Get loads of traffic with Google images

Posted by Eric

November 6, 2008

Tons of traffic with IMAGE optimization

During the course of the last few months, I have been tracking my traffic sources to this blog and was surprised to see that a large portion of my search engine traffic is coming from Google Images. Just this month I have had 2000 visitors from Google Images alone. Although ‘image’ traffic isn’t the most valuable source of traffic, it still has some potential if your site is highly related to the images appearing in the image search.

I have also discovered that it is MUCH easier to rank for images and requires much less effort. Upload an image with a relevant description, alt text, title and your images will be ranking in searches with ease. That is why if you are ever using an image in a blog post, on your website or wherever else, don’t just link to it from an external source. Save that image and upload it to your server, then when the search engines crawl your site that image will be added to the image search on google, yahoo etc.

The last image I uploaded to this blog was about a month ago and I’m still seeing a significant amount of traffic from image search for the specific keyword of that image. It really is a whole new form of generating potential valuable visitors to your site, although I understand that most people are just going to be clicking on the view larger image button, a small portion of those people may actually browse your site and come across something they like.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that you should expand your horizons and always look for innovative ways of acquiring the results you want. In this case image optimization for traffic can stand to be highly beneficial for your endeavors. And the principles that are present in basic SEO remain the same. Give good relevant titles to your images and include keywords if necessary. The catch is that it is MUCH easier to rank for images than in the SERPS for keywords.