So you may be incredibly good at optimizing sites and there are hell of statics to prove that thing. Impressive it sounds. Now, do not shrug off in disbelief if I ask you to optimize a website that contains only images, zillions of them and no content at all. Yah, I am talking about photography sites – iStock, Getty Images and their likes as you know. It sounds tough, but there is no point in laying down your arms without a fight. There are ways to make a stock photography site super optimized without doing any sneaky things like stuffing keywords in the title and meta description or adding some really loooong ( oh sorry I stretch the things too far) alt tags. Nope, just follow some basic tips and you are fine. This is how you are supposed to do the magic:
Stay Clam: Stay calm, photography sites are not out of the world thing. They are here and they are here to stay. Do not be obsessed with content; I know having great content is a great help but you can still lead a life without them. Focus on some basic SEO things. Do a SEO Moz crawl or Screaming Frog crawl of the website to have an idea. Try to figure out whether the internal pages have unique title and Meta data or not. If you find any instance of duplicate meta data or stuffing of excessive keywords, just make the necessary changes. Check the navigation and add Google webmaster tools to figure out whether the entire website is crawlable or not.
Faceted Navigation: This is a common issue with stock photography sites. Do a thorough check to ensure that an image cannot be accessed via different paths. If you find any instance where an image can be accessed via different paths or via different session ids, you need to set canonical version for the preferred version of the URL. This will fix the issues of duplicate. Check that you are using the canonical version while internal linking, otherwise you will be sending different signals to Google when it comes to choosing the preferred version for ranking.
Optimize Images: Since images are the one and only thing you are supposed to get ranked for, you need to take extra care that they are fully optimized. Make the URL of the images sensible. For in case of nature images, the probable image URL should be something like this – http://www.example.com/images/nature/sky/blue-sky.jpg . this looks simple and users will have an idea of what the image is all about without clicking on to them. Alt tags should be used against all the images site wide, but do not go to the extreme with them. Try to use something that has relation with the image. For say, use something like this – “Blue sky complemented by warm and gentle weather”. It is short, simple and certainly not spammy. You have at look at some industry leaders like – photos.com or thinkstock. These sites also employ some marketing tactics like offering promotional discount coupons just to increase their popularity. You can also give it a try if you wish so.
Image Sitemap: This is the most important thing that you need to develop for your stock photography sites. Image sitemap gives search engines a clear signal that the website owner wishes to get the images of your website appear in their image search result page. Generating an image sitemap is certainly not a though task. Once you are done with the image sitemap just submit that thing via Google webmaster tool and you are a freeman.
About the guest author: James Smith is a professional blogger and he has written different articles on promotional codes at coupon blogs that houses photos.com promo codes and thinkstock coupon. He is associated with a coupon site where you can find amazing offers on photos.com promo codes, thinkstock coupon and other promotional codes.
This is a unique article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.
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Nice spam blocking pluging