Plogger: an SEO friendly photo gallery
My aim with the site PicturesFromEarth is to get my pictures exposed to a wide audience. Whenever I surf on the web and am searching for pictures, I’m appalled at the way pictures are presented. Everything seems to be made for people not to find them!
At first, I joined flickr. I think these guys did a great job to create a lively community. It’s also great to find pictures if you search directly from their site. However, for other search engines, I think it is a disaster. As an example, just look at the URL of my most popular picture on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fanz/134271077/. I mean what does this tell users about my picture? Lions? Africa? I don’t think /134271077/ tells them much! When surfing I saw plenty of examples like that and decided I wanted to try something else.
I wanted to create a simple site, but made for the internet, users and understandable by search engines. I want my URLs to be descriptive, my pages to have a nice title and a little description of the picture. But I don’t want to spend hours coding every page manually either!
So I went looking around and decided to give Plogger a try. It looks extremely simple and promises SEO friendly URLs. That’s a good start! So far I have been very happy with my choice, but I had to do a few tweaks to make it look exactly how I wanted it.
The first thing I did was to enable the option “Generate Cruft-Free URLs”, to have SEO-friendly URLS. However my first problem with that was that URLs were ending with the extension of the picture (.jpg) which I didn’t like since these are html pages and should not be labeled wrongly. To fix this I used this simple tweak:
http://dev.plogger.org/changeset/528
After that I was left with URLs without trailing slashes which annoyed me as well, so I applied this two revisions:
http://dev.plogger.org/changeset/546
http://dev.plogger.org/changeset/547
To apply these just download the zip archives at the bottom and replace the relevant files on your server.
Now my URLs look a lot more like I wanted them to look. Check this one for example:
http://picturesfromearth.com/travel/madagascar/grand-tsingy-national-park-valley/
Isn’t that much clearer?
Thanks for the article and links, you’ve been very helpful to me! I Google’d “photo galleries for SEO” and your site was the sixth link on the page. I’m glad I stopped by because I found useful information as well as a really cool photography site! You’ve done an excellent job SEO’ing all your images and URL’s! Adding you to fav’s now! Thanks again!
Excellent article!! And Excellent links! I will use these!! Thanks SO much for sharing my friend!