AS landscapers or garden designers you are going to want potential clients see examples of your work by displaying photographs of your projects.

These could be simple before and after type shots, or close ups of particular methods you used, however, you also want to make sure people find them via search engines.

There are a couple of things you can do to make it easier for search spiders to find your images, but more importantly tell what the actual photograph is about.

Give your image a title

The first thing to do is to change the default name your camera provides once you have downloaded your image to your computer, often it is something like 'dsc00887.jpg' which doesn't tell us a great deal.

So after you have edited your image save the new one with a more descriptive name, something like 'rose-garden-norwich.jpg' as you can see this both describes the pic and offers up a location.

You'll see that I also split the words up with a 'dash' again this lets search engines read what the pic is all about.

If a search engine can find your image then so too could a potential client...which could lead to being commissioned.
A quick aside on editing the image.

Your camera software most probably has a simple image editor built in, or you may want to try Google's Picasa or the free PhotoScape, whatever you use try and keep in mind some simple dimensions for your photos.

Images don't need to be as high quality as in a magazine and many cameras, by default, provide an original image that if you printed it off would be about A4 size, clearly we don't need that on the web.

So I would suggest that your images don't need to be any more than about 500 pixels wide with a file size of around 75kb, you won't lose a great deal in quality.

I've loaded up the same image in two different dimensions to provide a comparison and to give you an idea of how little difference there is when viewed on a computer screen:

Large image of summer ball

Smaller image of summer ball

I also think this could help a little in reducing the illegal use of images by other websites.

For a start you could still include a website address in the bottom corner of your image as a type of watermark, but you are also not providing someone with a full size image that they can do want they want with.

I think the majority of people are pretty honest and will link back and mention the source of the image if they use it on their site - some won't, but they are crooks and whatever you try to do they will attempt to rip you and many others off.

To a degree as search engines improve and more people link to you, the person who has the original image or the more reputable online presence is likely to see their images appear higher in search engine results.

As you can see it's not an exact science, however, there is one last thing you can do to help your images be found.

Images also have alt tags, they look like this: alt="Rose garden" and you will see them when an image does not load properly.

The other tag connected with images is called the title tag, but it does not feature within the image properties on the network, but it is the one you see when you hover your mouse over a pic.

Again search engines use these to understand what an image is about, so if you wanted more locally based searches to prove popular your alt tag could read:

alt="Rose garden Brighton"

In fact I recently crossed a very useful article from Google themselves on improving your site for search engines, as well as the use of alt tags in images, take a few minutes to check out the video below.


Unfortunately the Ning service doesn't complete the alt tag automatically when you add an image to an article, it could use the image name for example, hopefully in time this will be the case.

In the mean time you can do it yourself, so once you've uploaded your image there will be a line of code and you will see, alt="" click between the quote marks and add a few words of descriptive text.

Don't stuff the alt tag full of words that have no relation to the image trying to trick the search engines, it won't work, all you need is a short phrase and maybe a location.

In the end though if you have taken a little time to write an interesting article or a helpful paragraph or two describing your image, this will help both search engines track you down but more importantly entertain and inform your readers.

Related article: Tips on using the Landscape Juice Network