Search Engines and Images

I personally love Google. Whatever they produce it is always good to excellent. It works. It makes things easier. And it's free. You just couldn't get better. Thanks Google.

Google does however have a large impact on small website builders such as myself. You have to get high up on search results to be seen and therefore visited. The search engines can be a bit fickle and their algorithms (complicated mathematical formulae to find the best page on a search term - keyword) change. It's a slippery business and an exhausting business. And a constant battle. To all budding website builders: don't start unless you have commitment and stamina as you won't get seen and then what is the point.

Enough griping. The point is this for me. I use photographs a lot; the fine photographs of Helmi Flick.

Her photographs provide a lot of information. They are both highly aesthetic and educational at the same time. But if you put a single large format picture on a page and almost nothing else, the search engines don't like it.

The page in question may provide more information than hundreds of words of description, yet for the search engines the picture is not good enough. They will de-list you (drop the page from their rankings) and maybe worse. There little spiders may tell the search engine that this site is no good because there are too many pages with too few words on them - bad website....

There is still a long way to go before the search engines get it really right and we will look back at this time as a rather crude episode in the history of the internet, one day.

The search engines should give more credence to excellent photographs and pictures but they can't because they have no way of telling which ones are good and probably never will. That's why I have pictures with words on my site most of the time.

If the pictures are alone on the page I normally have it off site.