SEO Upgrades in SmugMug Show Traffic Increases for All

I wrote an SmugMug SEO Review a few months ago and let me tell you that SmugMug never rests. I want to be Google’s neighbor too! I was browsing the SmugMug blog and its Digital Grin support forum and they have been busy rolling out upgrades to its users. Below is a summary of what they have been up to. These features, combined with the Photographers SEO Book text and link building ideas will have you perfectly positioned for traffic growth.

Batch Keywords and Captions

In December SmugMug improved the usability of its image keywording feature. The benefits of this action allows photographers to clear previously entered “junk” data and then enter useful keywords for images. These keywords link together and bubble up into category pages, helping users and Google both filter and understand what the images are about. More on the intricacies of this upgrade from the SmugMug blog:

• A new option has been added to the Bulk Caption/Keyword tool.  It lets you remove all numeric keywords from a gallery.
• You’ll find a setting in your Control Panel to enable or disable automatic keyword generation from filenames (default: enabled).
• There is a Design Rule for Camera File Systems (DCF) that lets us ignore filenames generated by your camera.  We do not create keywords from filenames like IMG_001.JPG.
• Multi-word keywords no longer need to be quoted as long as they are followed by a comma or semi-colon.  For example, we used to require you to put quotes around “New York” to make one keyword phrase.  Now you can enter New York, or New York;
• 1 and 2-character keywords used to require quotes, but no more.  For example, 12, 5, would be added as keywords.

Homepage Meta Description Field

Since the meta description shows in search results, it may help readers click your link, thus is very important. You’ll find Andy all over Digital Grin answering questions, often SEO ones. In this post he quietly rolled out a great feature allowing users to control the homepage meta description from the control panel.

Up till now, Google would get META Description info from words in your bio box. This led to problems with folks having a slideshow and other code in their bio…

So, we made a control panel entry – Homepage Meta Description – 255 characters for you to describe your site, your business, whatever.

It’s what will show up here:

You’ll find this in your control panel, settings tab.

When you enter something in this new box, it’ll trump whatever’s in your bioBox (text, divs, code, anything). Enjoy!

Direct Links to Old and New Photo URLs

Previously was an update that allowed original photo URLs to work in addition to new “NiceName” URLs for photos which allow for better URL paths rich in keywords. What also impressed me about this series of notes is that SmugMug tells users how to select certain pages to be hidden from search. Hey – it shows how much control you have with your website when you can offer some pages to be indexed and some not – great feature for private images and proofing galleries! This upgrade can also be seen in the SmugMug blog:

NiceName Photo URLs

Direct links for photos that look like this will still work just fine: http://smugmug.com/photos/imageID_imageKey-Size.jpg

But now in the Get a Link feature, you’ll see that we serve up direct links that contain the photo’s filename as well as the NiceName for the category, subcategory, and gallery that photo lives in. Reason? Descriptive words directly associated with your photo = more relevant search engine results.

As always, SmugMug makes it easy to stay out of search engines if you’d prefer.

• Our Get a Link feature from the Share button will now properly update the embed code when the preview image is changed.
• Our Search Engine Optimization help page was overhauled by our in-house expert and has sage advice for those seeking love from Google.
• We fixed the “share photos” link in the single image view (found in older viewing styles)
• Files in your SmugVault that have a space in the filename can now be downloaded without a hitch.
• If you login while browsing a gallery, we’ll direct you right to the photo you were viewing.

NiceNames Results are In

In mid-2009 SmugMug released NiceNames, a feature that provided a quality keyword naming to the URL file structure and titles of  image galleries. The implications to search are huge in helping them to understand the content, and they were. Here are the stats, posted by the President of SmugMug on Digital Grin. This means the average photographer is getting more traffic under the new naming convention.

Tagged as: keywords, nicenames, SmugMug, website templates