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Search Engine Optimization for Images

I have been wanting to improve the search engine friendliness of Pixaria Gallery for a while now but the main obstacle has been that in order to do this, there would be a lot of changes to the front end templates. Since that was always going to happen with version 3.0 anyway, I decided that it would be best to incorporate these optimisations into this update.

Optimising a website for image searching is difficult because there is no published documentation on how the major search engines index these types of media. That said, there are some common sense guidelines which I have applied in version 3.0:

1. Image titles and captions are in the same HTML container element as the image itself.
2. Image file URLs can be configured to contain the image file name or the image title which results in better context matching.
3. The underlying HTML code is simpler which makes it easier for search engine spiders to associate relevant content with an image file.
4. Canonical URLs are used to ensure that even if an image appears at multiple URLs, the search engine is able to identify the default, correct URL.
5. The text in the HTML title tag has been re-ordered so that the name of the site comes last. This means the content on the page is highlighted to the search engines.
6. Where possible, HTML metadata tags are used to present relevant metadata about galleries and images to search engines.

For best results with search engine optimisation in Pixaria Gallery, there are a couple of important guidelines to remember:

1. Using Adobe Flash to present images on the detail view page will make it harder, if not impossible for your images to be indexed correctly.
2. Turn on search engine friendly URL support in the general settings control panel to improve your site's indexability.
3. Remember to keep image titles, captions and keywords distinct and accurate for each file. If they are the same for hundreds of files, your content will appear to be less unique and will not rank highly.