A classmate photographer showed me his new Dream-Weaver based photography website and asked for my opinion. I gave him a few web-design-SEO tips and advice about what I think he should do to make it easier for him to build and scale the site and for the search engines to better understand what his site is about and I attach it here in case it would be any help for others.

First, I strongly recommend photographers that want to get a gallery up and running to run a software that would allow them to do that in an easy scalable way. If you have a choice, I’d recommend skipping Dream-weaver and using one of the many open-source PHP gallery software. The one I like the most and use quite often, integrated with Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla is the excellent Gallery2.

Take a look at the basic site design :

This kind of design is actually quite easy to achieve with Gallery2, and in a more interactive scalable way, but one of the main drawbacks is having to do manual basic SEO work to make the search engines understand what its about.

Following are some general SEO tips suggested for this kind of Dream-weaver website

• Optimize your images with keywords
  • Name of file.
  • The ALT / TITLE tags in the <img src=”” alt=””> images.
• Try to use filenames that would serve as meaningful permalinks.
• Add metatags (tutorial1, tutorial2)
• Make sure your page title is meaningful (<TITLE></TITLE>)
• Make sure you have H1, H2, H3 headings in your pages (<H1></H1><H2></H2>)
• Ask your friends to links to you with meaningful titles and anchor text (less of “Garret” and more of “Taiwan Art” “Asian photography” “culture gallery” and other keywords that you would want to appear on. This is one of the most important factors. In the <a href=”” title=””> it’s the title tag. If you’re involved in forums, add the link to your gallery with your keywords in your signatures.
• Make navigation in your website easy with interlinking between pages. When you don’t have others linking to you, this will count. When you link, link with good keywords.
• Put this script on your website to make the most of Google/Yahoo Image Search traffic.
• Create a Sitemap (method 1, method 2)
• Submit your Sitemap at :
  • Yahoo Site Explorer
  • Google webmaster tools
    • Turn on Tools->Enhanced Image Search.
    • Set preferred domain to “www.”
• Use social websites to point to you. For example – to simplify submitting to social websites, use Social Poster (The “Dofollow for SEO” is the more relevant).
  • Choose the right keywords in the title of your submission.
  • Add relevant tags, try to make it appealing.
• Redirect to WWW : Do this next one only if you understand what you’re doing.

Easy simple steps that would make a big differences. Any more idea? other suggestions welcome…