Optimization for an Car Image Gallery Site

[ketan9]

I have a site where I feature several car images and the details/press releases about those cars.

So normal layout would be an article page consisting of the following:

• Article Text

• Image gallery list laid out for user to browse.

Now, when a user clicks on the image, the link opens up in another page with the image as a main content and then other image belonging to same article are shown below to browse. Each of such pages with images from same article are linked to one another with 'rel'=prev/next and has a 'rel' canonical to the page with article text.

Am I doing this right to prevent thin content and duplication issue? Each of the images are for same car and are related to one another.

The site under question is DieselStation. Also, if you can provide a general feedback on the site's layout and architecture in terms of SEO, that would be great.

[CaseyKluver]

I have had great success just keeping the gallery all on the page as the article. Just let the thumbnails open in a lightbox. Title and Alt the images appropriately (since you have a gallery here they dont all have to be exact match, be vauge). You dont need a image on its own page. This will be good enough for image SEO and better user experience.

[christianoliveira]

Hi Casey!

I have a doubt, do you load all the images in the article URL? I mean, if the gallery has 20 images, you include all of them in the article's html, so that when the browser loads the page, it has to download all the images? How does this affect traffic costs/usability?

Thanks in advance!

Christian

[CaseyKluver]

Well, you should be creating thumbnails of each image(or your gallery script should make them for you). This way the page load is significantly faster.

As far as usability, users will much rather see the image gallery on the same page as the article is on. I takes a step out of their research process and thats ultimately the goal.