What To Do For A Website That is Mainly Images

[rhysmaster]

I have a website that is a desktop wallpaper script.

People can come and upload 100's of wallpapers to share with the community.

This is were the problems comes in.

Files are normally called 27636dark.jpg or whatever and come with no description.

This leads to 2 things.

1. no text content that google can use to know what the page/image is about.

2. Meta descriptions, URL's just look like spam.

Example: /car-wallpapers/7636dark.jpg

If a text description was added, it would still only be like "Green Trees in the distance". Which as you may guess, with 1,000's of wallpapers... would end up having a lot of descriptions the same.

Is there any advice for sites that focus on image driven content?

[StalkerB]

Well, it depends how much forcing users to add a description would negatively effect you I suppose. Hard to get something out when there's no data being put in

They must already choose a category (car), can you get them to name the image (ask them to be descriptive 'Red Ferrari on an Italian mountainside') and tag it with items in the wallpaper (red, Ferrarri)?

If so then you can improve your URLs a title tags

URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/red-ferarri-italian-mountainside-3/
Title: Red Ferarri on an Italian Mountainside Car Wallpaper | Computer Desktop Wallpapers

Add the tags on the page with links to tag pages (which I don't always like but would be useful for your users and internal linking).

URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/tag/red
Title: Red Car Wallpapers | Computer Desktop Wallpapers

or

URL: site.com/tag/ferarri
Title: Ferrari Car Wallpapers | Ferarri Computer Desktop Wallpapers

Unfortunately unless you want to do all this yourself you will have to get users to give you more info at time of upload. As I say, no real way to get something out without putting something in

[baptisteplace]

Barry is right, I would suggest to wait before puttin tag pages online (or making them indexable), this can lead to huge amount of very similar pages.

Apart from asking user to put a description (or any other UGC like comments, tags, etc.), you compute some data from the images if you have the technical capacity : compute the colors of the wallpapers to have 2 or 3 main colors, size of the wallpaper, file format, etc. This will allow you to display "raw" data or even generate text patterns to fill the blanks.

[StalkerB]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of tag pages in general, but I often see these image sites and especially site themes (for WP, Joomla, etc) using them to very good effect. Certainly if there's 100 new wallpapers a day being added I think they can be beneficial.

However, please do look very carefully at how you make them and link to them. Consider no following links to those pages and even perhaps no indexing the pages themselves.

I don't have enough experience with using tag pages to give you any definitive advice, maybe someone else can jump in

[saibose]

1st of all, make an image sitemap and submit to Google. Here are the guidelines to do so.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636

Then, do some default tag and category definition. As Barry pointed out, it makes a lot of sense to categorize. That would add relevance to your website in searches.

Then, at the backend, assign default tags for the categories. Like for cars, the default tag could be automobiles, for scenery it could be nature so on and so forth. That would help in your optimization.

[Goetzman]

image sitemaps is the way to go, Google is loving that lately

[firstconversion]

Go to the http://www.gumtree.com/ and create an ad for a house (or whatever), the in field help they give to get users to give indepth information is great without seeming forced.

If you incentivise your community via "likes" or rankings, then they will want to provide this information i.e. make it in their interest to provide you with information