Hello all,

My site, Get Milked, which I never plan on making money on (but that's not the point), contains over 400 comics. Right now I have them in galleries of 10 with just the images displayed (gallery list). Now, someone said that this will hurt me in SEO, in that search engines will only find "gallery" and not the individual words on the comics themselves. The proposed solution: make a single page for each comic with the <title> thread the name of the comic so search engines see the individual words of each comic. The result should be more snags for search engines.

Does this sound correct to you SEO gurus out there? I'd like to get some opinions because the change would require lots and lots of wear on my brain and my digits. Also, would this change make the comics more annoying to navigate through? Or would the SEO payoff trump any navigational issues?

Thanks!

does it look like the SEs are having a problem?

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...etmilked%2ecom

more to the point is does it really matter?

Ed, I think it would depend on what keywords you would think relevant to the page. One thing with the comics is that there is very little text on the pages. So if you create a unique page for one comic and there's nothing there, but the image there's not all that much for a search engine.

Looking at some of the comics all I can see that would use as a title is the title of the comic, but I doubt that would bring people people looking for the comic. For example one comic I see says:

"Fish wondering why it doesn't have nipples"

I can only imagine the kind of phrases that someone would use to find page. I doubt any of them are going to be looking for a comic. Assuming they found the page they might just click the back button right away.

I understand what your friend is saying, but you have to have the keywords to justify the unique page. If you can find phrases specific for a comic that you think people would use to search for a comic then you could make that comic a unique page, but even then a single image on a page will have a hard time ranking for all but the most specific of phrases.

And in the end if it makes it harder for your visitors to interact with the site it's probably not worth it.

I think there's a way to accomplish both SE and user friendliness, although it will take a fair amount of work.

You're going to have to come up with titles that describe each comic in both a user-friendly and an SE-friendly manner (moreso user friendliness). If you can do that, and you won't get most of them right the first time, then it could work.

You would also need to figure out a way to do things such as include alt attributes (and maybe even longdesc attributes), and somehow come up with text for each.

Like you said, though, it's a buttload of work based on the way you've built this site and would take a long time to do, redo, and threedo until you got it right. I don't know if it would be worth it or not...I'd say in the long run it might if you can get the site found and figure out a way to make some coin off it, but it's not overly likely.

To follow Adam, don't forget that when users bookmark your pages, the title is what they see in their bookmark menu.
So, make sure you are user friendly there as well.
I would wager that comics are especially likely to be bookmarked.