Google Image Search Can Drive Traffic To You!
March 1, 2008 – 4:41 pm
This is a handy tool to increase traffic to your site, especially if you are a fan site.
To help optimize your image ranking, you can follow these easy tips.
- Use relevant keywords in the file name. If you image is of a cat in a Santa Clause costume (how did you get the cat in that outfit, anyway?) then name your file something like cat_as_santa_clause.jpg or cat_christmas.jpg.
- Use relevant keywords in the alt tag for the image. If the image is of, say, President Bush, then use “President George. W. Bush” in the alt tag.
- Use relevant keywords in the caption of the image. The text closest to the image provide context for Google to determine the image content.
- Don’t block the Googlebot from your image directory with robots.txt.
Of course, there are downsides to the Image Search.
- Google gives users the options to just view the image and ignore your site completely. This means that even if your image gets a lot of hits, it may not translate into more traffic for the rest of your site.
- An increase in image views may increase your bandwidth a lot. If you have very little bandwidth on your hosting account, then this may not work for you.
- Users may hotlink your images by pulling them from Google. This is annoying and can waste your bandwidth.
Depending on the site you have, you may or may not find it useful to try to optimize your images for Google Image Search.
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.