Online Photo Gallery: drive traffic and increase social media activity
-
I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events. One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery. We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com.
I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com. I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family. So my questions are:
1. How do I get visitors to spend more time on my website vs. leaving to go to the www.smugmug.com website?
2. How do I get visitors to share our website/gallery/photos via social media like Google+, Facebook, etc... and bring traffic to our website?
-
Hi Mark,
I took a look at 2 of my competitors who have professional looking websites and who also use www.smugmug.com to host their online galleries. This is what I found. Are either one of them doing this correctly?
Company 1: http://companyname.smugmug.com/SF
Company 2: http://photos.companyname.com/San-Francisco
-
Thanks, this is exactly what I'm looking for! I checked out www.smallpetselect.com and I can't believe how many Facebook "Likes" they have and how many Twitter followers they have, for such a small website.
Do you have any plug-ins or photo gallery embedding software that you can recommend?
-
Great question.
Get rid of smugmug.com and use a simple plug in for your site to keep the photo gallery on the site. You are sending all the value over to them......or create a plug in that allows them to view the site but they have to stay on your site.....
Another option is with some photo gallery sites you can embed the technology and make it part of your site structure.....so it would be at www.yoursite.com/photo gallery
Once you do that the ability to get people to share your site becomes a no brainer because all they need to do is send them to your core photo gallery to look at pictures...and when they click the link they are on your site.
Onc eother thing you missed.....if you can figure out how to upload the photos with met descriptions and seo value you will generate seo value for each picture. For example: the picture should be uploaded as:
persons name_wedding_name of your company_possibly a keyword
Then you will start to get seo value from each picture related to the core keyword (wedding) and your other keywords.
If you want to see some of our stuff in action go to smallpetselect.com. All those animal photos are driving huge social media likes and shares and huge seo value.....
Hope this helps.
Mark
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirecting photos during site redesign?
Hello, We are doing a website redesign for a long-standing client. Their new website is completely different and includes mostly new elements, My question is do we need to redirect photo URLs if they are no longer on the site, and if so where do we redirect them, the homepage? Thank you! Tyler
Image & Video Optimization | | BeyondIndigo0 -
Philosophical: Does Google know when a photo isn't what your meta data says it is? And could you be downgraded for that?
Not something I've ever heard discussed before, probably still a bit too esoteric for present day, but I've always been one to be guided by where I see Google headed rather than trying to game the system as it exists now. So think about it: Most stock and public domain photos are used repeatedly throughout the internet. Google's reverse image search proves that Google can recognize when the same photo is used across dozens of sites. Many of those photos will have alt and/or title text that Google also has crawled. If not it has the content of the page on which the photo exists to consider for context. So if Google has a TON of clues about what a photo is likely to be about, and can in theory aggregate those clues about a single photo from the dozens of sites using it, how might Google treat a site that mislabels it, old school "one of these things is not like the others" style? Would a single site hosting that photo be bolstered by the additional context that the known repeated photo brings in, essentially from other sites? If 10 sites about widgets are using the same widget photo, but the 11th uses an entirely new, never before published photo, would the 11th site then be rated better for bringing something new to the table? (I think this would be almost certainly true, drives home the importance of creating your own graphics content.) Anyway, like I said, all theoretical and philosophical and probably not currently in play, especially since an image can be used in so many different contexts, but it's New Years and things are slow and my brain is running, so I'm curious what other folks might think about that as the future of image optimization.
Image & Video Optimization | | BradsDeals1 -
Meta Tags for Images in Multiple Galleries
For a while now we've had an outside SEO consultant as well as having me in-house doing a variety of work. One of the things our consultant would do was writing up optimized alt & title tags for the image galleries on our ecommerce sites. Recently what came up was what to do when a image appears in multiple galleries (e.g. an image of a bedroom could appear in both the bedrooms gallery & the accent wall gallery). We're not sure whether it would be best practices to use the same exact alt & title tags for an image in all the galleries it appears in or whether that would be too much duplication and each gallery should have different tags despite being the same image. None of it is being done in a deceptive manner, we're just been tailoring how we explain the image based on the specific gallery, landing page, etc. Our consultant is saying that an image should always have the same tags across the entirety of the site but I'm more of the mind that varying them by specific page would help images more readily rank for multiple relevant terms. Any advice?
Image & Video Optimization | | MikeRoberts0 -
Should I create a Google Places listing for an online only store?
We currently run an e-commerce store that is online only. We do have an office address that I could list for Google Places, but it is not open to visitors so I am not sure if this would contravene the TOS. At the moment we are in the process of trying to build reviews and Google's revamped 'Places for Businesses' looks like it would be a great tool for monitoring and responding to reviews. From what I can see, though, it is only available to those with a Google Places listing. I am also looking into independent review services, but typically these cost £100 per month minimum, whereas Places for Business would be free. Is there a way that we can use Google Places to build reviews, given that we do not have an actual shopfront? If not, does anyone have any advice on how an online only store can build reviews in the same manner using Google's own tools?
Image & Video Optimization | | pugh0 -
Rel Author Photo when does it show in SERPS
Hi,
Image & Video Optimization | | Ant71
Ive been using Rel author recently to get my Google+ photo showing up on Google serps. Can someone enlighten me to when people would and wouldnt see it. It appears on peoples results who live near me, however when someone 60 miles away does the same search he does not see the photo just the serps result. It is not a Google+ places entry, just your normal organic result. Any thoughts welcome 🙂0 -
Image Gallery - Name of the image files
I would like to know If I have a image gallery in my website, what name must I put in the image files? Can I associate with the my key-word? Ex: Post about pizza buffet, and than... the images can have the name "pizza-buffet-01, pizza-buffet-02"? Is it wrong? Thank you
Image & Video Optimization | | otimizador20130 -
New site, SEO well considered, no traffic :/ What next?
Hi There! We've built whatphone.com.au with SEO at the top of the list but things are not going as expected. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do, but I was hoping to get some guidance on what to do next to make sure we keep the right focus. This is what we've done to date: Added lots of unique and relevant content, particularly to our blog (and will continue to do so on a weekly basis) Ensured internal linking is strong Optimised each product page around product name (and relevant internal links pointing to it) Ensured the code is clean (ok, we are not a 100% but in a good place) URL structure, metadata, page titles, file names and alt tags following best practice Named the company and registered our domain around one of main keywords we are currently targeting "what phone" What we're working on: Link building Site speed Social signals Rich media (videos, more images) Not a bad effort right? No love from an organic traffic perspective 😕 Ok, the site / domain is no older than 2 months old, it's a very competitive industry, and no inbound links yet, but come on! Questions: Are there any benefits of engaging external providers to help with link building? I'm talking about outsourcing from elancer or similar.. Or is this playing with fire? Have we missed something obvious here? Any help will be greatly appreciated! PS: we currently have some issues with our pricing tables, but will fixed as soon as possible..
Image & Video Optimization | | whatphone0 -
Best practice using Video to increase website pagerank?
Goal: Leverage videos to get links and traffic back to website not video hosting platform site (e.g. YouTube) to generate website leads **Issue: ** If we place a video on a website using video YouTube embed code and video sitemap for the crawlers to index our video DOES show up in search results BUT that link goes back to YouTube. Great for increasing views on YouTube but not increasing link popularity for client website. Question: What are recommendations / best practice for SEO (such as using another player like Viddler, etc.) that will get video results from search engines back to the website? We want to leverage videos to build links and generate leads to client site.
Image & Video Optimization | | jfeitlinger0