APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR THE LONG POST! However, I think questions about SEO/Yoast may be important to others as well as to me, so I'll beg your indulgence.

Maybe these issues have to do with the unique nature of a commercial photo-selling site, which is not a "normal" blog like Yoast is meant to deal with. But still, the questions are there.

Last night I installed the Yoast plugin and read through the info. This morning I started the process of trying to turn 600+ red-button image-pages to green. Yikes!!!   So far, I have gotten one image to "greenish", so I guess I've accomplished something. Learned a few things too. Maybe "greenish" is good enough???    I'm beginning to suspect it is.

I get what's going on but do have some questions. I'll phrase them as they relate to this one particular image I just happened to pick to start with:

http://bestnaturestock.com/image/coyote-looks-back-stock-photo/

1. It seems Yoast doesn't recognize that the page is related to an image, since I keep getting this message: "No images appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate." But there IS an image on this and every page. Does Yoast not "see" that? Do I just accept that Yoast doesn't "know everything" and ignore this constant warning, which will never allow me to get any of my image pages to "full green" on the Yoast scale?

2. Yoast is also telling me "The keyword doesn't appear in the first paragraph of the copy, make sure the topic is clear immediately."  But the keyword in question actually IS in the first paragraph. It's the 2nd word of the paragraph, and it's bold face. What the hey?

3. I feel I've written myself silly on this one description. How much more does one need to write for each and every image on a photo-selling site? For this image, Yoast is telling me: "There are 116 words contained in the body copy, this is below the 300 word recommended minimum. Add more useful content on this topic for readers."  Really??? Must each page be the equivalent of a full blog post???

4. I hadn't included any links in my descriptions before, but Yoast told me this: "No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate." So I added links to the 2 "similars" within my own site. I'm still getting that message, so I assume those links aren't "outbound". So... is it okay to link to my own images this way inside the description for this image? Does it help, hurt, or make no difference at all? Worth the bother to do this with "similars" or not???

5. Yoast says: "No subheading tags (like an H2) appear in the copy." So, should I break down my copy into subsections and give one or more a subheading? This isn't hard to do, but I'm trying to understand if this is needed & desirable in a photo description.

6.  Yoast is congratulating me for this: "You've never used this focus keyword before, very good."  The focus keyword in this case is coyote. Obviously. But since I have a whole assortment of images (8 at present, more to come) that will need that same keyword, how can I possibly make Yoast happy by using that keyword only one time on my entire site? And... how many alternatives are there to coyote, or to American black bear or raccoon, etc? I don't see a "fix" for this problem. Is there one?

7. Before I knew what I was doing, I gave my new site a very long name: Martha Marks' Best Nature Stock Photography. That's fine BUT... I now discover that it's eating up way too much space in my allowable title. Leaves me very little room to describe the photo in question. Is there any way to shorten my official title at this point?


I'm sure others are or will be grappling with these same issues, so perhaps discussion of these issues will help others along the way.

BTW, I'm extreeeeeeemely sorry that I didn't install Yoast at the very beginning of setting up my site, even though it would have made that tough stage even harder. Now it seems I need to go back and retrofit the 600 images already on my site. Not going to get the remaining 900 in my port up very fast at this rate.

Thanks in advance to the more experienced folks here for your input!

This is one of mine:

http://www.picture5479.com/image/using-surgical-gloves/

This one is on green for yoast

Thanks! That's very helpful.

Will you have a lot of other images with the same main keyword?

Thats what I do, the way i look at it, if a buyer puts into google young graduates and i have an image tagged for this then its more likely i will show up as opposed to just having a tag for graduate.

Of course I know very little about SEO other than google gives what the searcher wants

Ive done about 200 images out of 1200 so far, all gone to green.

Steve (Cascoly), this is tremendously helpful. Thanks so much for taking time to answer so many of my crabby, PO-ed questions from this morning!

I really do appreciate hearing back from you and from several others, including a few who PM'd me with specific info.

As a result of all this advice and input I've spent this afternoon "mastering" (LOL) SEO with my small set of 8 Coyote images. Somehow managed to get them all to green on Yoast, and also have gotten the "similar images" widget working as it's supposed to. (Thanks, Redneck!!)

Here's that set of images, if you'd like to see them:

http://bestnaturestock.com/image-type/coyotes-images/

Now... just 595 more to go of the current batch already up on my site!!!   

This is truly an amazing group of people. It's because of you guys with knowledge and willingness to share it that I had the courage to plunge into this venture. I'll be happy to pay it forward once I've finally figured out how this SYS system works. Meanwhile... I'm done with Coyotes, on to Bears!!!

Martha

Hi Martha
I think I know what you mean about your title but ....

When you are working on Yeost it will append to your heading/title/url whatever you have called your site in settings

In the Symbiostock (bee) Author Options there is an option to append your choice of wording to the title
under
Append Text to Title:

When you are editing and seo-ing the title of the site will appear, but once you have published it the text appended to title shows up, for instance I use "stock image"
Hope this helps

Yoast wasnt meant to be for image pages, but to get your website noticed. Mainly text based websites. None of my images is green and never will be.

This is my graph from webmaster tools, I started my SEO after I uploaded everything.

I plan on doing that as well once I'm done uploading.

Not to hijack but does Yoast update the sitemap automatically or do you need to do that manually?

Thanks.  I'll work with Yoast for now then down the road get Leo's plugin.

Quote from: Anita Potter on August 12, 2013, 13:07

Quote from: picture5469 on August 12, 2013, 13:04

This is my graph from webmaster tools, I started my SEO after I uploaded everything.

I plan on doing that as well once I'm done uploading.

Not to hijack but does Yoast update the sitemap automatically or do you need to do that manually?

I use Leo's and Yoast. Leos updates automatically.

I use both and I think they both update automatically.

According to this blog:
https://managewp.com/google-seo-by-yoast-guide
If you check the box that says "Check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality." it will update automatically. Weird, but I haven't been able to confirm that on Yoasts site yet.