The best way to organize a gallery for SEO?

[UnderRugSwept]

I need to redo the following gallery
http://goo.gl/PFvjE
because besides the fact that it looks ugly, it's an SEO mess. Since all the pages are comprised of images, and the only text is the navigation, I'm getting duplicate content issues. I tried adding a little paragraph of text on some of the pages, but this thing needs a total revamp.

My main question is this: is that menu being repeated on all the pages really a good thing? What good is it to, say, on the fire patches page, to have a menu that includes all these keywords for sports patches? Would it be better to just have a main gallery page that lists the main patch types: applique, motorcycle, Scouting, ect, and then once you get to that page, list all the different sub categories?

[DougRoberts]

Hi Marisa,

I'd start by looking at how your human beings are navigating your site and see how much cross-category jumping there is, but I suspect that your suggestion would be a good idea.

As you say, Instead of having the drop-down navigation with all the categories, you could replace this with just the top-level (FIRE, POLICE, MILITARY,SPORTS etc,).

I notice that these top level categories don't have a page themselves, so you would then need to create a page for each with navigation to the sub-categories.

These top-level pages can be optimized for phases like "police patches" etc, perhaps put the most popular patches on this page.

Can you add more text to the individual items too. A shortish description for each patch would help.

Could you add a "vote for this patch" thumbs up widget? Can you contact the organisations who's patches they are and run a competition to get them to come a vote (get a link?). Depends on how happy they are to have their patches featured in the gallery.

[UnderRugSwept]

Thank you! I'm glad someone finally answered this! I really need to get going on it. I think that is what I'm going to do--make a top-level page for the main categories and then only have navigation to the sub-categories on the top top-level page for each category. It seems like the best solutions for both humans and bots.