There is a photo gallery, but no visitors. How to be

Attracting an audience to the "picture" sites

Recently, a familiar photographer contacted us for advice and complained about the lack of visitors. Especially for him, we created a small instruction on choosing the site structure, preparing materials and improving the results.

We are sure that it will be useful to some habrayuzer.

Gallery structure

The creator of the gallery should take into account, first of all, the interests of visitors, i.e. to develop a convenient structure and distribute photos and pictures into sections in accordance with some criteria, as well as do an advanced search.

It is better if the navigation will provide the ability to view lists of pictures for the maximum number of characteristics.

For instance:

• by subject
• by tags
• to size
• by format

etc.

Preparation of materials

• Each image should have alt and title spelled out. In addition to the fact that they must communicate what is shown in the picture, include key phrases in the signatures.
• To improve the link between documents, cross-reference images, for example, based on descriptive tags, subject, format, and other available characteristics.
• Ideally, there should be short explanatory texts for the pictures. They can be placed on pages where individual images are displayed.
• Make transliterated file names. This is also taken into account when ranking images.
• Consider the image format. GIF - often refers to illustrations and animations (the search engine may give preference when searching with the words “animation” to GIF or SWF formats), JPG - to photographs (respectively, preference for this format when searching with the words “photo”, “photograph”)
• A picture must be prepared in at least three different sizes - small, medium, large. Yandex prefers medium-sized images.
• Yandex tries to exclude advertising banners and duplicates from the results, so your materials should be unique and, if possible, without texts on top of the pictures.

What else to consider

When writing descriptions, I advise you to use words that describe the meaning - “photos, pictures, illustrations, graphics, file formats (jpg, png, gif)” and evaluate the demand for this information in wordstat.yandex.ru

How to improve results

1. Copyrighted materials
2. Well thought-out format and target audience
3. Watermarks and contact information
4. Do not use “empty” pictures - menu items and other for promotion
5. Compliance with the laws of the Russian Federation and moral principles
6. Use the demand for geo-and event photos and pictures: for example, on New Year's Eve people are looking for pictures with Santa Clauses, and in the summer - photos from resorts.