Help with terminology please

I’m beginning to rebuild my portfolio website (which I shall submit for your ruthless criticism in due course). Apart from the challenges of teaching myself Flash, I’ve encountered another problem – I don’t exactly know how to describe my work.

In the past, I’ve loosely referred to my work as “enhancement and retouching” of photos, without really elaborating. I’d like to explain it a bit better, so I need clarification of these terms.

In my mind, “Enhancement” refers to general contrast, exposure and colour corrections – ie, improving on the original photo.

Whereas I took “Retouching” to refer to changing a photo in some way – most commonly improving skin flaws, for example. Obviously, I would “enhance” a photo first, before moving on to “retouching” it.

Really major work would perhaps be referred to as “Compositing”, where two or more photos are combined, etc.

Can anyone tell me if they agree with my definitions? Is there actually a standard for this? Dictionary.com seemed to agree with me (hard to tell), and Wikipedia wasn’t much help at all.

I might question why you need to offer more explanation than is actually required. I would use something like "digital darkroom" techniques and leave it at that. Everybody does the same type of process to their photos but most of the buying public sees "retouching" as somehow untruthful.

I think the more information you offer the better job you will have to do to explain (justify) the work you have done. Short of that, your definitions look fine to me.

Works for me, too.

eddarr wrote in post #4845569
I might question why you need to offer more explanation than is actually required. I would use something like "digital darkroom" techniques and leave it at that.

Well, I want to promote my services. I feel that "enhancement" and "retouching" services aren't necessarily aimed at the same clientele.

I can see already that people are going to look at it differently, based on age maybe. My mother worked as a "retoucher" in the days of B&W right after WW2. In the old days, it was the art of applying colors to black and white photos, I mean, real inks or paints, right on the paper over the image. It could be quite striking, with the paints either being opaque or transparent, some of it looked real nice, but you would never mistake it for a color print. And then, Poloraoid came out with color instant film and put that little cottage industry in the chutes.

So maybe different age groups will see it in a different way. But I think I understood pretty good what you were saying and that was your point.

What are you doing with Flash? You know, right, that a flash site hasn't a chance against html?

Yes, I know. I'm building the site in html (hand-coded, mind you), and just embedding the slideshow of images inside it.

Luckily I read up on it recently. I was all fired up to build a whole fancy site in Flash, it was going to be the funkiest thing going around Then I read about how Flash sites don't do so well in search rankings, so I quickly knocked that idea on the head, and went back to basics.

I'd been wondering why our humble little site ranked so much better in Google than nearly every other high-end photographic business in Brisbane. We are a part-time operation with a basic HTML site, and we are beating the fancy pros with their fancy Flash sites in the race to the top of page 1.

Well, the secret is to offer both from index.html. Have a link to the all flash site and one to the html. Let the flash site biggyback in the rankings on the pages of the html site. The problem is, no search engine so far has developed a spider than can read and make sense of an swf, being a visual application instead of text bassed. Carts are also much easier to make work in html or php/cmf/asp.

I use to be an editor for one of the major directories and worked with some of the early Google techs on search and spiders and then got into flash about 5 years ago, and most people just don't get it that the web still revolves around html.

And again, I am now working for another major Directory player and find that most people don't understand the power of the meta-tag. Everything to do with ranking and search results revolves around the three meta-tags, title, description and keywords, in that order.

Thanks for the tips. What is the key to good metadata? To cram as many keywords in there as possible? Or to be very selective and concise?

No, and that's the last thing you will want to do. You will get penalized in the rankings for going overboard with the keywords. First, you have to understand how search works. The robots are little bits of code that are sent out to search for certain criteria. They can follow links and they can send back what they find on a page. In effect, a spider is a friendly virus. Each big search engine, Google, Alta Vista, MSN, all use their own proprietary coding and algorithms cause each company has it's own aims for how it's results are used on their pages. But they all have one thing in common, they want searches made on their sites to fulfill what the searcher, you and me, was looking for, first time, every time. Meaning, the results of the search should be exactly what you asked for and the search spider has to find the most pertinent sites from #1 and down from two or three words you type in. It finds that in the Google database servers and those are filled from submitted sites, spidered sites, which is about 95% of the database, and from RDF dumps form directories who give out their data. Google use to use ODP almost exclusively for it's directory listings.

Directories on the other hand, never use just spidered sites. All true Directories use live editors that actually review sites to see that the content is what it says it is, then writes a human written title and description for that site, then inserts it into the listings database. Search engines like Google store every word of every page their spiders visit, while Directories only store the written title and description, and the link to the site itself.

Now, the Meta-tags. Both human editors and the spiders love well written meta-tags. They should be easy to find and easy to read and they should all use keywords but be understood as a sentence when read by a human. Except the keyword tags. They should be words related to the main text and intent of the words found on the viewable page and the title and description tags, misspellings, acronyms, synonyms, that kind of thing. Also, most search engines have character length limits for keywords, title and description. Earlier, I said penalized if you abuse the meta-tags. It's not really penalty, except in the sense that once the spider reading your page hits the character limit, it stops, it may not go on, it may not go on and then send a string back to the database spiders to kick out all reference to this page. See what I mean, it's very effective, and the spiders are as smart as the guys working for Google can make them, which is way smarter than 99.9% of the webmasters who think they can trick them.

