More on Flickr as an SEO tool

Are more of us starting to recognize Flickr as a good marketing tool? It certainly is if your small business has a photovisual element to it — i.e., you have products for sale or something else that can be photographed and showed off as a means of attracting attention.

I hope you’ve already read my How to Market on Flickr from earlier this year. And let me suggest a weekend post from Chris Smith on Natural Search Blog: Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization.

Whereas my “How to…” takes a Big Picture approach, Chris’ post goes into more detail on working with individual photos — tagging, writing descriptions, etc. It’s a good article overall, and a logical next step from mine.

I do, though, want to take slight exception with one suggestion about adding your photos to Flickr group. Chris suggests:

Ideally, add it to groups which have a lot of members — the number of members indicates the popularity and traffic of the group.

That’s not always the case. There are a lot of huge groups that are nothing more than photo repositories — i.e., people put pix in these groups, but no one ever looks at them. I think it’s better to find groups that have recent, active discussions — this is your clue that people in the group are actually using the group, and a group with active discussions is a group where your photo is more likely to be seen.

[tags]flickr, photo search, image search, alternative sem, online marketing, participation marketing[/tags]