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Microstock Photography Forum - General => Symbiostock => Symbiostock - SEO & Marketing => Topic started by: Leo Blanchette on March 22, 2013, 23:04
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Its worth posting this before you deploy your sites and put up your images:
Lets say you upload to six or seven agencies. They extract meta-data from your images, and what you have is this:
somesite.com/your-identical-sounding-image-which-competes-with-itself/
somesiteother.com/your-identical-sounding-image-which-competes-with-itself/
superquickstockpics.com/your-identical-sounding-image-which-competes-with-itself.php
yet-another-agency.com/images/your-identical-sounding-image-which-competes-with-itself.html
...You get the picture. Google sees these as relatively identical, and will often favor the one that got uploaded to first, or perhaps use some other smaller factors in giving search weight.
So here are some pointers to give yourself an immediate advantage:
- Although its easy to upload hundreds of images and immediately publish them, save them to drafts instead. Change their verbage, then publish.
- Do what you can to make each image unique from its counterparts found on the web, especially in the URL and title.
- Give a little more description keeping in mind which keywords/phrases you wish to optimize for. Even a few paragraphs if you think the image is worth it, and is a proven seller. Mark one or two important keywords/phrases in bold.
-Give your site more than routine attention as just another site to upload to. Consider as your garden, your home base, and something to pay attention to. Keep it unique as much as possible in terms of content. If you give your site the personal attention early on, you will find it becomes a strong earner for you within a year.
-Post random and interesting blogs on things your customers might enjoy, even silly stuff. It keeps your site getting spidered.
-If you happen to specialize in a particular area of imaging, be sure to name your site after it.
To this day, the majority of my traffic comes from my earliest images where I went the extra mile to optimize for keywords.
There is volumes to be said, but unique content is most important. I've been giving a lot of attention to SEO and meaningful semantic markup in the Symbiostock theme, so any added effort you give (especially on the image pages) will only help.
Please use this SEO board as much as you can. Its your main advantage in going independent.
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Thanks Leo for all your effort, and for this interesting post which gives lots of food for thought.
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I never would have thought of that. Great advice.
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Not sure what impact it will have, but I have taken some of my vector designs and reconfigured them a bit (colors, orientation, sizes) to upload to my SymbioStock site. Hopefully, along with Leo's fantastic suggestions above, some of my content will appear in Google image search and direct people to my site instead of the several stock agency sites that already have my content uploaded.
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I can't test this myself as image processing isnt working yet for me, but does the new file name of the image (which comes from the title I understand) also have "stock-photo" added to it? I notice that most of the images from the agencies have "stock-photo-your-image-title-here.jpg"
Should I add that manually?
Steve
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I can't test this myself as image processing isnt working yet for me, but does the new file name of the image (which comes from the title I understand) also have "stock-photo" added to it? I notice that most of the images from the agencies have "stock-photo-your-image-title-here.jpg"
Should I add that manually?
Steve
It appears that the image is renamed to a number and the words "royalty-free-content" are added to the preview file name.
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I looked at your site - are you sure you clicked that option under Settings Permalinks to select Post name as the naming format for each post? I don't think the images should be named in the way they are on your site. If you mouse over the image on this site: http://www.photomining.com/q/?image=chalcopyrite-mineral-sample-with-gold-and-copper-with-pyrite (http://www.photomining.com/q/?image=chalcopyrite-mineral-sample-with-gold-and-copper-with-pyrite) you get the full title in the jpg name.
Steve
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I looked at your site - are you sure you clicked that option under Settings Permalinks to select Post name as the naming format for each post? I don't think the images should be named in the way they are on your site. If you mouse over the image on this site: [url]http://www.photomining.com/q/?image=chalcopyrite-mineral-sample-with-gold-and-copper-with-pyrite[/url] ([url]http://www.photomining.com/q/?image=chalcopyrite-mineral-sample-with-gold-and-copper-with-pyrite[/url]) you get the full title in the jpg name.
Steve
I can't set the permalinks until my webhost changes a setting on their end. Otherwise it wipes out my entire website and I have to completely delete the entire wordpress installation. I'm working on look and feel for now. :)
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I'm all fixed up and ready to network! -edit, Seriously though, who wants to share just to test things out?
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I looked at your site - are you sure you clicked that option under Settings Permalinks to select Post name as the naming format for each post? I don't think the images should be named in the way they are on your site. If you mouse over the image on this site: [url]http://www.photomining.com/q/?image=chalcopyrite-mineral-sample-with-gold-and-copper-with-pyrite[/url] ([url]http://www.photomining.com/q/?image=chalcopyrite-mineral-sample-with-gold-and-copper-with-pyrite[/url]) you get the full title in the jpg name.
Steve
Screen shot below of my permalink settings.
Ugh, if this is wrong I have a feeling I have to start over. :(
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Thats correct. The URL is a biggie in search relevance. The ?variable=value&somethingelse=whatever is baaad
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Thats correct. The URL is a biggie in search relevance. The ?variable=value&somethingelse=whatever is baaad
Thanks Leo!
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Is there a max number of characters that we can put in the title? And is "stock photos" a good choice to add into the title?
Steve
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Is there a max number of characters that we can put in the title? And is "stock photos" a good choice to add into the title?
Steve
I'm not sure about a max number of characters, but under 70/80 is good for seo. "Stock photo" is a very good thing to put in title if your looking for potential customers who put "stock photo" into their google search.
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Leo , may I ask a question , im sorry if it was answered somewhere ?
Im not clear how whole thing will function but a main question would be:
Is there going to be some kind of search engine which can search images trough all symbyostock sites or that's not achievable ?
Thanks
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There will be a few options which people might choose to pay for inclusion.
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Google has started indexing my pictures, only small ones are visible so far with some pictures of my network as well
google image search: site:aseanphotostock.com
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Thats awesome. People should announce their sales when they start happening.
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Thats awesome. People should announce their sales when they start happening.
I just need a few hundred more on my rare earth site before I start contacting the buyers I have in mind. :)
(the great part of niche photography is you can find your audience pretty easily)
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Bump - good post Leo, thanks. I understand a lot more of this now.
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Leo , may I ask a question , im sorry if it was answered somewhere ?
Im not clear how whole thing will function but a main question would be:
Is there going to be some kind of search engine which can search images trough all symbyostock sites or that's not achievable ?
Thanks
there are 2 so far:
http://symbiostock.info (http://symbiostock.info)
http://symbiostock.cascoly.com (http://symbiostock.cascoly.com)
each sym site produces xml files that can be harvested & collated into an external database
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Looks like 123rf is doing sth really good in SEO. For Most of the images search for my images in google, I first get result from 123rf and then rest of the agencies.
A related question: are the keywords that are populated with the image used only for image search within the site or are they picked up by google as well?
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They are picked up by google, which is why it is important to have comprehensive (but not spam) keywords and also use compound keywords - such as "New york" rather than "new" and "york", neither of which are appropriate for a New York image. Google can properly read those, Symbiostock.info searches them and I'm sure we will get a fix to the in-site search soon.
Steve
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Looks like 123rf is doing sth really good in SEO. For Most of the images search for my images in google, I first get result from 123rf and then rest of the agencies.
A related question: are the keywords that are populated with the image used only for image search within the site or are they picked up by google as well?
I think though that 123rf bury internal links into each image linking to similiar images on the site. This is one of the ways they increase their SEO
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Ha! Only 2 days and 17 from my 24 uploaded images are indexed by Google! :D Great work, Leo!!!