Back to those humans who are looking at your site to write a nice pertinent title and description for their Directory. The first thing they look at is the home page, then open the source of the page. Since time is money, you can, if the webmaster knew how it worked, get a nice title, which is usually the company name, and a great non bragging description to use in just a few seconds and then your on to the next. If you clutter up the title and description tags with crap to make it look good for spiders who are great at sniffing out crap descriptions and titles, then you've just made more unnecessary work for that human editor. Make it really hard for an average person to find out what your comany does and for that editor to come up with a descriptive sentence or two for his directory, and he may just leave and not list your site. There are thousands of others out there waiting. I guess you can figure out I'm talking from experience?

Anyway, your Title tag, your Description tag and your Keywords tag, should all be concise, filled with keywords that describe your business, and not too long. In the code of the page, they should be right up at the top or very close, and each on it's own line. Neatness is good for spiders and human editors. I am not kidding. This may sound funny, but this is absolute truth and taking it seriously will help your ranking.

For instance, your title tag, Belle Photography Brisbane. That's it? OK, that's short and sweet, but you are allowed more characters, spaces count, and Cap the first letter of each word. Hypens seem to help. Unfortunately, your only keyword is photography. Here, try this on just your index.html page;

title = Belle Photography Brisbane - Offers Photographs on Canvas - Photo Retouching
Discription = You know best what you do, so think it out and write it out in a couple of sentences, exactly what all you do, service and products offered, and don't repeat yourself. Your keywords are over done with the word Brisbane. Only use any one word variation 3 times in the whole keyword tag and spread them out, further than every third word. For instance, this is far too often; old photo restoration brisbane, photo enhancement brisbane, photo retouching brisbane. It doesn't have to read sense, but there is nothing to gain by repeating it too often and a lot to lose.

And write new and different tags for each and every page on the site. Don't duplicate the same tags for all pages like you have now. That's a big no-no for spiders.

Brilliant advice! Thanks for taking the time.

To show you how important the words in the title tag are, go to Goggle and search for Wisconsin Bird Photography. Then go to my gallery link home page from the link in my footer, View Source, and see what my title tag says. Then go back to the Google search and see where my site is listed.

So I went here...
http://www.dmoz.org …l/Commercial-Advertising/
... & looked at one of the top links:
http://www.artsachspho​tography.com/home.html
In the page source, I don't see much in the metatags that got him there. Why is that?

Because the ODP, Yahoo, BOTW, most all directories are Alpha listed. A's at the top. Remember, directories are live people editing the listings, the GUI just allows you to add a title, description, notes and what category the listing will go into. Meta-tags, for a directory only help the editor adding listings, for his eyes, for finding a good title and description he doesn't have to waste time writing himself, copy/paste, one time only.

I also had a post up awhile back here, offering to list anyones valid site in the directory I work at now. I have to and will follow the directory rules for listings, and I don't want to be pestered about changing the wording on a listing, which is just not done, but I will list POTN'ers sites for free. Easpecially if you write a good set of tags so I don't have to waste time figuring out just what it is your company actually does. LOLOL And it doesn't have to be a business or studio. If a member owns his own domain, I will list it too. What I won't list is links to flickr or the sort, Tripod, Geocities, throw away sites. Just PM me with the link and maybe a suggestion of what category it should go in.

Thanks for that answer. And thanks for this, too: "...offering to list anyones valid site in the directory I work at now."
Someday, when I've finished playing with the tweaks & tags on mine, I'll rerun Validator. Maybe by then they'll not only tell me what is wrong, but how to fix the problems too.

Well, playing the meta tag game is like playing chess. All the respectible search engine companies write their own algorithms for what they filter for when they read a page code. so what it comes down to is a bunch of webmasters sitting around waiting to get rich and tinkering with their tags on a daily basis, thinking that's going to help their ranking. I know this, cause I use to do it myself. But it's a waste of time. Time is really slow on the internet. Google for instance only spiders once a month, more or less. MSN, on a looser scale, six weeks sometimes less often. And theres no way to give a good picture of spider times for all search engines, cause they vary it just to throw off people trying to milk the system.

I don't think validators are anything a serious SEO Tech would even consider. It's all about testing, waiting for the spider, checking your ranking, changing a few words of text on the page or in one of the tags. It's like watching trees grow. And no validator is going to do that at the click of a button. Any good SEO Tech is already going to know all the rules, just how many characters MSN allows in the title and so on, second nature. A SEO Tech is a validator.

The best rule to follow is the one no webmaster wants to. Go to the "Webmaster" pages of each big search engine, google has a nice one. They tell you what their spiders like, how to treat them, what they feed on and what they drool over. All any webmaster has to do is to follow those rules, and I will bet my shirt, you will get onto page one in a reasonable amount of time using any reasonable search term string.