On my Flickr account, I get a very large portion of my photo views from Google and Yahoo search results. Flickr has a very large amount of traffic (#33 on Alexa currently), and the search engines seem to rank it favorably. Yet, if there are 10 photos of the same thing on Flickr, which one comes up on top for Google? What factors come into play, and how can you optimize your photos to have the best chance at highest rank?
I was at the Official Google Meetup in Cambridge the other night where I had a chance to poke at the brains of the very people who work at Google who would know the answers to these questions. It ends up that what effects the search ranking of photos currently is far simpler than I had imagined.
The things that effect search rank are:
- Inbound Links: The number, quality of (via Pagerank), and of text (both of the link itself and the text surrounding) links pointing to a photo’s page effect if the photo ranks highly. As always with SEO, having links from multiple strong websites is better than having multiple links on a from a single strong site. So in short, the more people using your photos, linking to them with rich and descriptive text, the better.
- The Photo Title: The title of the photo becomes both the H1 and the title for the page, as well as the ALT text for the photo. Make this descriptive as you would any blog post. You want it to be not too long, and filled with strong unique words. “Sunset” is probably a poor title, but “Sunset in Winter over the Charles River” is likely far better. Under no circumstance should you keep the default name that the camera kicks out like, “DSC_0057″. Even if you can’t uniquely title every photo from an event, put up something that describes the event like, “ROFLCon 2008 at MIT” for all of the photos. Its better than nothing.
- Other on-page text. The group that your photo belongs to is an H3, as are any photo pools. From what I can tell, your description under the photo and tags are just viewed as normal text, but since there’s so little of it on the page it is taken heavily into account (although I could imagine that text in the comments could outweigh these easily).
That’s it. I really thought there might be more to it (and maybe in the future there will be). They said that whatever Google builds, they want to be platform agnostic and work equally on Flickr, Picassa, Smugmug, etc. The only other thing that will have minor effect would be the size of your photo, since people can filter on Google to search by photo size but generally as long as its VGA resolution then it doesn’t matter.
What doesn’t matter:
- Number of contracts you have via Flickr
- Number of groups the photo is a member of (except for the influence of the H3 text on-page)
- Number of tags (its just text on page, and the text overall is sparse so you aren’t going to really overdo it and dillute things)
- Number of internal photo views via Flickr
- EXIF Camera Data (currently Google doesn’t really read into these)
- Creative Commons vs Rights Reserved license
- Geotagging (might matter at some point, but doesn’t seem to effect things overall right now)
So my general optimization tips:
- Properly title every photo you put up there. Try to have unique titles for each one as much as possible. Include the name of the event in the title somewhere (ie, “Moot, Founder of 4chan, ROFLThing 2009“) because the group overall doesn’t attach well since its only an H3.
- Use groups and sets to help organize things. This is good practice overall.
- Use tags heavily
- Use a description when you can, filling out things that don’t really fit as tags
- Submit the photo to as many pools as possible. While the name of the pools, like your groups, is only an H3, it still helps massively for getting traffic and comments.
- Upload the larger resolution photos where possible (so that if someone is searching for a “large” image via google it will appear)
- Consider use of a Creative Commons license to encourage people to reuse and credit (linking to) the photo. More links = higher ranking and Creative Commons is a great way to get your content used and linked to.
- Encourage as many people to use the photo on their page (and link into the photo and use good ALT text), or simply to link to the photos (with good title text). Suggest to people text to use in, or around the links. The more consistent this text is, the more Google will understand “what” your photo is, aside from just your title. One easy way to do this is to send people links to photos of them, and encourage them to use the photos.
- From an event, focus on getting one specific photo promoted as much as possible. It might not be possible to get all of them highly ranked and promoted, but if you can get a lot of people linking into a single photo then that will be massively helpful. Start off by putting that photo on your blog, tumblr, etc and encouraging everyone to do the same. Getting 100 photos ranked highly from a single thing will be hard, but you can get one of them going well pretty easily.
- Search on Google for what you’re planning to name the photo. If a lot of other photos come up, consider tweaking the name a bit. If you get something unique, it will likely appear near the top.
SEO, Google and overall ranking is something that’s constantly changing. The Google guys suggested that one of the best places to contact them for up-t0-date information is in the Google Webmaster Tools Forums. All of my photos can be found on my Flickr page and are Creative Commons Licensed.
