# How should I use Lightroom 3 with SEO in mind ?



## perzennstrom (Nov 28, 2010)

Hello all from a newbie at this forum from Berlin !

I have recently become very interested in trying to improve my websites ranking http://perzennstrom.com and I wanted to see if You good people out there have some thoughts on this, in my view, pretty thorny subject. I have been searching this forum for a post about this but couldn't find anything so I ventured out there myself...
I think I have a basic grasp of the specific problems facing photographers with very little text content on their websites (We need to make sure that the search engines can read the images and gleen the relevant keywords from the images = captions / meta data / keywords ?
My ideal work-flow scenario would go something like this:

Shoot -&gt; Import images -&gt; re-name the images with a relevant file name (both for my own archival purposes & with SEO in mind) -&gt; Give all images in the whole shooting relevant keywords...
After editing -&gt; give the images that will get published unique captions ( My thought is that since it would be hard to give every image from the whole shooting a unique caption, I would limit this to the images that will be published or are most likely to get published)
I'm going on about "uniqueness" here a bit since I believe I read somewhere that You might get penalized if You duplicate too much, correct or not ?

Ideally, to be effective I would like to be able to do all this in one fell swoop as I import and edit !!!

I'm not a coder and I basically looking for smart ways of streamlining my work-flow with a few things in mind:
*How do I increase my SEO juice when it comes to file-names ?*
I imagine that there are a few theories about this and I'm all ears...
Can a file name be too long from a SEO perspective ?

*What about captions and SEO ?*
How do You go about this ? 
Can a caption be too long from a SEO perspective ?

*Keywords and SEO ?*
How do I get my keywords to "follow & Stick to" the images once they leave LR ?

Since I dread going in and "code in" captions and keywords on the website etc etc I would love to be able to do it once and for all in LR
I'm very interested to hear back from people on "best practices" and hoew You go about this !

Thank You
Per Zennström


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## dj_paige (Nov 28, 2010)

SEO??


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## sizzlingbadger (Nov 28, 2010)

You might want to look here first http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/blog/top-metadata-myths.html


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## Brad Snyder (Nov 28, 2010)

SEO = search engine optimization; a landscape of much confusion, hucksterism and outright fraud. 

A lot of our forum spam here comes from that arena.


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## perzennstrom (Nov 28, 2010)

Wow !
... that was quick !!!

I'll take a look at that article and if I have more questions I'll get back to You !
I'm very Impressed with this forum !
Thanx
pz


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## johnbeardy (Nov 28, 2010)

Also see http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/blog/embedded-metadata-wont-help-seo.html

And I do like Brad's definition!

John


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## matsmithphotog (Nov 28, 2010)

I spent a fair amount of thought space on this subject when starting out with my new website. Here are my conclusions from back then:

- In Lightroom, I tend to set the metadata title, caption, or label (doesn't matter which you use really, just keep it consistent) to a Google-friendly term separated with hyphens. Make every image very different, generic, and think hard about the keywords you want to win online. The two key points are variance and keyword importance. For example, "radio-actor-portrait", "politician-headshot", "beautiful-new-york-wedding-bride", "girl-with-blue-eyes", etc.

- I then export my files, changing the filename to be "my-photography-company-name" + "lightroom-image-label".jpg

The output filename is nice and long, it has variance, and it also has similarity in that it has your name tagged on each and every file. Therefore when it shows up in google image results, or natural search, your photography company is shown without fail on every image.

e.g. "dan-james-photography-gorgeous-hampstead-wedding-bride-makeup.jpg".

Long filenames are good.

- Always keep your google analytics and Webmaster tools close to hand, so you can see the results. I have seen some REALLY interesting things that bring people to my site that I never would have thought. And it helps me direct my marketing.

- As others have noted, embedded metadata doesn't help SEO, but ALT tags do! Set the ALT tag to the same as your filename, without the hyphens. If you want to go the extra mile, find a way of basing your ALT tag on the filename, but with a slight variation.

- Metadata doesn't help SEO right now... but who knows it may well do in the future. Things change very quickly in the world of SEO.

- You can pay someone to 'do your SEO' for you, but it's not a good long-term strategy, as they don't really care about your business. Therefore you are better off trying to understand the concepts yourself.

- This may be obvious to you, but if not, here it is. Use gallery systems on your website that actually allow search engines to see filenames and image ALTs. Most Flash-based galleries don't do this, beware. This is not to say that websites based on Flash galleries don't rank highly; they do, but not necessarily because of the quality and variance of the content. My advice is to stick only with a gallery system that displays images from image links found directly in the HTML source (php source, whatever source)


Hope that helps

Mat


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## perzennstrom (Nov 28, 2010)

OK !
So I read some of the articles from Controlled Vocabulary (very impressive depth of knowledge) about images and metadata (from a SEO) perspective and this is what I took away, please correct me if I'm wrong...

