Creating traffic to your blog can be a difficult task. While doing some research and looking at my Google Analytics stats I realized there is another way to generate traffic to your blog. This is something most of you probably have never thought about and I didn’t think about it myself until I started getting traffic to my website through this method. Everyone knows that getting traffic through search engines is great because it usefully converts better and you don’t need to advertise your blog all the time to get this type of traffic. Have you ever thought of the possibly of getting traffic through the Google image search feature? If you haven’t this might be something to look into. Let me explain a bit further.
When you add a image to your blog you think you are doing this mainly to create an attractive website that people will be interested in; however there are other beneficial reasons why you may want to add pictures to your website. This other main reason is because people can find your blog through the Google image search feature. Have you ever seen the Google Image search feature? There is a button at the top left of Google to search images when you search for topics and in the search feature you sometimes get Image results showing at the top of the search results. See example below:
So how can you optimize your images so they show up in the Google search feature? If you can get in one of these top spots when people do regular Google searches you could potentially generate a lot of traffic to your blog. So how is it done? Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your images so you can get some better traffic to your blog through Google Image search feature.
- Insert keywords into your Alt tags – this should be pretty self-explanatory. If you put descriptive alt tags on your images you are more likely to come up in the search results
- Name your Images with Descriptive titles - this as well should be pretty obvious. If you have unique titles for your images then you are more likely to come up in the results. If you have a very generic title for your images then the likelihood of it being the same as other images is very good and therefore giving you bad image search results
- Use relevant text around the images – It is helpful to have relevant keywords around the images because those keywords will likely show up in bold as well and the user who searches will more likely click on the images
- Optimize the title and meta tags of your pages – this is something you should already be doing for all of your pages. You should especially be doing this for the pages that have the images so that they come up in the results a bit more easily
- User anchor text keywords in links to images – what this means is if you have a hyperlink to an image and its text make sure the text is descriptive and not something generic like “Click for full size image”. That type of thing is generic and will not help. If you put something like “Jessica Alba Hot Picture” you are more likely to get the right results
- Make Your image folder accessible to search engines – you need to make sure that your images folder is accessible by search engines. If it is not then the images will not get indexed by Google and you will not get in the search image results
- Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Tools – this is one that I just recently found. If you are signed up with Google Webmaster tools what you can do is login to your account and go to the Tools tab on the menu bar and find the option to enable enhanced image search on the left sidebar. Once you do this your images will hopefully be indexed a bit more easily
- Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed – this is an important step because if none of your images are indexed then you are not going to get any traffic from Google image search. You can do this by going to Images button at the top left of Google and then typing – site:www.yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com. It really depends on how your site is indexed for if you should have the www or not. If it brings up results then those are the images indexed by Google. If you get no results then you have no images indexed by Google and you need to work harder on the steps above to get your images indexed.
So hopefully these tips above will help you generate some extra traffic to your blog. I know it has worked in the past for many other people and can work for you if you just give it a try and try to follow these guidelines. Good luck and let me know how successful you are at this technique!
While you do bring up a great and valid point here, I think it is also good to remember to only post pictures relevant to the posts.
Just today, during my blog browsing I saw someone employing this technique, but he was using pics of attractive women on a blog about how to make money. I won’t ever go back to that blog…Zero class, and the content wasn’t great either.
Overall, good post, and I like the blog here. Great use of relevant photos too haha. Perhaps following you on twitter is a good option.
@ethan – thanks for the comment.
You are exactly right. It is important that the pictures are relevant to the post or there is no point in having the picture in the post in the first place. That is why not all my posts have pictures in them. I think I know of the blog you are talking about. It isn’t very classy and not worth it.
I am glad you like the post. I thought it was pretty relevant to get my point across
Thanks if you decide to follow me on Twitter!
Wow! You hit the point of how to increase traffic with Image search on Google. I didn’t realized that Google actually used the text which is around the image until one day I try to do some research on those images.
The tips are solid tips to get traffic but I don’t really like it because most of these traffic ends up giving higher bounce rate.
@Alex – Thanks for the comment!
Yup I agree that this type of traffic will more likely give you a higher bounce rate but I still think its worth testing it out because it is pretty much free traffic. Once you are indexed you can just sit there and watch the traffic come in. So I’d still recommend trying it and see what kind of results you get.
My website http://www.doriva.com have tons of traffic from google images. Don’t know why.
@small hosting – congrats on getting a bunch of traffic through Google images! I am still working on improving my websites with Google images. It is coming a long though
Thanks again for the comment.
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Very interesting!! Ur right, I never thought of that one!
Taripre$t
@Taripre$ – Thanks for the post!
You should try it out and see if you can get some decent traffic from image searchs. It seems to be working very well for my brother and other people. I am still working on it with my websites.
Not that I own a picture bank or anything, but this is a good source of traffic each month. Now if I was alt’ing my pictures something related to popular topics I could probably get more
very interesting post. this should help me with my blog. thanks for the idea.
@John. Thanks for the comment. Glad you liked the idea. Try it out for yourself and see how it does. You can get some decent traffic from it. Remember though that not a ton of the people will actually look at the site itself because they are looking for images. But it can’t hurt to try and optimize your pages and see what comes of it.
cool tips. I definetly do that.