Make Money from Blogs

Optimization of Gallery2 - A photo album

ashish — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:05:51 +0000

Gallery2, located at this site, is a fairly useful and customizable photo album organizer. Gallery2 would be available at most hosting companies (for example, in my case, I host a Gallery2 installation, http://ashisha.com/gallery, which contains upwards of 4400 photos, and is hosted at HostMonster). The Gallery 2 provides a fairly customizable interface with many modules, the ability to link to some ecommerce transactions such as online printing solutions, multiple ways to upload photo to the site, and interface to CMS such as Joomla.
There are many users of Gallery2, given the advantages it offers. As with many other solutions, there are multiple ways to optimize the usage of Gallery2. Some of these methods and tools are:

FAQ for Gallery (how to reset your password, things not working, etc) - Link1, Link1

Moving Gallery2 installation from one server to another (link)

Performance Tips for Gallery2 (link)

Security Tips for Gallery2 (link)

ACL performance for Gallery2 (link)

Scalability of Gallery2 (link)

Using Gallery2 with Amazon’s S3 service (link)

Add Adsense to Gallery2 (link)

How To’s for Gallery2 (link)

Thirteen Ways To Add SEO To Gallery2 (link)

Gallery2 and SEO - Tips and suggestions (link)

Money making Gallery2 site (link)

Show your Gallery with Google AdSense (link)

Gallery 2 Optimization for Google Images search (link)

Learning how to use the Google Webmasters Tool

ashish — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:45:43 +0000

The Google Webmasters Tool is a very useful tool for webmasters eager to ensure that their sites are quickly indexed by the Google Search Engine, that new posts / content is quickly indexed by the GoogleBot, and overall, their posts have a much higher ranking in the search engine. Now, using the Google Webmasters tool does not guarantee a higher ranking, but it does ensure that your content is available in the Google Search database, and new content is quickly added to the search database. Now that you know the advantages, how do you actually go about using the Google Webmasters tool ? If you are an advanced user, then you already know how to use the Tool. However, if you have heard about the benefits of the Google Webmaster package, then things may be a bit confusing for you.
Once you start using the Webmaster tools, they will be pretty clear. At the same time, Google has also defined a checklist that users of the Webmaster tool should use (link to checklist). Here some excerpts from this page, and you should really also go to the page and read in more detail:

To Google, http://example.com and http://www.example.com are completely different sites and can display completely different content. You can avoid potential problems (and get a better view of your data) by specifying your preferred domain. (Make sure you’ve added each version of your site to your account.)
Adding a Sitemap is optional, but we strongly recommend it. Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages you own, and how often they are updated or changed.

Google does not use keywords meta tags for search engine rankings

ashish — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:29:25 +0000

This may seem pretty obvious to somebody who knows about this, but there are a large number of people who do not know this. At some time in the past, many years back, Search Engine Optimization used to emphasize the need to add keywords to your web page, so that you would get an advantage over others in terms of search engines rankings, and like any other technique, people started misusing this like anything. You had websites where people would add hundreds of keywords in the hope that this would increase their search engines ranking. So, here is a clarification from Google on this area (link to article):

At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Promoting your Photo Blog (contd..)

ashish — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:18:25 +0000

An earlier post covered some tips for promoting a photo blog. This post covers some more tips that I learned while researching this topic of trying to promote a photo blog.
1. Ensure that your site does not have a robots.txt file that could prevent the search engine crawlers from indexing your site
2. Ensure that some keywords are there in the ‘alt’ description for the image file. At the same time, do not go overboard.
3. It has been found that if you change the filename of your file (from the filename generated by cameras) to something more descriptive, it has a beneficial effect on your images being indexed by Google Image search.
4. This tip is more about using Adsense to determine how Google is using your image. If you place an Adsense ad near your images (not to the right or left though), then the Ad gives you an idea of the keywords that are getting associated with your image. You may need to experiment with the text near the image as well as the text on the ‘alt’ tags so that you finally find the correct keyword association.
5. If you want to determine how Google Image search is indexing your site, there is an easy way. You should go to www.google.com/images, and then search for your site by typing ’site:www.yoursitename.com. The results will tell you as to how Google Image is indexing your site.
6. If you need to determine whether the Google Image Bot is visiting your site, then check whether your site visitors contains this piece of text:
“Googlebot-Image/1.0″
This determines whether your site is visited by the Google Images search engine
7. The larger the image, the more time it takes for people to download your images, and makes it more difficult. Instead, keep your images of a regular size with the maximum dimension of either 1024 or 1200
8. If you place the image on a page that has a high PR rank, the image is likely to place higher in image search

Photo Blog promotion - post to search engines and photo directories

ashish — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:01:01 +0000

In the previous post, I had mentioned some tips on how to promote your photo blog. One of the good ways to promote your photo blog is to post to important search engines and to other photo directories. Now, you can find many such photo directories on the net to post to, the list below is the one that I am using to add my photo blogs. Your mileage can vary, and in some cases, you may have some specialized photo directories (such as if you are having a lot of photos of the Netherlands, you would also have some photo directories that specialized on the Netherlands).
Well, here are some of the directories and search engines to post to. For search engines, all the research I have done indicates that there is no special way to submit to the Image search, you need to submit to the generic search.

Google Search (link)

Bing Search (link)

Yahoo Search Submit (link)

You can use Free Submission Websites that submit to multiple search engines, such as Submit Express (link). However, nowadays search engines can easily find your sites, and do not really like these bulk submission programmes.

Yahoo Media Search (link)

Dmoz.org (link)

Alltop.com (link)

Directories:

Photography and Photographers (link)

Photo Clicks Pro (link)

Free Photo Gallery (link). Select the required directory, and submit from there.

PhotoLinks (link)

Blogged.com (link)

Photography Directory Project (link)

PhotographersIndex.com (link). For photographers.

Photography Homepages (link)

International Photo Gallery Project (link)

All Things Photo.com (link)

Library of Photography (link)

Photo200.com (link)

http://www.directory.hickerphoto.com/ (link)

Photo.net (link)