How to DOUBLE Your Traffic with Google Images
Most of what the SEO and traffic generation strategies that we perform, we do based on knowledge and experience. Sometimes, however, we get unexpected bonuses. One of our major clients is an ecommerce site, which ranks top of Google for a number of high volume keywords. Understandably, this brings high levels of traffic. A few months ago, they asked us to help get their product pictures included in the Google Image search results. This led to incredible results - they received DOUBLE the traffic they obtained from natural search and their turnover increased by 35%. Today, we will explore how you can use Google Image Search to boost your business.
Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization
Optimising your images is not a great deal different to optimising your article or website - ultimately Google wants to rank the most highly relevant results at the top of the search results. By including images within your pages which are relevant to the content of your article and by labelling these appropriately, you can drive huge levels of traffic to your website for free.
People use Google Image Search for many purposes. They may be looking for a picture of a product they are interested in buying, such as a brand of clothing, furniture of electronic gadget. Alternatively, they may be looking for pictures of celebrities, political figures or cars.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the content of your website is - adding images to it will not only give your site a nice look, but it will help drive free traffic via Google Images.
How to Optimise Your Images
The good news is that optimising your images for Google is very simple and requires only minimal effort. For this reason and for the potential benefits it brings, you should take a little time to maximise this opportunity. Below are some key guidelines you should follow.
1. Use Keywords in your Filename
One of the most basic, but important tips is to use relevant keywords in your filename, rather than camera-assigned filename such as DSC05443.jpg. Instead, if the image is of Britney Spears you should call your image britney-spears.jpg. Use hyphens to seperate your keywords. Keep your filename short and sweet, don’t use too many keywords or unnecessary words.
2. Use your Alt Tags
We have already covered the use of Alt Tags in a previous article but as a quick recap - this should be a slightly longer description of your filename. The most important this is that it is relevant to your image and page content.
3. Use Keywords Around Your Image
To maximise the effectiveness of your image, include it in a section of your page either directly before or directly after some descriptive text which includes your main keyword. This helps improve the relevancy of the image, rather than sticking it at the bottom of the page, far away from your content.
4. Optimise your Title Tags
Although not directly related to the image, optimising your title tags for your main keyword will improve the ranking of your image. This is because Google wants the user to find the most relevant result and a picture of Britney Spears which is on an optimised page about Britney Spears is more relevant than a page which has short profiles of every American singer whose surname begins with the letter S.
5. Use Adsense to assess your page content
One good way of testing your page to see if Google thinks it is relevant to your chosen keyword is to install an Adsense unit on the page. If the ads shown are about your chosen keyword, your page is regarded relevant for that topic and your chances of ranking well are improved. If it doesn’t, try optimising the page some more.
6. Link to Images Using Anchor Text
If you provide a link to your image anywhere on your site, do so using appropriate anchor text, which matches your keyword. So instead of linking via some text saying “Click Here”, use “Britney Spears Picture”.
7. Ensure your Image Folder is accessible to search engines
Ensure that your robots.txt file does not limit search engines from accessing your image files. This is essential if you want your images to be ranked on Google Image Search. Try not to use javascript links on image files as well as it will limit search engine access as well.
Results with Google Images
The potential benefits of using Google Images are clearly understandable. We are keen to hear your own thoughts and experiences of this method of driving traffic, so feel free to post stories, questions, or additional tips and advice in our comments section!
Google Images - Increase Traffic
Search Engine Optimisation is undoubtedly the most effective method of driving traffic to your site - obtaining number one rankings for highly searched keywords can bring huge volumes of traffic to your site. However, it is important not to obsess over SEO and instead spend a proportionate amount of time driving traffic to your site in other methods. In our last article, we looked at 5 Promotion Tips for Targeted Traffic and today we will look at how we can drive traffic through Google Images.
Guide to Google Images
Every single visitor to your website is a potential sale, so you should use every means possible to try and attract targeted visitors to your website. One very effective way to do this is by getting your images included in the Google Images search. As an example of how important Google Images can be, one e-commerce site that we work with ranks number one in the natural search listings for all five of their chosen keywords.
Despite this, they obtain MORE traffic from Google Images than they do from the natural search results on a monthly basis! This was of a huge surprise to us, but shows the importance of this method of driving traffic. If done correctly, it can bring in a vast amount of targeted traffic and more often than not - it is people looking to buy a specific product.
