We often get asked, "how can I increase my search engine relevance?"  Here are some tips.

• Keywords, keywords, keywords.  Add keywords to the photos on your site. All of them.
• Add gallery descriptions and photo captions.
• Post and contribute to forums and blogs.  LInk your website in your post.
• Get other sites to link to you.  (Be careful of link farms, though - they'll get you banned from a search engine!)
  
• Start a blog, and post to it frequently.  See examples from Barb Gates and Mike Lane.
• Register your site with Google and the other search engines.
• Put descriptive information in your Bio box.  That will be picked up as Meta information.  For  example when viewing source, it would show:
  

  <meta name="description" content="blah blah blah blah" />

If you do these things, and keep up with them, your search results will greatly improve.

Another question that is often asked, "Can I put in my own META tags on my SmugMug site?"  The answer is no, that information cannot be changed.  The good news, though, is that modern search engines largely ignore META tags because people use them to try to spam search engines.  The search engines have gotten wise.  :)

Some references:


A little bit of PageRank Revealed

PageRank Explained

10 Things SEOs Don't Want You To Know