One of my competitors had a designer put a new look on their website.   As soon as they uploaded it we went to the site to sniff the code.  We saw that the developer left the "noindex" on all of the files.  We laughed and laughed about that.  Within a few days their entire site dropped out of search and it took them a couple weeks to figure out what happened while we enjoyed a big increase in sales.   But, when they uploaded the site with the noindex removed, within a few days the pages were mostly back in search and two weeks later they were back to normal.

The amount of time required is influenced by the amount of spider action received by the site.  If your site has low PageRank and does not receive a lot of spider action you can go much longer without being reindexed.  Deep pages on a site without much spider action can take weeks to come back.  The site in the example above is a PR6 site with mostly PR3 and PR4 pages.

Instead of making "slideshows" I place all of my photos on a big single page with lots of generous captions.   Then when people land on those pages they say ... WOW!

Some of my big pages full of images are ranking well in google for very difficult queries.

A lot of people don't like slideshows because they have to click, wait, click, wait, click, wait.  I don't like them.  That's why I don't use them.

Google can see a slideshow as a whole page with one image and not a lot of text.  They might think that the purpose is to get visitors to click click click and display a lot of ads.  It would not be a surprise to see google judge a big page with twelve images and 1000 words as much more deserving of rankings than a single slideshow page.  That's why I don't see slideshows ranking above my big pages with a lot of images.  Plus, if you have a lot of pages like that on your website then you could have a panda problem for thin content.

lol... Yes, but you can do BOTH.

I remember that goat project.  The kid was the pitch man and the old man had all of the expertise.

So what you are saying is less emphasis on KWs and more emphasis on ideas?

Not quite.  What I am saying, is that if you have ideas don't allow volume or bidding or pricing data to frighten you away or discourage you.  There could be a lot of money out there.  It might be widely distributed but it still can be profitable.   I have made nice money by casting a wide net.

Now, changing to a different philosophy....  one that has been more successful for me....   I use the Adwords keyword planner, but in a different way.

I first ask myself... What are the keywords for which I have the expertise, enthusiasm and content creation ability to be highly competitive?   Then I go to those SERPs and look at the content that is out there right now.  If I can beat it then I am ready to attack.  That is the time to look at the keyword planner and determine the exact point of attack and what the keyword data tells me should be explained on my page(s).  That is the information that everybody everywhere is asking about.  If everybody is asking then it might not be addressed well on the web.  The keyword planner data informs content development around the topics that people are asking about. Address them.  All of them.

Again I don't allow the keyword planner data to sway my thinking.  If it says... "Highly competitive" and "high volume" then I am not frightened off.  Why? Because where there is high levels of competition and high levels of traffic there is usually a lot of search diversity and a lot of money changing hands.  Even if you get in there for long tail queries you can make a lot of money.  But since I attack where I am confident that I can compete head-on with their content that is exactly where I do NOT want the presence of competition to discourage me.

So, I attack and it often works well.  Do not fear competition.  That is where money is made as long as you have what it takes to compete.

Is it a correct assumption that if the KW doesn't have a suggested bid, there's probably not going to be a real impact in optimizing for it?

Some people know how to make big money in niches where nobody else has ever guessed (the people who can sell manure or dirt are examples).  It is who knows how to do something valuable with that traffic - even if the money per keyword is small.  A little money here and a little money there... ads up to big money.

Looking where others have ignored can make you highly successful.   Some of the biggest oil discoveries have been made where no one else ever thought to drill, and where many believed that  there was none to be found.

No..... but if you IMPROVE them occasionally it could be beneficial.

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!

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.

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.

There are plenty of sites doing this successfully, and they don't have any problems.

I agree with Bill's answer.... but I think that this is something that Google or other search engines could change their mind about.

I write a blog that links out to a couple dozen articles on the web every week.  I don't link to anything that is behind a read gate.  Why?  I believe that most of my visitors will be disappointed to hit the readgate.

I think that Google could see searchers click on a listing in the SERPs, hit a read gate, bounce off, and decide that they did not give the searcher a good experience - and thus demote the content behind read gates.  If I was the boss at Google, that is what we would be doing.

I spend about 1/3 of my time improving the content on a long-established site.   Articles are made current, more substantive, new data, updated graphs , additional Images.

I often see an almost immediate improvement in rankings.

These are not just tweaks to a few sentences.  They are major rewrites.  An article of 1000 words and three images might get a new introduction that hits topics in the news and two or three new subheadings and two additional images and an updated data table.

Rankings can go up within a couple of weeks.