Easy SEO Technique to Bring Traffic: Google Images

by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James

Hi Ladies:

A quick and easy way to bring in traffic while you sleep: use images in your web posts or pages, set their alt attributes, and link them to something if possible. This might get your image, and your website, found in Google Images. What does that mean? It means that if you are going to blog about something, include a picture, fill in its alt attribute, and write your post with your keyword phrases woven in. Let's break down this image recommendation:

1. You want to blog about the super cute rolling shoes that kids roll around on, but you want them for adults. You will create a "post" about this (aka web page, but if it's in blogging software, it's sometimes called a blog post), titling the post something like "Super Cute Heely Roller Shoes for Adults". I did not keyword research that, and guessed, but I do know from my own website stats that "heely roller shoe" is a searched for term.

2. You need a picture of a heely roller shoe. If you are not blogging on your own products, and you need to find the image, especially if it's a product, go to Amazon.com. Do a search for the shoe, right click on the image you want (Mac users: hold down your "ctrl" key next to the space bar and then click), and select Save to Desktop, or something simular. This sucks the image down onto your computer. Most likely, the file name is something like 2349875thiefuodjrw8.jpg, which makes no sense. Rename it to heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg. This may or may not help in search engines rankings, but it can't hurt. Now you can upload it via your blogging software (Blogger lets you do this, or Flickr) or upload it to your host. Remember, if you are wanting to use an image from a small company, or a content based organization, you should ask permission and state your use of the image before you do this. It's a good idea to offer to link to that company or organization in your citation. Even with Amazon, it's just polite to link to them if you use their image.

NOTE: it is not advisable to post the image in your website using the other website's code. This is a lazier way of doing it, and does not require that you host the image on your own site. However, doing this is called "hotlinking" and it is theft of bandwidth. You are stealing their bandwidth. Therefore, it is advisable to ask a website if you can use their images first. I wrote a whole article on hotlinking here. This is also not advisable because if that website removes those images, you will have an error graphic where the image once was.

2. You will increase the image's chances of getting listed in the first pages of Google Images for the specific keyword term if you fill in the alt attribute. This was created to help the blind know what the image is, so it's really a descriptive term of what the image is. It will not show up on your live website page. In the code, the alt attribute looks like this: alt="descriptive term here"

If you have to go into the code, vs your CMS or blogging software letting you access it a different way, the code for the image and alt attribute would look like this:
<img src="http://www.fashionmista.com/images/heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg" alt="pink heely roller shoe">
I only bolded it to show you where it is. It won't be bolded in real life.

3. For your copy, get the actual keyword word as close to the image as possible. Google will read the copy on your page and show the image that is closest to it in Google Images.

That should be it! Pay close attention to your website stats to see what is working and not working, making adjustments all of the time. Good website stat programs are Google Analytics and Statcounter. Google Analytics will keep a history of your stats, but Statcounter will only keep it for 100 hits at a time. Each have their benefits, like how Statcounter gives you real time results in a consice way, whereas you have to wait a day before Google's presents the full results.

Any questions, just ask in the comments.

 

Good luck!

Comments

[BatGirl]

Careful doing this. I had an image that people wantd to download, and that completely froze up my site very often. It took up way too much bandwidth having all these tourists visiting!

[Katie]

Hey BatGirl,
This is true. I had a similar experience. For me, people were not downloading the image to their computers as I've described, but were displaying the image on their websites. That is called "hotlinking" and definitely steals your bandwidth, something you pay the hosting company for each month and could freeze or crash your site. I wrote about my experience at my other IT blog here, where someone hotlinked to my free desktop wallpaper and had it as the background of her blog. Every time her blog displayed, it would display my image, using my code, which is different from downloading an image once and hosting it on your own server: http://thatitgirl.blogspot.com/2007/09/if-someone-is-stealing-your-code-can.html

Thanks for you comment, as I've made a note in the blog post!