In the first article in our Homebuilder Photo Galleries blog series we showcased the explosion of online photos. In this post we’d like to outline how your photos should appear online. We’ll be outlining best and worst practices that we’ve seen from homebuilders.
Most builders already have a series of photos embedded on their website. We don’t need to tell you how important it is to have photos of your homes for prospective buyers to see. In a later post we’ll tell you how many photos you should have and what types of things should be included in your online photo gallery.
95% of new home builder photo galleries are absolute garbage. Some aren’t easy to find, some are cloaked in bad HTML or built into Flash videos and some are void of any descriptions or tags which make them completely worthless to search engines.
What a Homebuilder Photo Gallery Should Be
First and foremost a photo gallery should be easy to find. A direct link should be present on your homepage (no matter if you build 1 or 20,000 homes a year). A compelling photo gallery should be search optimized and have tons of pictures for prospective buyers to look at. It should load quickly and should give visitors the ability to flip back and forth between photos easily. Every photo should include a title and brief description, and the words used for both should be keyword focused. Search engines can’t tell what the photo is unless you tell them, so make sure to label every photo with words that will help prospective homebuyers find you.
Many photo sharing websites will break pictures into albums. This is a great way to separate your photos by floorplan, community or even home. Many times users will have narrowed their search to a specific floorplan or home type so why not make it easy for them to find their home? Some photo gallery applications will allow you to tag each photo with any relevant descriptive keywords to help users find the photo. This is also very valuable for search engines because Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your site and relate the tags to the photos.
To make your photos viral you need to make it easy for consumers to share their favorite photos with friends and family. They should be able to email every photo to a friend. They should also be able to post the photo easily via Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other social bookmarking sites. This creates new opportunities for non traditional prospects to see your homes. We’ve seen prospective home buyers post photos on their Facebook pages encouraging their friends to comment. This may lead to additional sales opportunities for you.
What a Homebuilder Photo Gallery Should Not Be
Too many times we see a custom homebuilder photo gallery that is a series of tiny thumbnails that when clicked open the actual JPG file in a new window. We realize that homebuilders aren’t web development gurus, but nowadays this is inexcusable. There are tons of free photo sharing applications that are simple to use.
The flip side is overproduction. Many builders that have invested small fortunes in flashy web design are also missing the boat on photo galleries. If your company’s photo gallery is built in Adobe Flash you’re probably missing out on tons of search traffic. Without getting too technical the search engines are incapable of reading the content inside of Flash videos. This makes it very difficult to get any value from organic online searches, even if the photos are labeled inside the video.
Your photo gallery should be easy for customers to use and share. And you should do everything you can to help search engines index your gallery to drive organic traffic to your website. In tomorrow’s article we’ll talk about some free photo sharing applications from around the web.
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