Last week I wrote a post about the SEO benefits of Twitter but today I’d like to discuss the SEO benefits of Flickr and how you can optimize your Flickr profiles. In fact, last week’s post made me realize how rarely businesses consider the integration of Social Media into their larger SEO strategy. We touched on this when we talked to AdAge “Editor at Large” Matt Creamer about Reprise Media’s optimization of his name across several platforms, but corporations and individuals continue to view Social Media strictly in terms of engagement and reputation management. While Social Media Marketing is excellent for these purposes, Social Media offers great SEO benefits as well.
While Flickr’s SEO benefits decreased several months ago when they decided to add “nofollow” tags to picture captions and comments, the site still allows for a number of ways to boost SEO. First of all, Flickr has not added nofollow tags to discussion boards, groups or personal profiles. Flickr has an awesome, active community with a wealth of conversation taking place on discussion boards around photography and other topics. If you have content on your site that is relevant to a discussion, including a link back to that content allows you to benefit from the substantial “link juice” that Flickr can provide. The same applies for personal profiles and group pages. And of course, don’t forget to embed those links in keyword-researched and targeted anchor text.
This leads to another relevant topic beyond groups: How can you optimize your company’s dedicated Flickr page? The following is a short rundown of things you should consider:
- Profile ID: If you haven’t done so already, make sure to secure your branded Flickr URL as soon as possible. For example: http://flickr.com/photos/reprisemedia/
- Photo Titles & Descriptions: As is the case with any SEO project, you want to begin by researching the keywords people are searching for. Use high volume, relevant keywords to title and describe your photos.
- Tagging: Tagging your photos with relevant keywords is crucial to helping users find you in Flickr’s internal search engine as well as Google, Yahoo, etc.
-Group Participation: As I mentioned above, joining and participating in Flickr groups and adding relevant comments and links can help you benefit from the link juice that Flickr provides.
Each of these steps can help you or your company show up higher in search engine results pages when people search for you. Remember that just as your webpage or blog acquires link equity by being properly optimized and receiving links coming in, so too can your Flickr profiles and groups. The key takeaway here is this: Do not overlook the integration of Social Media when it comes to your SEO strategy. Now get out there and Flickr Optimize!
Great post. As a fairly new participant in the social media arena, these are the helpful posts that have helped us understand what is effective. We’re just getting started with Flickr, this will help us get off on the right foot out of the gate. Thanks, keep up the good work!
Enlightenment
Thanks for the article. We’ve looked into this for clients (on other photo hosting sites.) Maybe even just creating the profile is worth the link, although I’m sure we could come up with creative ways to add say, product images, to gain at least the value and association of the tagged images. Anyone have a list of dofollow profiles?
Thanks!
Ian
SEO Seattle
@ODE Reading blogs (especially Searchviews!) is a great way to learn what’s useful and what’s not in terms of social media optimization. I’ll do my best to continue with these articles, as I’ve found that many readers find them very informative and a good jump-off point for engaging in their own social media efforts.
@Ian You’re more than welcome. While simply creating a profile can potentially serve some purpose, it’s important to not create a profile for the sake of creating a profile. Optimizing it with useful content that’s relevant to your client’s brand and that users will also find interesting will encourage interaction and engagement all the more. Also, the more relevant content and links you have, the more likely Flickr is to be beneficial to your SEO efforts as well.
Six of my flickr groups are on google page 1 for prime keywords. For instance AT&T Park San Francisco – my group is #7!
But, the description on the google page is Flickr’s description. Since I have no analytics on the group, I don’t know how many people pick me in the SERPs.
Is there anything I could do on the group page to increase the conversions over to my website?
@juliemarg – First off, congrats on having your group so prevalent for prime keywords. It is frustrating that you can customize the meta-tags and descriptions for Flickr groups, but that probably won’t change soon.
A few quick ideas that come to mind that might potentially drive traffic and conversions to your page are:
1. Use a tool like http://www.watermarker.com to add discrete watermarks with your website’s URL to your most popular images (use the analytics that Flickr provides to figure out which pix get the most views).
2. Determine what some of the most popular tags are on Flickr that are *relevant* to your images, tag them, and include your watermark on the image. If people are looking for pictures of “ATT Park” and see your image and it’s interesting…they might be inclined to check out your page too.
3. Flickr allows you to “add notes” to your pictures. Include a quick note and your websites URL in these notes so people can find your site.
4. Flickr allows you to add HTML right into the description of your photos, so throw a nice little link to your website in each photos description. Make sure to use “Flickr Uploader” to batch add descriptions and tags, etc.
These are just a few suggestions that could help drive additional conversations from your Flickr group over to your website. Try them out and let me know if you see any spike in Flickr traffic!