Using Image Searches to Get Traffic
Recently Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and just about every major search engine has branched out to include image only searching. This type of searching works just like a regular search only it finds only images, not websites. You go to the search engine of your choice, click on images and type in what you are looking for and you get a ton of pictures in the results. With results like this, who needs to even find a porn site these days? The search engines just may have become one huge TGP. Don’t believe? Go to Yahoo, click on images and type in porn. There are dozens of pages of pictures right there for you to check out. This article will give you some advice that how to get traffic from these searches.
BRAND IT
With most of these image search engines when the surfer clicks on a thumb they are taken to a page that has the thumb at the top and loads the site from which the thumb comes below. If they click on the thumb they see the full size picture. I would venture to guess that most veteran image surfers ignore the site and click right through to the thumb. An easy way to get some free traffic is to put your url on every picture you have on your site. This way when someone finds them in an image search they at least see your url. If you have a catchy domain or an easy to remember domain, use that one because as the surfer grows tired and wants to go to a site, your site will be one that they remember and may then visit.
OPTIMIZE
Many of these image search engines pull the images based on two things: the name of the image itself and the alt text on the image. If you have an image on your site named “GHT34587.jpg” with no alt text or an alt text that simply says something like “picture” or “thumb” it will never be found by the image searches. So name your images something that can be picked up and easily searched, but keep it relevant to the picture, short and to the point. There is no use naming your image “hotpornlesbianteenblowjobpussyfucksextits.jpg” instead name it after whatever the actual picture is. If it is a teen lesbian pic name you pics “teenlesbian1.jpg” and “teenlesbian2.jp” or even “teen_lesbian1.jpg” or something along the lines. The same goes for the alt text. Make the alt text something that is representative of the picture and is an easily searched term. With the previous example a great alt text might be “teen lesbian sex” or “sexy teen lesbians” and so on. I personally try to stay away from making the alt text identical on every image on page. If I have a gallery with 15 pics on it I will often use 5-8 different alt texts on the different thumbs/images.
When someone does an image search the results pages have a group of thumbs with the url of the sites the thumbs come from just below each thumb. A common theory is that the text in the url may play a small role in the search results, but in the eye of the surfer it can play a very large role in getting them to choose your thumb and indirectly your site. If someone is looking for “porn” in the image search when the results page loads it will have your thumb and the url for your site below it. If your url is www.domain.com/110507/daily/galleries/first.html it’s not very appealing to the surfer. However if your url is www.domain.com/110507/porngalleries/hotporn1.html it will be more eye catching simply because the search engine will highlight the two uses of the word porn in your url so under your thumb your url will look like this: www.domain.com/110507/porngalleries/hotporn1.html. These highlights can really help draw the eye of the surfer to your thumb and entice them to click or visit your url.
USE THE TRAFFIC
There are some people that will tell you this traffic is garbage. While it may not be as good as some traffic, to me, any traffic is good traffic. Every pair of eyes I can put on a site is a chance I have to sell them something. A little trick I like to use is to make sure that I have an ad in the top 20% of every page that has images on it. There are several reasons for this including the fact that a visitor to my galleries will see the text ad load and can read it while they wait for a few seconds for the rest of the page to load, but another reason is that in an image search when they see my thumb in the results page and click it I make sure that they see the ads on my site as it loads below the thumb. If they decide to visit my site as a whole, great, but if not and all I get to show them is that small piece of my site as they click on my thumb, at least I got to show them and ad and I had a chance to sell them.
You probably won’t get a ton of image traffic, but it can be a nice addition to your sites. I have a blog that I run that now receives over 5,000 hits a month from image search traffic. It’s not going to make me rich, but it’s free and it only takes a few minutes of work to optimize for it and bring it to my site. Adding image optimization to all of your galleries and sites can help you bring in some extra visitors and hopefully extra dollars.
Reader Comments: (1 posts)
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Tilly says: I found just what I was needed, and it was entetraniing! |
October 29th, 2011 at 1:55am EST Rating:  |
