Foliovision » WordPress images

SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images

alec — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:05:59 +0000

We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.

Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.

As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.

Most websites publish their images like this:

Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.

Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:

For bonus points link that image to a larger version of the same properly labelled image:

For extra bonus points put that image in a h5 tag with a proper caption, close to if not identical to the alt tag:

Fortron PFC ZEN fanless power supply

If all that sounds like a huge hassle - when you do it for every image - you are absolutely right. It is a huge hassle to optimize for Google images by hand.

Which is why we built the SEO Images (part of Foliopress WYSIWYG) plugin.

With SEO Images, all of the above is happens automatically.

You only need to give the image the correct name (words separated by hyphens) and upload to the correct directory.

Automatically all the rest is added to your image:

alt tag
thumbnail (whatever size you prefer)
link to larger version image
caption
width and height
lightbox

If you want a lot of visitors from Google Images, you only need to use SEO Images for a few months and you will have the rankings and the visitors to go with them.

Here are the Google Images result for our example from above, the Zen Power Supply. Of 107,000 images, spots one and two are from Foliovision.com. The large and the small version of that image.

SEO Images Google Images results

Why a few months? Historically indexing in Google Images is much slower than for the rest of Google.

Chris and Stephen, in the future, please keep our secrets to yourselves!

Also check out Problogger Formatting images for SEO.

By Alec

SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images

Post from: Foliovision

Site Renovation Day

alec — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:52:30 +0000

Spent most of the day working on Foliopress WYSIWYG together with Peter Baran.

Our solution for the Wordpress WYSIWYG and image handling nightmare is coming along quite brilliantly well. This is what the basic toolbar looks like.

Foliopress WYSIWYG toolbar preview

Foliopress WYSIWYG offers true What You See is What You Get Editing for Wordpress.

It is backwards compatible with legacy code (hello Xstandard/TinyMCE)
It doesn't break complex forms (hello TinyMCE/Xstandard)
It doesn't discard whole posts (hello Xstandard)
It doesn't go haywire and create more and more nested P tags (hello WYSIWYG Pro)
It doesn't look like hell in the Wordpress interface (hello normal FCK)
It doesn't make uploading images a never ending and hopeless struggle (hello Wordpress uploader)
It doesn't make your clients hopping mad and lead them to breaking everything (Plaintext/RAW html)
Your drafts look like exactly like your posts will, without having to waste time with a preview function (hello Xstandard)
You have unlimited standard undo from the keyboard (hello Xstandard)
Very easy to configure (including site WYSIWYG) (hello Xstandard, TinyMCE, FCK)

In short, Foliopress WYSIWYG is what you always wished the Wordpress Editor would do. I'm using it now and can't believe no one created and editor like this earlier.

I'm waiting for John to get back off holiday so I can put it up for downloading (we must do a custom implementation of his excellent Wordpress download manager Drainhole). We plan to release Foliopress WYSIWYG and Foliopress SEO Images under the Creative Commons strictest license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. What does that mean?

Basically anybody is free to use Foliopress WYSIWYG for non-profit websites. We encourage and support creativity and personal expression in all forms. But for commercial websites there will be a small charge, likely with a per site license. Why should someone running two small commercial sites pay the same as someone running 300 commercial weblogs?

Currently the only WSYIWYG editor which actually works on Wordpress belongs to the Semiologic pack and costs $25 for a personal license. It's a very good deal, but Foliopress WYSIWYG editor is much, much better (sorry Dennis). Specifically, Foliopress WYSIWYG is better looking, has more complete and easier to use options, offers true WYSIWYG editing and handles images at a totally different level.

You will save yourself a ton of time by using Foliopress WYSIWYG. And frustration. Money is good. Less frustration - on the web - is even better. You wil write more posts and enjoy the writing more.

The best complete freebie out there for commercial use is Dean's FCK Editor for Wordpress. There's nothing wrong with Dean's WYSIWYG editor (and lots good, including a rich options panel) but it's not very good looking and pretty clunky. We sent Dean some core code which would make his editor compatible with our SEO Images plugin for FCK. Unfortunately we didn't hear back from him. He's probably swamped in mail (so am I Dean, if you must know).

In the meantime, there's a lot to clean up on this site. I got to some of it:

The long missing breadcrumbs so that people could navigate up in the tools seciton.
The few downloads which weren't working (misconfigured Drainhole).
The shrinking deep menu in the static pages section.
Documentation and screenshots for the Mambo Embedded Menus plugin.

Merry Christmas! A working Wordpress Editor. A few days late, but it's been 2000 years coming.

[sniplet signup]

By Alec

Site Renovation Day

Post from: Foliovision

WordPress Photo Galleries: State of the WordPress Images War

alec — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:18:33 +0000

I'm on a professional WordPress mailing list and this interesting question came up:

I'm using Wordpress 2.2 as a CMS to create a site for a client with a small business. My client wants a portfolio page (not necessrily a WP Page) with a list of thumbnails that will each link to its own "gallery" page which will include multiple photographs with some descriptions. My client is a non-programmer who will need to update and add to the portfolio page on her own.

I've been looking at WPG2 and wondering if this will accomplish my needs. I've seen you can put photos in posts, but can you link those post photos to a WP Page that contains more photos from that category in a gallery style (such as the embedded WPG2)? I will also need descriptions about those photos on that Page. I've looked at other sites that have WPG2 embedded within Pages, but their Pages don't contain photo descriptions beyond the photo title.

Does WPG2 seem a good fit? Or is there another plugin that works better? Or will this not be possible?

Alas, Tracy, all of the galleries in WordPress stink. Both Gallery 1 and 2 are way too top heavy on their own. Mixing Gallery with WordPress would be a fatal PHP cocktail, capable of choking the most powerful server and confusing the most adroit programmer.

We've spent whole days at Foliovision playing around with what's out there in terms of WordPress image plugins and there's nothing I would recommend.

The closest thing to what you want are (listed in order of least amount of work to get something passable):

All have huge problems with URLs and reliability. ZenPhoto is by far the best in terms of simplicity and clean URLs, but it's not well integrated into WordPress just yet.

If you can make any of the above work, without clunkiness and/or very ugly URLs, please comment below. If you find something better, let us know.

At Foliovision, we are currently doing some work on an images plugin but it won't be for larger galleries but for embedding images directly into posts in a simplified workflow. As soon as FV Images is ready, we'll be posting it here.

For the moment, if you want something clean, I'd have to recommend doing it by hand (uploading all the images in both full size and thumbnail and linking and embedding them).

Ecto (available for Windows and Mac) can also be a great help when you have a lot of images to include in a post. The quality of the thumbnailing is poor on Typepad (I have one weblog over there still) but could be handtweaked on WordPress. It can be tricky to get Ecto to play nicely with WordPress built-in XML-RPC.

By Alec

WordPress Photo Galleries: State of the WordPress Images War

Post from: Foliovision