Optimize Your Site For Google Image Traffic
Looking for another way to get more traffic to your website? Optimize your blog for GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH. Many people use Google Image search to locate pictures and images for a wide range of topics. From what’s in the news, to cat pictures, to how to knit a purl stitch. Here are some tips to help optimize your site and your images to tap into this traffic.
My personal website, a Baby Boomer Blog, Wine on the Keyboard, gets quite a bit of traffic to my images that are listed on Google Images. I get traffic to posts that are years old from Google Image Search. A post about my old couch. A post about the last flower of fall. You never know what pictures, if done correctly, might bring in traffic–traffic that wouldn’t have come to your site otherwise. How can you set your blog up to attract this kind of traffic?
Google Image Search Optimization:
1) First off, use a descriptive name for the picture. HerMantoRemember.jpg is better than img000-0776.jpg or whatever your camera generates. Cover.jpg isn’t going to bring in anyone looking for your book by title.
2) Make sure you are using the Alt text with your images. For instance your image code would look something like this:
<img scr=”http://yoursite.com/NameofYourFile.jpg” alt=”good description of picture”/>
3) The text surrounding the picture should give clues as to what the picture is about. Make sure to include the keyword that you think people will search on directly before or after the image. If you do a search on Google Images for a term, you’ll see the term you searched for highlighted in bold beneath the images listed.
4) Make sure your images folder on your website is accessible to search engines. If you’ve limited access to some files with your robots.txt file, make sure you allow Google Image Search. Google suggests adding the following to you robots.txt file to allow the Google-Image bot permission to find your images.
# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
5) Make your images standards compliant. Images need:
-
title
width
height
alt text
<img src=”http://yoursite.com/folderwithimages/reallygreatimage.jpg” width=”400″ height=”200″ alt=”Image to attract Google Image bot” title=”Really Great Image” />
6) To see if your images are being listed in Google Images go to Google Images. Enter this in the search bar:
site:www.yoursite.com
(or site:www.yoursite.com/blog if your blog is in a separate folder on your website)
See what images come up. If your site is fairly new, it may take awhile for your images to show up in Google Images. You can go back to older images on your site and edit the posts and add the alt text, width, and height, for your images. At the very least, add the alt text.
It takes a bit more time to make sure you add all these things when you add images to your posts, but the benefit is increased blog traffic by way of Google Image Search.
This is how your post titles show up on a Google search page. See these first two posts on “How to Write a Book”. Both of them have good, attention getting post titles.
