping descriptions reasonably clean and direct.  Is it better to add additional or more detailed description of what is being viewed? 
>No images appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.  Seems like this would be for a blog page but doesn't apply to this situation unless we could add clickable thumbnails to other images from the series. 
>No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.  Again, maybe clickable thumbnails or a link to a lightbox if we could have that as a feature someday?  (maybe one of those Plugins to purchase Leo?)
>The page title contains keyword / phrase, but it does not appear at the beginning; try and move it to the beginning. How critical is this?  I don't want all my images from a series starting with the same word and it may not be the best description.
>No subheading tags (like an H2) appear in the copy. I'm not sure what an H2 Subheading tag is.  I'd happily consider including if I knew what it was!

You will never reach the recommended 300 words per page for image pages, unless you have HUGE descriptions!

With this plugin, it cannot tell what happens on the page after publish. For instance, Leo has coded in that the page includes an image (your photo for sale). But the plugin is looking for an image within the page, visible from the editing screen which you wont have ever, unless you manually insert an extra image (not sure why you would want to do that). So some of these things you just have to accept that you wont tick the boxes on. But that doesn't mean that Google wont index or rate your page well.

Speaking of SEO your image page has elements in the code that tell google what sort of image it is - in this case a creative work by such-and-such author, not just a random picture happening on the page. So it goes a little beyond even what the SEO plugin will tell you.

Just a strategy for you established people -

Your never going to have the time to meet that checklist on every image. Its grading article-style content.

But if you have a favorite image(s) which you know will do well, use it as a sort of "lighthouse" to the rest of your site. Put the love into it's description, try to complete the checklist...etc. Even if that image doesn't get purchased, it will be responsible for netting a lot of visitors because its highly searchable. Its a good strategy.

The more images you do this with, the more they will act as a lighthouse bringing in people to the rest of your content.

Thanks Cathy & Tim.  I'll try those H2 Tags!

Quote from: Leo on April 10, 2013, 01:38
Just a strategy for you established people -

Your never going to have the time to meet that checklist on every image. Its grading article-style content.

But if you have a favorite image(s) which you know will do well, use it as a sort of "lighthouse" to the rest of your site. Put the love into it's description, try to complete the checklist...etc. Even if that image doesn't get purchased, it will be responsible for netting a lot of visitors because its highly searchable. Its a good strategy.

The more images you do this with, the more they will act as a lighthouse bringing in people to the rest of your content.

This sounds like good thinking. And it's something you can keep going back to, once you've got the bulk of your images uploaded.
Thanks Leo!

Quote from: klsbear on April 10, 2013, 02:04
Thanks Cathy & Tim.  I'll try those H2 Tags!

No worries

Quote from: klsbear on April 10, 2013, 02:04
Thanks Cathy & Tim.  I'll try those H2 Tags!

It will create another line of text below the image that is the same as the title (or you can use the focus words first then add more to the sentence), and seems redundant but its all about the seo. If no one finds our images, we have just been wasting our time.

Well, it's hard to advice that which plugin to use but for convenience you can check out these top 5 SEO plugins. I hope that it will help you on making right selection and improve your website ranking.

Simply installing a plugin could not fully assure your website's ranking because search engines have toughen their parameters a lot hence it has become necessary to pay equivalent attention over content quality, font readability, and the most important speed up your load time. In order to boost loading speed you will have to evade using graphics rich substance in website.       

I use yoast for my symbiostock site, and as others have mentioned try to optimize a few of the thousands of images. 

I've included some other ideas for promoting your symbio site at http://cascoly-images.com/pix/symbiostock-network-how-do-i-promote/

or  for makling interactive contact sheets you can post on other sites:
http://cascoly-images.com/pix/how-to-make-interactive-contact-sheets/

Yoast = Joost. A dutch guy