How Can A Site like this have good SEM

product picture and product name underneath

[sadelb]

I have an affiliation site that shows mostly pictures of the product with the name of the product underneath the picture. My goal for my site is to get the customer to the merchant site as fast as possible. I make clear pictures of the product, product name, and price underneath. i do not have a description section for the product. My question is, can a site like this be spidered well by google or is it necessary that I have a description section for each product for more content. My content is basically the picture of the products along with the name of it. I plan on using lots of backlinks and anchor text on other websites to get good page rank for my keywords. Is it possible to be ranked high up on the serps with just pictures and the products name on my website? Thanks in advance

[HughMungus]

I really don't have an authoritative answer, but, I'm starting to wonder about this very thing a lot (that is, how pages that have only a title or name on the page do vs. pages that have title or name plus description). The reason I'm wondering about this so much is because I have a lot of pages on my general-interest site that are nothing more than some text describing the link or some text describing an image or video and I'm ranking really well for terms with almost no inbound links (and almost no inbound links to the specific pages, and, the site was just created in the past few months).

What I'm thinking is that there's some kind of percentage factor in search engine algorithms. That is, if there's a page with one word on it, its "keyword percentage" for that word is 100%. If the page has the keyword on it plus a bunch of other text, the percentage goes down according to how much other text there is. The higher the percentage (what algorithm thinks the page is "about" compared to other pages on the web), the higher your listing in search results.

This is the only way I can explain my rankings compared to other sites that have been around longer but which I presume have a lot more "extraneous" text (off-keyword text) than my pages.

Comments? I don't know that much about search engine algorithms but this is really stumping me.

[dohs]

our primary keyword at google and various other engines consistently produces a "garbage link" to an inside page of web site that has nothing to do with the keyword. this link has even spent much of the time at number one. the page has no text, one image of keyword item, a banner ad below it to an unrelated "service", and a title, desc, and keyword meta tags containing a couple variations of the keyword. i have reported it once with no luck.

i've been tempted to try a similar "test" to see if i can duplicate the results but have not. i can't believe it has been up there in the serps for well over a year.

[Lorel]

I manage several web sites and those with products and very little description or photos in a gallery with a few keywords under the picture rank very highly for their keywords in Yahoo and MSN. However they often don't rank at all in Google until I can get sufficient backlinks coming into the site.

It is my understanding that one should keep their keyword density between 2% and 7%. This is very hard to do on a text heavy page.

However on one site already well ranked by Google I had a portfolio with a major keyword (and also very popular) ranking #45 in Google and I was able to bring it up to #24 by reducing the amount of text on the page--just a few lines of major keywords under each picture (focusing on the one I needed for that page). I put all other info in small pages they needed to click on it they wanted that extra info, i.e., with a javascript onclick it opens a new small window.

So I would say, Yes, include a description under your images but use your main keywords for that particular page, i.e., if the page focuses on blue widgets then make sure this is the keywords under those pictures, in various spellings and arrangements.