Here is something I have found will make a major impact on the traffic to your site.
Photos.
You may or may not know this but many people will directly search for photos on the major search engines in the images section.
I have found it is much easier to rank well for images than the standard search engine.
In order for your photos to rank well they need to be properly tagged.
For instance if your member uploads a picture of a superman cake( my sites a cakes community)
it will only rank well if it is tagged Superman Cake. Many members will leave the title and tag as something like img 55555 etc. This will not work.
You have a couple of options to fix this.
1. You can manually edit the pictures for correct titles and tags.
2. You can educate your members to do it the correct way.
I have found telling members if they want the pictures they upload to be seen they need to properly tag them. This has worked well for me.
It can take months for images from your site to rank in the image search engines.
So dont get discouraged if you dont see results right away.
If you get creative the descriptions and tags you might be able to rank well for less competitive terms.
For instance Superman Cake might already have thousands of listings. So title and tag it something like Superman Birthday Cake
You can get keyword ideas using this tool
Finally
One more thing will make your pictures rank well.
That is the content on the page with the picture.
So comments mentioning the picture will help it rank
You would want to post something like
"that is a great superman cake picture" in the comment section
Sorry if this is a little drawn out
BK
Replies
very good tip, Brian! I have been planning to go through my pictures and better tag them with something that will rank well, and then describe the specifics of the pics in the description. thank you for posting this!
+1
I was under the impression that tags on photos did not influence google but only the Ning search on your network?
Can anyone confirm one or the other?
Here's what I did that seemed to work well for my site; I went into the "Language Editor", found the word "Tag" that your members see when uploading photos and changed it to; Tags: (Give it some searchable names)
Brian, tags do influence the Google search engine. For instance I uploaded a surf photo onto another ning site and tagged it "surfing donuts". Search that in Google images and it shows up No 2 and a few other spots on the first page.
I have also been running a ticket with ning about their RSS feed no longer working as a site-map on Google Admin Tools. Turns out it's a problem at Google, not at Ning. After this stopped working I lost my biggest traffic source: google images.
Perhaps this tip can make up a little for that.