I'm trying to work out simple SEO.

Right now, my provocateuse sites are pretty simply automated. There isn't much language on them, just names and site titles. Amy told me that Google thought one of them needed to be translated from Danish. I have no idea.

Anyway, I'm reading that keywords meta tag is dead. Like, only Bing looks at it, and it looks at it to tell if you're spam. But I would like some way to maybe add text for some people, so other searches than just their given name might find the pages. I'm assuming that most weight goes to words displayed on your page, right? More important than anything in your description tag?

What simple things do you guys do to make your paged play nice with search? I'm not looking to make a second career out of this, but if it's a non-major change to my templates, it might be worth doing.

Search is very content oriented these days, and heavily influenced by the number of pages linked to your pages. The main thing you could do is write captions for the photos that repeat the words you think people might look for. However, Bruce Willis Glad Hands, Bruce Willis Thinking Hands, etc., would get old fast. Adding a small Bruce Willis under each picture would help. Some algorithms also put more emphasis on headlines, so having the top Bruce Willis in t h1 could help.

Off the top of my head - Meta keywords are utterly useless, but meta descriptions are powerful. A language declaration in the header should take care of the Danish problem - without it, it's just taking a best guess based on whatever text is on the page, which is usually just people's names and a few links IIRC?

Your easiest wins will probably be to add meta descriptions and improve your alt tags -- it looks like they're just echoing the file name of name_01, name_02, etc -- if they're descriptive, that will massively increase the amount of parsable text on the page. Descriptive filenames might also help, but might not be worth the trouble of recoding all those links, depending on how you're generating things.

This is a decent overview of some factors for images (not all of which will apply): [link] . That site has decently non-scammy SEO advice overall, and it's an area with way more scammy advice than not.

Right now, the subject's name is in the t title the name of every image (I could stand to give them alt text too), and at the top of each page in no header tag at all. and the site name is t h1 linking back to root. Would making the person's name an t h2 tag have a significant effect?

The system is set to automate caption displays the same way it parses for the pictures themselves. I use that spottily, though. If there's a credit to the photo of an interesting source (like, if it's from theatre) I use it, but it's rare. I could get better at that, but I don't know if your eyes would cross if there are ten pictures of Shemar Moore with his name under every one as well as at the top of the page.

Jesus, 10 pictures of Shemar Moore. No rush on answering the questions, I'm going to be mentally inaccessible for a while here.

serial: What do you mean by descriptive file names? Right now the pages are built by scanning the image folder and parsing the file names. I don't want to mess with that, but if I get better at adding a caption file for each image, there's room to play with there.

I could change the alt text to be the name of the person and the topic of the site.

Would making the person's name an tag have a significant effect?

Probably so, yes. At any rate, it's worth a shot.

No rush on answering the questions, I'm going to be mentally inaccessible for a while here.

Understood. I got a little distracted doing research myself.

Would making the person's name an tag have a significant effect?

As I understand it, it could under some algorithms. It doesn't help that the search engines are moving targets.

What do you mean by descriptive file names?

Things like colin_firth_in_a_bathtub.jpg as opposed to colin_firth_03.jpg, for ex.

(OH HAI COLIN FIRTH IN A BATHTUB!!)

I could change the alt text to be the name of the person and the topic of the site.

That might help. This stuff is always a little experimental anyway -- there's no definitive guide. But the more the machine has to go on, and the better structured it is to show what people would actually be looking for, the better. After all, the machine knows about cat videos now, so how far off can wet men be?

(we could do more research on yr sites, I'm sure.)

Hmm. Changing the filenames from sequential order would mean recoding the entire system of sites, so that's outside my scope.

I think I'll h2 tag the names, make the alt text a tiny bit more descriptive and use captions more often.

If I could work out a way to incorporate "Iron Man" and "Avengers" into a RDJ page, for instance, but it's not like I want to tell the viewer those words. That they know. I just want Skynet to know...or maybe it already does.