jon
CibbuanoAttracting Image Search Traffic
October 2nd 2007 12:14
Image search traffic accounts for a huge proportion (more than 50%) of the total traffic of most successful blogs so it's very important to be absolutely on top of making the most of it.
There are a couple things you can do which will help:
1) Post images! Many bloggers don't post any images, or not very many. Just about each and every post you write should have at least one image unless there is absolutely no reason to include one. Not only does this make your posts about 10 times more attractive to your readers, it also increases your chances of attracting image search traffic.
2) Give every image a title! In Orble this means filling in the "Title or Image Keywords" section when you are uploading an image. This will set not just the filename of an image but also the title and alt tags which helps a search engine figure out what is in the image. Search engines are still not very good at figuring out what's in an image without some help from us.
Try to limit the image title to include just the required keywords to describe what is in the image. "Julia Roberts Oscars" is a good example instead of "Julia Roberts going to the Oscars". "Britney head shaved" is another example which would be a much better image title than "Britney goes mental again". The keywords should be the same as what the average person would type into an image search to find the content of the image.
3) Original images are better. If you have images which you took yourself or which are not published elsewhere on the net use them as they will attract much more traffic than copied images. Google especially is very good at detecting copied images and will penalise that post for duplication just as they do for duplicated text. As always with the search engines original content is best and that goes for images too.
4) This is a little bit cheeky and Google will probably clamp down -- but if you don't have access to original images then compositing several copied images together or quite severely cropping a single copied image can make it seem original to the search engines. They will probably come up with a detection routine for this soon though it's on the edge of what those wacky computer vision scientists can do for the moment.
The downside of image search traffic is that it does not pay very much. People searching for images just don't seem to click on ads. It's still worth having though, some of those readers are bound to stick.
Also be aware that Google only seems to update most of it's image database periodically so it may take up to 2 or 3 months for your images to start generating traffic. As always with blogging be patient and persistent, it's well worth the effort in the long run.
Happy Snaps.
There are a couple things you can do which will help:
1) Post images! Many bloggers don't post any images, or not very many. Just about each and every post you write should have at least one image unless there is absolutely no reason to include one. Not only does this make your posts about 10 times more attractive to your readers, it also increases your chances of attracting image search traffic.
2) Give every image a title! In Orble this means filling in the "Title or Image Keywords" section when you are uploading an image. This will set not just the filename of an image but also the title and alt tags which helps a search engine figure out what is in the image. Search engines are still not very good at figuring out what's in an image without some help from us.
Try to limit the image title to include just the required keywords to describe what is in the image. "Julia Roberts Oscars" is a good example instead of "Julia Roberts going to the Oscars". "Britney head shaved" is another example which would be a much better image title than "Britney goes mental again". The keywords should be the same as what the average person would type into an image search to find the content of the image.
3) Original images are better. If you have images which you took yourself or which are not published elsewhere on the net use them as they will attract much more traffic than copied images. Google especially is very good at detecting copied images and will penalise that post for duplication just as they do for duplicated text. As always with the search engines original content is best and that goes for images too.
4) This is a little bit cheeky and Google will probably clamp down -- but if you don't have access to original images then compositing several copied images together or quite severely cropping a single copied image can make it seem original to the search engines. They will probably come up with a detection routine for this soon though it's on the edge of what those wacky computer vision scientists can do for the moment.
The downside of image search traffic is that it does not pay very much. People searching for images just don't seem to click on ads. It's still worth having though, some of those readers are bound to stick.
Also be aware that Google only seems to update most of it's image database periodically so it may take up to 2 or 3 months for your images to start generating traffic. As always with blogging be patient and persistent, it's well worth the effort in the long run.
Happy Snaps.
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Comment by Techno
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Appreciate it.
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Will do
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Comment by Jeanne Dininni
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That sort of answers the question I asked on your Meta Tags post (about alt tags). So, then, giving images a title is what sets the alt tag?
I wonder why quite a number of my blog's images are reported by Whois.sc to lack alt tags. (Not that I post very many images.) I don't suppose there's any way to go back in once an image has been posted to give it a title (and therefore an alt tag)--though I'm not sure I'd know which ones to change. (Would passing the cursor over an image to see if it has a title tell us whether or not it contains an alt tag?)
Thanks!
Jeanne
Comment by jon
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So instead of
title=""
have
title="whatever you want the alt tag to be"
Let me know if you have any problems.
Jon.
Comment by Jeanne Dininni
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I'll give it a try.
Jeanne
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