Community @ The Turning Gate

dlangan · 2017-02-03 20:57:08

Hi there,

I hope you can help. This is a two pronged question:
(1) On my old website, I used to create my galleries using photoshop. PS created index.html files that I could just view & edit & for all of my customer galleries I'd cut & paste the same <meta name="keywords" content="wedding photographer, photographers wedding, ireland etc etc" </meta> into each and every index1....indexN.html file. I understand that some of this is now obsolete in SEO and yet I haven't changed it & it still gets my site listed high in relevant searches.

I like to login to a unix server & vi files old style but I can't find my files since I've started using backlight. Where are they? Are they stored client side? For example, I've got an about page. Where can I find the code for this page & is it readable/editable?

(2) Regarding SEO. In a nutshell, how is this done with backlight? Is it a combination of using keywords & titles in Lightroom & then tags or similar in backlight pages? And is there a way I can have a look at the created source to confirm that the tags exist as I expect etc?

And this is related to Q1 but when I create & post a Lightroom gallery in backlight - where is the code/files & can I read/edit them? I'd love to see what data is being stored with them in the same way that I can with my old index.html galleries.

Many thanks in advance,
Deirdre

Ben · 2017-02-03 22:52:59

Hi Deirdre, Backlight is fully dynamic. "index.html" files are generated on-the-fly in a two-stage process via a caching mechanism. Everything related to design is encapsulated in the cached files stored under backlight/data/designer/cache/. Those cached files are then populated with album and page-specific information upon each page view.
You may be able to gain some insight by searching through the backlight/ code for <meta... or looking at the generated files under the cache directory.

Matt and Rod, can you advise on how meta data works from a configuration point of view?

rod barbee · 2017-02-03 23:10:42

One can configure Backlight image captions to contain the contents of the image's Title metadata field.

Meta keywords are useless: https://yoast.com/meta-keywords/
From what I've been reading about SEO, page content is the most important thing. Including keywords in an album's page copy is one thing that can help the most.

Matt's written about including keywords in file names: http://ce4.theturninggate.net/docs/doku … file_names

bob chadwick · 2017-02-03 23:55:22

Thanks for the link to Matt's write-up on file naming. I see a mistake I have been making and need to change. I begin my image naming with the date of the image. I'm going to change that with the addition of my last name at the beginning of the name.

rod barbee · 2017-02-04 00:10:33

I'm too lazy to add keywords to my file names. That just feels like a whole lotta work.
I just use last-name_YYMMDD_1234 1234 being the original file number suffix.
But I'm not so lazy that I don't create captions and keywords for the images. I probably should add image titles, seeing how those are used in the HTML single image breadcrumbs.

michilge · 2017-02-04 02:32:24

After having read and thought about SEO in the last days, I decided to change my routine and start making image titles and captions more verbose. On the single image pages there will be more text that will offer more individual information for search engines to evaluate.
I do not want to bloat my gallery pages with to much text under the thumbnails, but could it help search engines if the metadata were rendered invisibly to the human visitor? Just for the case I configured my album template to put the verbous caption into the alt-tags. This should be done anyway to improve accesibility for visitors with screenreaders. But in the past I was to lazy to create individual titles and captions. With ~100 photos per gallery that is a serious amount of additional work and I'm not certain if I will stick to my resolutions.

rod barbee · 2017-02-04 02:53:47

If I remember, the HTML Single presentation is the one that's best to use for SEO. Besides the normal caption and title information that can be included in the Caption field, the image's Title is used in the page title as well as the breadcrumbs. If the Title field is empty, the file name is used.

michilge · 2017-02-04 04:10:00

Yes, I realized this from what Matt wrote in another context and I took care to have the single image pages included in my xml-sitemap.
But I also will see to get these populates with more text than there used to be. I will be able to evaluate the effort in two or three months.
Share links on the single image pages will not be hard to have, but I prefer if the majority of the visitors land on the blog pages and therefore would like to offer the share links there.

rod barbee · 2017-02-04 04:30:03

just ran across this tutorial on coding your own sharing links. It's a bit dated but might shine some light
https://www.doitwithwp.com/add-sharing- … eferences/

and another:
https://carriedils.com/social-sharing-w … lugins-wp/

Matthew · 2017-02-06 13:00:35

Backlight is built with SEO fully in mind, to the best of my understanding of modern SEO practices, which are a constantly moving target.

For images, for example, thumbnails on the grid are contained within FIGURE elements, and with captions in FIGCAPTION elements, which ensures that the caption is related directly to the image. The IMG element has both title and alt attributes filled, and every thumbnail links directly -- via the anchor element's href attribute -- to the single-image page, ensuring that search engines, crawlers and sitemappers have direct access to the single image page. That page contains the full-size image, in a FIGURE element, with FIGCAPTION, etc.

