5 sneaky photo tricks

20/04/2009 at 22:58

Lots of online sellers put huge amounts of time, effort and money into getting perfect product shots. But photographs can do so much more than show off your product; they can be an integral part of your SEO and branding strategies too. Here are a few of my top tips for making your pictures work twice as hard online.

some square, some rectangular pix. square ones take up more screen space1. Make your first photo square
This is the picture that eBay use to generate the gallery picture, so it makes sense to stick with the square proportions of the gallery picture. That way, you get the maximum 80 x 80 pixel picture on-screen. A rectangular picture has its longest side shrunk to 80 pixels, with the shorter side kept in proportion, so your gallery picture will include white space just to fill the gap. That’s white space you could be using to sell in!

2. Use eBay’s free picture (even if you have your own hosting)
However good your web hosting is, you need to allow for the possibility that it could be down. You don’t want your sales to grind to a halt because all your pictures have disappeared, so take advantage of eBay’s free picture on every listing. That way, there’ll always be at least one image for prospective buyers to look at.

3. Use alt text on images in your description
eBay listings can bring in sales long after they’ve ended: there’s one obscure bit of kit that I sold for someone else a year ago, that’s still getting me emails asking if I have any more, just because I’m the only link in Google that looks like it has something for sale. Use this to your advantage. SEO for eBay listings is a big topic, but one easy thing you can use is alt text; this is an extra bit of HTML which tells browsers more about what’s in the picture. So for example, I might write:

<img src="http://mywebsite.com/red-beads.jpg" alt="6mm red Czech round glass beads">

This allows Google and other image-indexing search engines to see that my picture is of 6mm red Czech round glass beads, and a Google Image Search should show them up. Anyone who sells in a category with a strong visual element – from Clothing to Crafts to Cars… – should consider doing this.

I’m struggling to find any figures on the current percentage of searches run using images, but in 2007, it was around 15% and increasing rapidly. As more and more internet users are on broadband, we’re going to see increasingly that buyers use image search to browse products from multiple ecommerce sites at once, so it makes sense to make it as easy as possible for search engines to figure out just what’s in your photographs.

4. Use meaningful filenames
Another way to attract Google to your images is to use filenames that also describe the image: red-beads.jpg means a lot more than 456454fdfdsfr.jpg, after all. The same goes for folders for organising your images, and this is another good argument for having your own hosting rather than using freebies like Photobucket: http://beads-and-crafts.tv/glass-beads/red-6mm.jpg conveys much more information than a URL full of gumph like http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v692/biddybid/findx.jpg.

If you’re going to use multiple words, Google’s Matt Cutts has said that hyphens not underscores should be used to separate words, so red-beads.jpg not red_beads.jpg.

5. Use Gallery for branding
Gallery doesn’t have to be solely about your product – or even contain a product shot at all. If, for example, you sell computer memory from the UK, you might choose to include the message that you’re a UK seller, not a Far Eastern seller. Adding a “sale” flash to gallery pictures has worked well for me too. If you read #1 and thought “but all my product shots are naturally rectangular”, then how about adding your shop name or a logo if you can make it work at such a small size.

And if you’re a seller in Clothing, Shoes and Accessories, remember you’ll have Gallery Plus for free from June, so start thinking about those super-sized pictures and how to take advantage of them now!

If you’ve got a top tip of your own to share, please leave us a comment.

Edited for the Inkfrog people

We’re getting a bunch of hits on this from a thread on the Inkfrog forum. I would have responded there but you have disabled registration, so I can’t.

to twistolife: “sale flash” means the word, in bright colours or on a bright background. You cannot use Flash files as gallery photos.

to atomicfrog: you can only add alt text if you’re using HTML to put the picture in the body of your auction. So you would do it like this:
<img src=”IMAGE FILE URL HERE” alt=”ALT TEXT HERE”>

Hope that helps.