Have you ever entered your photography website URL into an Internet search engine and found that your photography website did not show up anywhere?  Your website is active for the public to view but you are not getting any hits from users.  Maybe it is the lack of text content on your photography website that is hiding it from the internet search engine.

Internet search engines do not read photos.  They only read text.  You may find the effort needed to add text for each of your pictures to be a tedious job.  However, your payoff will be great.  You can add your text below each picture on the website, or you can add it in the “alt” text behind each image.

While it may be true that a picture says a thousand words, if no one knows there are pictures, they will have no one to tell their story to.  In the case of an Internet search engine, it is better to pretend that your website is set up for those who cannot see.

Add lots of text.  Add videos and Flash games, but couple this graphic-heavy website content with lots and lots of text to get the attention of the Internet search engine.

Take Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube as great examples.  They are definitely photo heavy, but they are also extremely text heavy, too.  Their websites are interactive and alive, constantly moving and changing to catch the new user’s eye.

There are websites that have no visible text content for the user.  Photography websites like these have their text running behind the scenes. This can be done by a html code.  Sometimes you can run your mouse over a picture on the screen and the url shows up.  When you move the mouse off the picture, the url disappears.

You will also notice on photography websites that on each photo there is a watermark, or a layered icon on each photo.  Just as you want to get your website photos noticed, you want to protect them from being stolen.

One option for a copyright photo is to embed the url into the picture so if someone downloads or copy/pastes one of your pictures, the url goes with it.  If legal action is required, the watermark leads authorities back to you, the originator and owner of the picture.