This creates a strong SEO "ecosystem" for every image, in every gallery, regardless of the Javascript presentation being used (Photoswipe, presently).

For pages, content is key, and you would do well to begin your copy with a heading. We also pull relevant information from the page context to create SEO-robust page titles, and embed Open Graph Protocol information into every page for social networking use.

dlangan · 2017-02-06 20:12:26

Thank you all so much for that info. Some of it's gone over my head so I've a good deal of reading up to do so wrt implementing good SEO practise.

Just one more follow up question please - Most of my galleries are weddings & the search term I want to be found for is any variation of "Galway wedding photographer". Therefore should I use these words (& all variations) as my keywords in each gallery or should I use say, the venue name & address? (which would give variety to each gallery) Or should I include everything as keywords?

Thanks again for all the info to date. It's great to have a starting point. Much appreciated.

Deirdre

Matthew · 2017-02-06 23:17:00

Hi Deirdre,

I cannot recall whether I've seen your site before, or not, and there's no link here in this thread, so I'm not sure what you're calling yourself or your site. But you might consider setting your site title as something like:

"Deirdre Langan, Galway Wedding Photographer"

And so that will be featured prominently in the TITLE element of your pages. Further, you might provide some text of introduction on the Home page, stating that you are, in fact, a "Galway wedding photographer". Then state the same on your About page.

And in the course of writing your paragraphs, you can drop the words "Galway", "wedding", and "photography" or "photographer" into the mix to act as content-based keywords.

dlangan · 2017-02-07 00:26:44

Hi Matthew,

Thank you for your reply & advice. My website is http://www.deirdrelangan.com

When you say the TITLE element of my page, where can I set that up? Can I put <TITLE> </TITLE> in each main page copy? Is that the same thing as the 'Title' field in Lightroom or something different altogether?

Regarding your FIG element comments - does that mean I should always complete the 'Caption' field in Lightroom?

And just to clarify - you guys are saying '<meta keywords' don't work but that 'keywords' do work - so do you mean use keywords in the sense of just using regular words in the page copy should enhance SEO?

Rod - what do you mean by "HTML Single presentation"? Is that an element in Lightroom or backlight that can be configured?

Thanks a lot again guys. I'm a bit muddled regarding what should be set where (LR or backlight).

Deirdre

rod barbee · 2017-02-07 00:43:53

Hi Deirdre,

Site Title is set in Backlight Setttings under Personalisation

HTML Single is one of the large image presentation options in the Album template.

Regarding your FIG element comments - does that mean I should always complete the 'Caption' field in Lightroom?

that's really up to you, but if you're concerned with SEO, it's a good idea. Besides, having that caption information in your images makes it much easier to find when you're searching in your catalog for a specific image. And it will really help on your website if you're using the Search feature included with Backlight.

so do you mean use keywords in the sense of just using regular words in the page copy should enhance SEO?

Exactly. Again, this post outlines the idea very well: https://yoast.com/meta-keywords/

Matthew · 2017-02-07 00:47:11

You can designate the title in Backlight's Settings.

Backlight's albums will make use of your image captions to bolster SEO, so yes, captions are helpful.

When we refer to meta keywords, we are talking about the HTML meta element:

<meta name="keywords" content="Galway,wedding,photographer" />

This is a relic from the Internet's early days, and is no longer useful for SEO. Search engines stopped using it a long time ago. Nowadays, you should sprinkle keywords into your content. Google around a bit and you should be able to find a wealth of articles about how to write for SEO.

As for your website, I do remember seeing it before now.

I'm wondering, as I wondered then, why on earth are you using that big, ugly image on your home page? What's the point of that? It's one gigantic picture of thumbnails, having zero interactivity and zero SEO benefit.

Instead, you ought to load those very same images into an album in Lightroom, publish that album to Backlight, and embed the album on your Home page. Visitors will then be able to click the thumbnails to view larger versions of the images, and you'll be able to reap the SEO benefits of having individual images, with titles, captions and file names. It will also be responsive on small screens, whereas your current image just gets smaller, making those thumbnails practically indistinguishable. They're nice images, and you can present them more in a more impactful and beneficial way using Backlight's in-built features. Use the masonry layout to achieve a similar look.

And the lefthand column, I'm not sure it needs to be there. There's not much in it, and you could probably take those bullet points, and instead put them into a paragraph in the main body, using that paragraph as previously discussed to bolster SEO on your Home page.

