How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable

[khi5]

Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content.

Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page?

I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result."

My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well.

Thank you

[EGOL]

I have been using plain text to caption my images.. .but the page that you shared looks like a better idea.  It communicates that you are writing about an image.

I have not used that coding but I think it would work well. Perhaps better than what I use.

Thanks!

[khi5]

last 1: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_figcaption.asp - would that be OK HTMP cap style to use?

[khi5]

OK. So whether I use wordpress or HTML style captions does not matter. My web developers had set up wordpress stye and I was advised HTML captions may be better. I will leave as is then. thx again. These have been very clear and quality answers

[EGOL]

I have image captions that are typed as text into Wordpress.   I have image captions that have been created as HTML in Dreamweaver.   Both of these work fine.

On many of my pages I have a gray caption box beneath each image and a colored title box above each image.  The color in the title box is taken from the image so that it looks nice.  Just make a CSS style to format the title and caption box.

[khi5]

this is great answer and you back it up with experiences you have seen.

Question: should this be HTML captions or can it be written text in wordpress below image? What kind of text works best for SEO?

[EGOL]

Pages with lots of images can be great assets for your website.   I have pages with 40 to 50 to 100 images (nice size images) that rank at the top of Google for really really difficult queries - and in my opinion the images are the reason why these pages rank so well.  People love visual content - especially if it is beautiful, interesting, surprising, funny, etc (long list of other reasons).

"The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result."

heh... my response to this is... Get off of your butt and write some captions.  If you have created all of those awesome images you must know something about them.  They say an image is worth a thousand words.  Get busy.  If visitors see a great image they want to know.... Who?  Where?  How?  WTF?   Should be really easy for you to write that.

I have some pages where I have spent $1000 to $2000 just to create the images.  Some are graphics, some are photos, some are graphs based upon data.  Images are my best content and my competitive advantage.  I spend thousands of dollars a month to create and acquire some of the best images in my industry.

It sounds like you have a lot of great images and are sitting on a fantastic opportunity.  Write about your images and see what happens.  You might be surprised at what happens.