Tagging your images for more traffic

Today we will have a closer look on how to get more traffic using images and especially the search engines image search sections. You have probably used Google Image Search before, so you know what I am talking about.

Google Image search allows people to find images related to whatever they type in as a search term. Here is what it delivers upon a search for the term “New York”:

Searches for images can provide some real extra traffic to you. It is used by hundreds of thousands of people every day. Now we are going to see, how we can use this to get traffic for your blog.

Check the filenames of your images
Especially when you are using images you may have made with your own digital camera, the will be named something like DSC_1020304.JPG by default.
Could you tell from that filename, what the image might be about? Probably not, and neither can search engines. This is why you should keep an eye on speaking filenames as you have optimized your post-titles before.
Better than DSC_1020304.JPG you should alter the filename of an image to something like downtown-manhattan-viewed-from-brooklyn-bridge.jpg.

Watch your links
While linking to an image on your site, you should always watch your link texts. I often see websites showing thumbnails of an image and have it linked to the original size version with the link saying Click here for full-size view or something else, which is not very descriptive. In the example above, we have altered the filenames of our images to be more speaking.
Wouldn´t it be far better to have the link say Downtown Manhattan viewed from Brooklyn Bridge. This will again tell users and search engines what the image is about.

Using the alt, width & height tags
To give search engines more information about an image, make sure you are using these three tags on every single images on your site. An optimized code for showing an image should therefore look like this:

<img src="image.jpg" width="100" height="100" alt="description" />

As you have chosen a descriptive filename for your image and a good description for it, any search engine will now know, what the image is about. Giving the size of it additionally helps Google as users can choose from small, medium, large and extra large while searching on Google Image Search.

Enhanced image search
If you have not done this yet, you should go to Google Webmaster Tools and enable the Enhanced image search option. Just click on “Tools” and then on “Enable enhanced image search” to get this:

If it is not activated yet, click on the check box and hit the OK button. That´s it. Google says:

What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?
If you choose to enable enhanced image search, Google will use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

If you choose to, you can opt-out of the enhance image search anytime you like. Just go back to Google´s Webmaster Tools and clear the checkbox again.

Let Google in
Go and check your robots.txt-File to assure you don´t block Google from spidering your images. If you are not sure about this, just add this to the end of your robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*

Track your images
You can check, how many images from your site are being indexed by Google. Visit this URL:
http://images.google.com/images?q=site:yoursite.com
Just replace yoursite.com with your domain and see, what Google has on file about your images.

Don´t fear hotlinkers - have them put links to your site
Some people think (while I´m not sure they do), it´s better to use images being stored on your servers than on their own trying to save bandwidth. These guys can really be annoying and you should stop them from doing this evil stuff. They are stealing your work, not less.
You can try to make them put a link to you while using the image. Patrick Altoft over at blogstorm.co.uk provides a handy little script which will help you with this.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

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google image search, hotlinkers, alt tag, image size, webmaster tools

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