The jury is still out if search engines actually read embedded metadata in images...
Some platforms like PhotoShelter do extract embedded meta data and makes it readable as text = SEO advantage
It's highly advisable to admetadata but maybe not froma SEO perspective.

Correct ?
thanx
pz


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## perzennstrom (Nov 28, 2010)

Thanx Mat for Your comment !

... any thoughts on underscore _ vs. hyphens - ?


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## perzennstrom (Nov 28, 2010)

... forgot something important !

I have a vague understanding of the importance of the ALT tag (and the fact that it gets spammed by spammers cramming in keywords) but what field / category / metadata or whatever in LIGHTROOM translates as an ALT tag once on-line ?
Is the manipulation of ALT tags something I can do in Lightroom or is this pure coding ?

Many thanx again !
pz


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## johnbeardy (Nov 28, 2010)

[quote author=perzennstrom link=topic=11737.msg78821#msg78821 date=129'976991]
OK !
So I read some of the articles from Controlled Vocabulary (very impressive depth of knowledge) about images and metadata (from a SEO) perspective and this is what I took away, please correct me if I'm wrong...

The jury is still out if search engines actually read embedded metadata in images...
Some platforms like PhotoShelter do extract embedded meta data and makes it readable as text = SEO advantage
It's highly advisable to admetadata but maybe not froma SEO perspective.
[/quote]
The jury is NOT out. Some SEO hucksters have heard about embedded metadata and - in the face of the evidence - tell you search engines read it. They do not read embedded metadata.

Add metadata to protect your copyright (to some extent) and so that systems like Photoshelter or your web page can extract that data and add it to the text visible on the web page and in Alt tags, which can then attract search engines. So the SEO reason is indirect.

John


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## perzennstrom (Nov 28, 2010)

Thanx all !

... things are a lot clearer now for me !
p


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## elfroggio (Nov 28, 2010)

[quote author=Brad Snyder link=topic=11737.msg788'9#msg788'9 date=129'974157]
SEO = search engine optimization; a landscape of much confusion, hucksterism and outright fraud. 

A lot of our forum spam here comes from that arena.
[/quote]

Actually, most of the secret sauce as been published by Google itself. At: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf for it's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide in PDF format.

Please note that you should only download it from Google itself, all the others are...

The other place to look at is: Matt Cutts' blog at: http://www.mattcutts.com/ in the older posts, he explains a lot about Google. By the way: who's Matt Cutts?



> Hi, my name is Matt Cutts and I joined Google as a software engineer in January 2'''. I'm currently the head of Google's Web spam team, aka quality control.


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## perzennstrom (Nov 29, 2010)

Hi all !

... just a little sidebar which has a slight relevance to the earlier stuff. I'm a complete novice when it comes to SEO but I implemented a few rudimentary "things-to-do" taken from PhotoShelters free, downloadable pdf reports here: 
http://www.photoshelter.com/mkt/research/
... and to my surprise my blog 1'horses is now #1 on Google for the admittedly low competition string"contemporary fashion photography blog" but hey...
The blog is here if You're interested: http://1'horses.blogspot.com


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## matsmithphotog (Nov 30, 2010)

[quote author=perzennstrom link=topic=11737.msg78824#msg78824 date=129'977578]

I have a vague understanding of the importance of the ALT tag (and the fact that it gets spammed by spammers cramming in keywords) but what field / category / metadata or whatever in LIGHTROOM translates as an ALT tag once on-line ?
Is the manipulation of ALT tags something I can do in Lightroom or is this pure coding ?

Many thanx again !
pz
[/quote]

Hey again

Lightroom has no knowledge of the ALT tag on image refs in XHTML.

Think of the ALT tag as a nice printed label you might make to stick under a framed print of your image in an exhibition. 

You can attach the text for that image label as a metadata item in Lightroom (this is useful), but then you somehow have to find a way to get LR to print that label out manually.

Same is true when you publish an image online, the ALT tag goes in separately.

The ALT tag is your way of telling the viewer of the web page what that particular picture is. It's traditionally used for screenreaders for the hard of sight, but also has become useful for other softwares that might want to know what the picture is about - such as search engines taking a peek.

You have two options, either write the ALT tags by hand for each image (these go actually in the XHTML/HTML and they are not stored in the image in any way), or find a gallery or CMS that does this for you.

Here's what I do: I take the sensibly named image name, convert the hyphens into spaces, change to Title Case, and use that for the ALT tag.

[quote author=perzennstrom link=topic=11737.msg78822#msg78822 date=129'9773'6]
Thanx Mat for Your comment !

... any thoughts on underscore _ vs. hyphens - ?
[/quote]

No difference really. But blogs and CMSs that generate image names, ALTs, and URLs usually use hyphens, so I stick to those.

I don't believe Google is fussy about such things.

Hope that helps!


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