Ex.
"Deirdre Langan is an awarding winning, professional wedding photographer serving couples in Galway..."

rod barbee · 2017-02-07 01:47:33

I'd also suggest that the right hand tray is way too narrow for practical use. Words are broken up and it just doesn't look professional. If you want to use the right hand tray in this way, make the tray widths wider.
If you follow Matt's advice and use those bullet points in the left tray as keywords in your main page copy, you would then have much more room for the content in the right hand tray.

dlangan · 2017-02-07 01:48:37

Thank you Rod & Matthew!

Matthew - thanks a million for your honest review of my home page. That makes total sense. From what I can remember that was my original intention but when I tried inserting album into the page, it showed just one image that I had to click into to see the rest. Obviously from what you're saying that isn't the way to do it & I should be able to display the album like how you've described. I'll give it another go! And thanks too for the advice & tips on SEO for that page!

dlangan · 2017-02-07 01:53:44

Hi Rod, Much appreciate your input as always!

When you say the right hand tray is too narrow - do you mean the facebook plugin on my home page is not displaying correctly? Which browser are you using? In chrome, it looks okay to me - even to the minimum size (before it becomes mobile responsive & disappears).

Deirdre

rod barbee · 2017-02-07 02:12:18

Hi Deirdre,

it looks the same to me in both Firefox and Chrome. Here's what one section looks like:

I see the same problem when the site goes responsive.

dlangan · 2017-02-07 02:23:51

Yikes!!!

Funny you should mention Firefox because in Firefox for me, instead of showing that fb box it just shows a 'Deirdre Langan Photography' link. I don't understand why it displays differently on different monitors! It looks fine on my Mac but now that you've mentioned it I just checked it out on my windows machine & it doesn't look good!

Thanks for the heads up - I will look at the tray sizes.

Cheers
Deirdre

dlangan · 2018-05-11 00:51:50

Hi again guys,

I'm once again looking at my SEO & I realised that all this time (16+ mths) instead of adding 'captions' in my lightroom albums, I've been mistakenly adding 'keywords'. I just did a view source & see that my keywords aren't showing up.

Soooo .... I searched the forums & found some old advice from Rod on another post saying:

'to speed this up you can check the "Push metadata....' checkbox in Publisher setup in Lightroom.'

I tried this & republished one album. From memory it seems to have published a lot quicker than it did first time around (648 images in a few minutes), which is a great help but my question is this:

I have several dozen albums that I need to update & each album has anything from 400-600 images so is this the best or only method of updating my captions?

As always, thanking you in advance :-)
Deirdre

Daniel Leu · 2018-05-11 03:03:07

dlangan wrote:

'to speed this up you can check the "Push metadata....' checkbox in Publisher setup in Lightroom.'
I have several dozen albums that I need to update & each album has anything from 400-600 images so is this the best or only method of updating my captions?

Yes, that's the way to go.

dlangan · 2018-05-11 18:15:02

Thank you Daniel!

Matthew · 2018-05-12 00:59:19

dlangan,

If you're only pushing metadata, be sure to go into the Publisher setup and enable the option to only update metadata for existing images. You'll save tons of time over uploading new image renditions to every album. You should be able to access the options by double-clicking the publisher in Lightroom.

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2017-02-03 20:57:08

SEO

#2 2017-02-03 22:52:59

Re: SEO

#3 2017-02-03 23:10:42

Re: SEO

#4 2017-02-03 23:55:22

Re: SEO

#5 2017-02-04 00:10:33

Re: SEO

#6 2017-02-04 02:32:24

Re: SEO

#7 2017-02-04 02:53:47

Re: SEO

#8 2017-02-04 04:10:00

Re: SEO

#9 2017-02-04 04:30:03

Re: SEO

#10 2017-02-06 13:00:35

Re: SEO

#11 2017-02-06 20:12:26

Re: SEO

#12 2017-02-06 23:17:00

Re: SEO

#13 2017-02-07 00:26:44

Re: SEO

#14 2017-02-07 00:43:53

Re: SEO

#15 2017-02-07 00:47:11

Re: SEO

#16 2017-02-07 01:47:33

Re: SEO

#17 2017-02-07 01:48:37

Re: SEO

#18 2017-02-07 01:53:44

Re: SEO

#19 2017-02-07 02:12:18

Re: SEO

#20 2017-02-07 02:23:51

Re: SEO

#21 2018-05-11 00:51:50

Re: SEO

#22 2018-05-11 03:03:07

Re: SEO

#23 2018-05-11 18:15:02

Re: SEO

#24 2018-05-12 00:59:19

Re: SEO

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