Draft Specification for SEO for Coppermine

[whats_up_skip]

This post is not a feature request as such. It is thread to discuss the best options for SEO of Coppermine.

Once this specification is resolved, then I would like to work with some people to develop these modifications or a plug in. As I am not a programmer I would fund all or part of this development, depending on the support I receive from others with this project.

Objective: To significantly improve the performance in search engines, in particular Google, of content within Coppermine based picture galleries.

Items to improve:
FRONT PAGE
Image alt tags: at the moment the "alt" tag simply uses the file name. In most cases this will not be of great value unless the file name was specifically made to assist with SEO. This should be changed to the category's name.

Description tag: I still find it beneficial to have a description tag as often Google will use this. At the moment there is no description tag and this should be included based on the standard gallery description.

Category and Album names: The default for these links is something like "thumbnails.php?album=2" which does not assist at all with the SEO. Ideal this should be changed to a URL including the terms used in the name of the category or album name. Even with the SEF URL plug in this is not improved; it is just simplified to a URL without a question mark.

ALBUM PAGE
Title: Currently is title of whole gallery plus title of album. This is acceptable, but may be better if it was just the album title.

Description tag: This should be the album's description field.

H1 tag: this should be the name field for the album and replace the static H1 that appears as standard on the front page.

H3 tag: This should be the album's description field.

Image alt tags: at the moment the "alt" tag provides the file name, date added and the dimensions. While this is useful information, it does not help with SEO. This should be changed to "title" field in the "pictures" table.

IMAGE PAGE
Title: Currently is title of whole gallery plus title of album plus the title of the image. This is acceptable, but may be better if it was just the image title.

Description tag: This should be changed to "title" field in the "pictures" table then " – " followed by the "caption" field.

H1 tag: this should be the image title and replace the static H1 that appears as standard on the front page.

H3 tag: This should be the "caption" field from the "pictures" table.

Image alt tags: at the moment the "alt" tag is "click to view full size image". While this is useful information, it does not help with SEO. This should be changed to "title" field in the "pictures" table plus the "click to view full size image" text.

[Joachim Müller]

Yes to most of your suggestions: they are being discussed for cpg1.5.x on the dev board (you're of course encouraged to discuss this publicly as well). There are some other things that need to be taken care of: meta albums are being seen as double content (big penalty in page rank!), spiders follow links that they're not suppossed to follow (like voting, search options, meta album links) that burn spidering cycles and bloat the search engine's database.

Most significant improvement that could use actual looking into by a skilled coder (maybe sponsored) would be a re-do of the SEF_URL plugin imo as you suggested, with album names and titels and everything being taken into account in the address bar. However, all fixes to the (still experimental) SEF_URL plugin are only doctoring minor issues - the whole plugin would have to be re-written from scratch.

Joachim

[Joachim Müller]

H1 tag: this should be the image title and replace the static H1 that appears as standard on the front page.

H3 tag: This should be the "caption" field from the "pictures" table.

Committed to svn repository for cpg1.5.x

Moving this thread from general discussion to make sure that it doesn't get forgotten.

[zeppo]

This is really good news! I hope the 1.5 version with SEO optimization will come soon. I spent quite a time to rebuild my cartoon site, which now is powered with Wordpress and Coppermine. I was very disappointed, when I found that after I had moved to Coppermine, the Google image search didn't find my cartoons. (Google web search will find them quite well though. This problem is discussed elsewhere in Forum).

Coppermine has a an excellent option to import IPTC information from image meta data. So it would be very nice if in future 1.5 version it will be possible to choose either title or keywords to be written as an image ALT tag.

[tfischer]

Category and Album names: The default for these links is something like "thumbnails.php?album=2" which does not assist at all with the SEO. Ideal this should be changed to a URL including the terms used in the name of the category or album name. Even with the SEF URL plug in this is not improved; it is just simplified to a URL without a question mark.

I've been thinking about doing some mods to the SEF_URL plugin.  I hope it's ok I ask these questions here since the above comment directly related to what I've been thinking of (and I'm not allowed on the 1.5.x dev board...):

One advantage of the current SEF_URL system (where you end up with links such as http://mysite.com/cpg/index-12.html or http://mysite.com/cpg/thumbnails-130.html is that if I rename the category, album, or picture, my links don't change/break.  I've been running my gallery for about 3 years now and every so often I'll rearrange things, rename things if necessary, and it's nice to know my links aren't going to break, particularly links from search engines where I get the vast majority of my traffic from.  Has anyone thought about a way around this?  I suppose every time a rename happens, you could store off the old name and use it to form a 'valid alternate link' but that seems messy at best.

For what it's worth, I can do a google image search and can definitely find pictures from my gallery using the proper terms...

I'm a longtime coder (my day job is C++ design/engineering) so I'd be happy to contribute anything I can to this great gallery.

-Tim

[tfischer]

I was just pondering this some more, and unless I'm missing something, this might actually be a pretty easy mod. 

For categories, instead of writing out:
http://mysite.com/cpg/index-12.html,

have the plugin write out:

http://mysite.com/cpg/categoryname-subcategory1-subcategory2-index-12.html

categoryname, subcategory1, and subcategory2 would of course be actual category names.  The trick is, that these would not be used for anything except SEO.  Mod Rewrite would remove all of this stuff, and the actual URL used internally would still be:

http://mysite.com/cpg/index.php?cat=12

This completely avoids my "what happens if you rename stuff" question because basically the whole "path" is there just for looks, and will be stripped out.  Renaming would change the path, but both the old and new versions would evalutate to the same internal link.


You could do something similar for albums and images:  come up with a URL that contained parent category names and maybe keywords from the image, but they would be 'fake' for SEO, and would be stripped down to the same php url's used today.

I'd appreciate thoughts on this.  It sounds easy enough to implement that I could do it even though I'm very green when it comes to php stuff...

-Tim

[Joachim Müller]

Due to the existing issues with the SEF_URLS plugin it has been removed from the core. It will be available as a plugin for cpg1.5.x and you're welcome to use and improve it with cpg1.5.x, but this thread here deals with SEO improvements directly in coppermine's core. Please review the thread http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php/topic,46718.0.html

[forumGuy201]

Coppermine now in it's 1.5.3 version i see it is SEO friendly already, that's awesome! i am gonna use that for my travel slideshots gallery website.

[Joachim Müller]

Locking.