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

Attracting an audience to the "picture" sites

Recently, a familiar photographer turned to us for advice, who complained about the lack of visitors. Especially for him, we created a small instruction on the choice of site structure, preparation of materials and improvement of the results.

Sure, it will be useful, and some habrayuzer.

Gallery structure

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

It is better if the navigation will provide the ability to view lists of pictures by the maximum number of characteristics.
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For example:

• by topic
• by tags
• to size
• by format

etc.

Preparation of materials

• Each picture must have alt and title. Besides the fact that they have to report on what is shown in the picture, include key phrases in the signatures.
• To improve the link between documents, let's cross-reference images, for example, based on descriptive tags, themes, 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 (a search engine may prefer a search with the words “animation” to GIF or SWF formats), JPG - to photos (respectively, a preference for this format when searching with the words “photo”, “photography”)
• The picture needs to be prepared in at least three different sizes - small, medium, large. Yandex prefers medium-sized pictures.
• Yandex is trying to exclude advertising banners and duplicates from the results, so your materials should be unique and, if possible, without texts on top of pictures.

What else to consider

I advise you to use words describing the meaning when making descriptions - “photos, pictures, illustrations, graphics, file formats (jpg, png, gif)” and assess the demand for this information in wordstat.yandex.ru

How to improve results

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