Part of coding every bit of every page is the responsibility of thinking about things that I didn’t really have to think about with other photo-storage sites. On the flip-side, I get to control every minute detail. Here are just a few things that I have had to do to get my SEO to an acceptable level.

Title of every page to be SEO friendly and match the photo on that page. Most photo-sites don’t even do this correctly.

Meta description could only be a certain length and have content about the photo.

Canonical URL must be in the header of every page. I had to Mod Rewrite every php intensive URL into a friendly html URL. This wasn’t too hard once I learned how to do it. Now my site has friendly html URLs instead of crazy variable-laden php pages.

Doctype etc. Simple things such as declaring the language and doctype. You would be surprised how many pages don’t.

Favicon also had to be Apple friendly – didn’t know that. I drew my own just to avoid any possible copyright confusion. Yes it looks corny, but that is what I was going for.

Viewport had to be set correctly to be mobile friendly.

twitter:card and og:tags. I didn’t even know about these. Now I can shape exactly how my page is shared.

H1 heading. Almost forgot that.

GZip for compressed data transmission. Had to do that.

The moral of the story is once I got everything done – and I probably don’t yet – my site’s pages will get indexed correctly. The hard part is that I can’t control the actual ranking. That part just takes time, links, and good content.

I did go back and look at other photo-storage site’s headers once I learned what I needed to and I can see why they just don’t do well with Google.