Songs and albums have a particular style of being named; it's short, catchy, and to the point. Think "Kind of Blue." There's a bluegrass instrumental called "Whiskey for Breakfast," and Clapton's best piece is probably his cover version of "Crossroads." Photography has its own naming style. In 1941 Ansel Adams shot one he titled "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," long before SEO. Galen Rowell chose titles like "Twilight Mist, Merced River, Yosemite."

Part of that is time honored tradition, and part is that it's frankly not that easy to come up with unique names for all of your photos. The whole idea is to communicate something in a non-verbal manner, and leave the viewer some room to interpret. On that note, I've been using names like "Rocky Mountain Sky" and "Stream and Waterfall; Big Basin State Park."

Google seems to have pruned a lot of my pages out of their index, but they've been showing more love to the ones that are left. Six months ago Webmaster Tools showed 160 pages of my site, now it's 60. I've been going back and putting more care into all of them, but I wonder if the lack of verbs and "glue words" has anything to do with this? I use very similar text in the page title, h1, and file name, and I'm wondering if that might look bad out of context?

"The Tetons and Snake River" has been a hit since 1942, before my parents were alive. Not that my stuff is as good, but that's how things are named in photography ... and yet people try to game the search engines stuffing keywords that don't read like plain English, and Google tends to look for that with algorithms, so I wonder how this style effects my site in the index?

Forrest, there's nothing wrong with naming your images the way you have. You wouldn't name an image of a blue shoe #15 and remember what it is, correct? You're supposed to name things in a semantic manner -- even CSS rules.

Keyword stuffing is when there's gobs and gobs of crap shoved into the ALT text Vs actually giving the ALT attribute a short and meaningful sentence that actually describes the photograph in question.

People that are blind or visually challenged need ALT attributes on images so that way they can hear what it is. I sent you a reply PM with some info about using D-Link with your images. It may help.

You also need to do the 301s like we discussed, also.

I've been hearing from a lot of people that older pages on their site are suddenly having problems (e.g., supplemental index, dropped rank, or dropped PR) but that's more to do with algo changes in google itself Vs anything else.

If pages are rarely updated, it signifies to google that the page is stale and perhaps not as important to your site as other pages that might change on a more regular basis.

The easy way around that is, add some extra content to the page that you can change up once and a while. Or even change the meta descriptions -- that does help too. You have to let the bots know the pages are alive, and that's the key.

If you're using includes, and make changes the date of last update won't be read from the server so easily. So, whatever file is housing the includes is the one that you will also need to just "save" again to push the last updated time to match whatever date changes were made in the includes.

Hopefully I haven't been too confusing ... I'm kind of half-here because of the pain meds for my shoulder.

I hope your shoulder feels better!

Thanks for the advice, by the way. I figured out how to do the 301s with .htaccess, a little confusing at first, but it's actually really useful. So I've got that covered.

In general I've tried to be pretty descriptive with my alt attributes, although I should take another pass through my site to check on all of that.

Oh, and no includes, or anything fancy. It's all plain xhtml, and a text editor. I think I'm going to write a CMS, but that's down the line.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

Songs and albums have a particular style of being named; it's short, catchy, and to the point. Think "Kind of Blue." There's a bluegrass instrumental called "Whiskey for Breakfast," and Clapton's best piece is probably his cover version of "Crossroads." Photography has its own naming style. In 1941 Ansel Adams shot one he titled "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," long before SEO. Galen Rowell chose titles like "Twilight Mist, Merced River, Yosemite."

Part of that is time honored tradition, and part is that it's frankly not that easy to come up with unique names for all of your photos. The whole idea is to communicate something in a non-verbal manner, and leave the viewer some room to interpret. On that note, I've been using names like "Rocky Mountain Sky" and "Stream and Waterfall; Big Basin State Park."

Google seems to have pruned a lot of my pages out of their index, but they've been showing more love to the ones that are left. Six months ago Webmaster Tools showed 160 pages of my site, now it's 60. I've been going back and putting more care into all of them, but I wonder if the lack of verbs and "glue words" has anything to do with this? I use very similar text in the page title, h1, and file name, and I'm wondering if that might look bad out of context?

"The Tetons and Snake River" has been a hit since 1942, before my parents were alive. Not that my stuff is as good, but that's how things are named in photography ... and yet people try to game the search engines stuffing keywords that don't read like plain English, and Google tends to look for that with algorithms, so I wonder how this style effects my site in the index?

it could be really it could"

ForrestCroce - Another good way to check the density of keywords is using tools which detect over usage of keywords. There are many of those available free on the internet.

try a search on google with "keyword density checker", this should give you fair amount of options to check your keywords and also provide you with count of main keywords you have used in various places on the page.

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