• Registered: 2008-08-24
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Making SimpleViewer Google-friendly (SEO)

I am considering SimpleViewer to use for my portfolio, but it is necessary that Google can index the captions for my photos.
As far as I can see with the standard installation the captions are only embedded into the flash and xml and google can't read them.

Is there any way to embed the captions as actual text in the pages, or at least in the html?
If this is not possible yet, my request would be to implement this as soon as possible :)
That would really make it an attractive option for (professional) photographers.

Thanks in advance!

  • Registered: 2006-10-30
  • Posts: 34

Re: Making SimpleViewer Google-friendly (SEO)

"Is there any way to embed the captions as actual text in the pages, or at least in the html? "

As html-comments maybe?

  • Registered: 2009-04-09
  • Posts: 5

Re: Making SimpleViewer Google-friendly (SEO)

Can't believe there isn't more interest in this topic, considering how vitally important SEO is for getting visitors.

Is there no way to make the image captions accessible to search engines?

Please respond.

This is a great app!

Thanks,
railer

  • Registered: 2009-04-09
  • Posts: 5

Re: Making SimpleViewer Google-friendly (SEO)

Haven't found anything is this forum with a solution.

I posted elsewhere that if I embed the viewer into an HTML page, I can do the METATAG optimization as with a normal page, and then also place the titles and tag text into the body under the viewer as "invisible" 3px black text, which would get indexed.

Arcane, but it's a solution.

Best,
railer

  • Registered: 2009-04-21
  • Posts: 2

Re: Making SimpleViewer Google-friendly (SEO)

Apparently Google can index flash files and their content...

Shocked? :shock: So was I! www searchengineworkshops com/articles/flash html

I was thinking that you could parse the xml file with php or ajax or something similar, create a hidden div and put all the thumbnails (linked to the images) and captions in there... Quite bandwidth heavy I know, but it's a solution.

Doing it this way means that you could also create a gallery to be shown if your user has flash turned off, creating a graceful degradation to your site! :D

I'm building a site at the moment which has to be accessible friendly, which means that the image links and captions will have to be readable by a screen reader. I'm in a lucky position as I'm marrying Simpleviewer, Autoviewer and Plogger (a cms), so I generate the xml as it's used, and can therefore put the captions in the page with php.

  • Registered: 2009-07-14
  • Posts: 1

Re: Making SimpleViewer Google-friendly (SEO)

I made a small php script that will output my thumbnails, captions and the ALT tag for non-flash browsers.

You can read about it and get the code from
mkwebdesign ca/blog/tutorials/making-simpleviewer-seo-friendly/

Let me know if it works for you.

...Mikael