Shozam Community

Hi All

Looking at purchasing a photo album package.  Shozam looks pretty good having done a bit of searching.  The only thing I am concerned about is actual promotion of the site once produced.  There was a question earlier that went unanswered and that concerns me.

After producing the site and paying for it of course, what about promotion.  I want it to get onto Goggle, yahoo etc.  but cant find anywhere to enter metatags, how will my site be found.

I am sure there is a simple answer but I dont know what it is.  Can anyone help, if not another user, perhaps an administrator.  This is concerning me, and clearly someone else.  I will hold of making my purchase until I know more.

Look forward to hearing from hopefully someone out there.

Kind regards

Phil

Hi Phil

I asked this exact same question elsewhere when I first set up my website. You might be interested in checking out the following link (it's a few years old) or search for the answer on Google.

http://my.brandeis.edu/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00006k

I regularly check the stats for my website and it shows results for 'googlebot,msnbot,yahoo slurp' - amongst others. These are known as spiders/robots and will search your site to collate information.

I hope this makes sense - I'm sure there are other forum members who gan give you more advice

Mike

http://www.mikespeightphotos.co.uk

Hi, You can add your metatags under #5 gallery tag tab description of your site and keywords hope this is a help to you.

Hi Mike

Thanks for coming back to me, I thought I mist be mssing something, and it seems I was I was right.

Thanks for your kind reply.

Regards

Phil

Hi Rick

Just to say thanks asI did with Mike, Only looking at trial version and havent got to grips with it yet, but clearly I have missed it.

thanks for your reply

Regards

Phil

 Try this site.

SerachEngineWatch.com

Loads of information and it stays current. 

Pay attention to what you name your Gallery. Shozam uses that for the title.

Below is a short excerpt form the site:

======================================= 

Position Your Keywords

Make sure your target keywords appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. The page's HTML title tag is most important. Failure to put target keywords in the title tag is the main reason why perfectly relevant web pages may be poorly ranked. More about the title tag can be found on the How HTML Meta Tags Work page.

Build your titles around the top two or three phrases that you would like the page to be found for. The titles should be relatively short and attractive. Think of newspaper headlines. With a few words, they make you want to read a story. Similarly, your page titles are like headlines for your pages. They appear in search engine listings, and a short, attractive title may help encourage users to click through to your site.

Search engines also like pages where keywords appear "high" on the page, as described more fully on the Search Engine Ranking page. To accommodate them, use your target keywords for your page headline, if possible. Have them also appear in the first paragraphs of your web page.

=============================== 

Phil,

Shozam also pre-populates each page with description content it extracts from various fields, where it makes sense, like image caption or album description. This automates most of the process of optimizing each and every page of your gallery for search engines.

You can create a sample gallery with a couple of images and enter image captions, album descriptions, etc. Then enter keywords and an overall gallery description in Step 5, Tag tab. Generate your gallery and then look at the code of the pages and see how each page is automatically optimized for search engines by filling context appropriate information for the keyword and description meta-tags.

I think there is some serious missinformation floating around on this forum about metatags and Google. And there are addtional bugs in the tags feature.

Contrary to what is implied by this thread you CANNOT control the meta tags on individual PAGES or even ALBUMS. The tag tab in step 5 only sets up a description for the GALLERY index.htm page NOT each page that Shozam generates. If you think I am wrong do a view source on any page in your gallery. Here is what you will find at the top:

meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="hand drawn bird illustrations" /><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><meta name="GENERATOR" content="Gallery generated by Shozam 1.0.0.13. Create photo album Web pages and showcase your images with a little magic - fast, easy, intuitive." /><meta name="robots" content="ALL, INDEX, FOLLOW" /><meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" /><link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="favicon.ico" /><link href="theme/theme.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="theme" /><script language="javascript" src="scripts/global.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="scripts/AC_RunActiveContent.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!--

As you can see the two main meta tags are 

meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="hand drawn bird illustrations"

This is the description for the entire gallery not the page.

meta name="Keywords" content="" 

This is suppose to be the keyword meta tag. As you can see it is empty. So while Shozam offers a tab for keywords, they do not get entered in the actual page.

This is very disappointing to me as the whole reason I purchased the product was to promote my illustrations. So the product not only does not allow Google to index individual pages it has a bug that prevents it from generating keywords for the entire site.

If I am wrong I would love someone to show me where Shozam generates descriptions and keywords for each page in a gallery, and prove to me that this keyword bug is not a bug.

-------

From Shozams own help

Tag tab

This tab lets you insert description and keywords metadata into your gallery's HTML code to help search engines find your gallery on the Web.   

How to use this feature

Enter your Description and Keywords into the provided fields. When you generate your gallery, this information will be added to your HTML code.

How the program generates metadata

• Page Title: the program automatically uses the Gallery title that you entered in the Generate tab field, for the title for all your gallery pages
• Page Description: the program also automatically creates page descriptions for some page types based on the information entered for the image Short caption, image Long description and album Description

Goofy, I have just posted information on the parallel thread:

http://community.shozam.com/forums/p/572/1935.aspx#1935

Goofy, I have also verified that keywords meta-tags are indeed entered by the program on every page it genrates. If you do not have that experience, please try the following:

• Make sure the "generate modified files only" is un-checked.
• Update to version 1.0.0.14

Morning Razvan,

I have three different galleries up behind my front page 2 are ver 1.0.0.14 and 1 is 1.0.0.12. On one gallery "Ted's Photo Gallery" I entered the meta tags in tab 5: Description & Keywords. This is the gallery I want to be advertised by search engines. I looked at the file: Index.htm, indexgallery.htm, Map.htm & Webgallery.htm. All of these files show the information that I entered in Keywords & Description and it shows the first. The Shozam info that is automatically created is mostly Tech. data about Shozam. That is probably because I didn't label my gallery and photos correctly. Now a second Gallery "Evie's Photo Album", I did not manually enter any information. When I looked in the files: Index.htm, indexgallery.htm, Map.htm & Webgallery.htm, I found mostly technical information related to Shozam. So based on this test I must conclude that for me I will enter th meta tags via tab 5.Both of these Galleries were updated to version 1.0.0.14 and generate modified files only was unchecked. This doesn't show any specific photo data for different albums but that is OK. These are new galleries created since I moved to 1&1. Located at (http://www.tdiebold.com)