When creating your business page, you may find that it would suit you to include a gallery page which shows off your work. Gallery pages can be extremely useful for demonstrating what your work is all about, and images are eye-catching and will convey a great deal of information about your work to your potential customers. Visitors generally spend between 20 and 40 seconds on a web page before leaving, so it is vital that you catch their attention and persuade them to stay. A gallery page can be a good way to do this, as browsing through pictures is often preferable to reading large quantities of text.
Galleries and SEO
However, with search engine crawlers reading and indexing text based information, could it harm your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) by having a gallery page? Will the crawlers be able to understand the page, and will it be returned by the search engines?
If the right approach is taken, your gallery page can be as effectively optimised as the rest of your site. Understanding more about your page structure will help with this. On any web page, as well as the visible text content, there are a number of unseen or off-page elements which are also giving search engines information about that page. These include the page URL and the alt tags.
Page URLs
Using keywords in your page URL tells search engines about your site. The URL www.mysite.co.uk/gallery tells crawlers very little about that page. The URL www.mysite.co.uk/wedding-photography-gallery, however, tells the search engines a lot more about the content of that site. Using keyword-rich URLs will assist in correctly indexing and returning your website to customers.
Alt tags
Alt tags are another useful element for optimising images. Alt tags are essentially descriptions of each image. They sit behind the image on the page, and give a text description of that image. These can be read by the crawlers, and as a result are vital in properly indexing your website content. Another important feature of alt tags is that they can be read by screen reader technology designed for the visually impaired, thereby extending your website’s reach further by not excluding customers from understanding your site content.
Added to this, you can optimise your gallery page further by including on-page text, such as image captions and keyword-rich titles. As long as all your images have words to accompany them and describe them, they should be found and indexed in much the same way as the rest of your website content.