While it can be done successfully for all types of site, it is most successful for an ecommerce site or an affiliate site which is selling products than customers may be searching for. Setting up your images correctly will help them be found when customers are searching for them.
Check if Google is Indexing your Images
The first step is to see if Google is currently indexing your Images. To do this, go to Google and click on the “images” link at the top. Then enter the following code into the search box:
site:yourdomain.com
This will display all the Image files that Google is currently indexing from your website. If no results appear then your images are not currently being indexed. The most common cause for this problem is a flawed robots.txt file.
For example, I used to have a “Disallow: /wp-content/” line on my robots.txt file, with the purpose of blocking some internal WordPress files from search bots. It worked, but as a result it also blocked all my images that were located in /wp-content/uploads/. The solution was simple: I just added the following line after that one: “Allow: /wp-content/uploads/”.
So if your images are not getting indexed, check your robots.txt file to make sure it is not blocking the access to them.
5 Promotion Tips for Targeted Traffic
Search Engine Optimisation is a very effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website - achieving top Google rankings for high volume keywords can add several zeroes to your annual turnover. While SEO is therefore arguably your most important marketing strategy, it is by no means your only one and you should not focus exclusively on it. For a start, your SEO efforts will take time and you should use other ways to drive traffic while you wait for your natural search traffic to flow. Secondly, any traffic you can drive via alternate promotion methods will help with your link building efforts, which will enchange your SEO campaign. So today, we will focus on other promotional methods you can use, with am emphasis on targeted traffic.
How to Drive Targeted Traffic to your Website
Give Something Away for Free
People love freebies. I have a friend who has amassed an unbelievable amount of junk over the years, simply because a company was giving away a free sample. Even though they will never use it, people will snap up any freebie going simply because it is free.
With that in mind, have a think about your niche and what your visitors might be interested in. If your site is about blogging, try coming up with a free tool which they can use on their websites.
If you are an ecommerce site, why not give away a free product for the first 20 customers who signup for a special offer. The possibilities are endless but be creative - create something of value and you will get interest.
Another good way to do it would be to run a competition. This would have the additional benefit of generating an email list of subscribers who you can use to promote your products to in future.
Website Advertising
If you have an advertising budget, you can get an initial burst of traffic by placing banners on websites which are related to your niche. You could also pay them to write a review of your website, which is arguably a more effective method of getting customers onto your site, rather than simply from an advertising banner.
If you can’t afford to pay for advertising, you could swap it. You could write a review about the other site in exchange for a review about your site. The other benefit of a website review is they can link to you via your chosen anchor text which boosts your SEO efforts.
Extra content on your website will give you more credibility while having your articles on other websites will lend your company a position of authority.
Viral Marketing
Sometimes the best ways to advertise a website are free! Viral marketing refers to a promotion technique which is spread around the internet by people. In the same way someone with flu symptons can pass on the flu to another person, spreading it around the world, interesting content is passed around the internet by users keen to share it with their friends or be the source who has “discovered” cool new content.
An effective viral marketing campaign can generate millions of unique visitors, turning a small unknown company into one known all over the world virtually overnight.
The key is to create unique content, which can come in many forms such as an article, a picture, a video or a news story. There is no rule for how to create a viral marketing campaign - if it was easy there would be many, many more millionaires. However, themes which generally work well as exclusive news, humour or controversy.
For example, if you were the first to report the launch of a new technology product such as the Playstation 4, you’d find that once someone found your article it would spread around the internet like wildfire. Similarly, controversial articles which “attack” leading figures or companies, or funny pictures or videos are also very successful viral marketing tools.
Post on Relevant Forum
A time consuming, but effective way of driving traffic to your site is to find forums which are relevant to your niche and build a reputation as an expert by offering useful help and advice. “Spamming” forums with links to your site will get you nowhere, but if you take the time to build a reputation, people will start to respect your opinion and check out your site for more information.
You should include a link to your site in your signature, then reply to threads offering useful advice to people. You could direct them to relevant articles on your site for additional reading, as long as it’s done in a spam free way.
Domain Names
One last thing to remember when you’re trying to spread information about your company is the effectiveness of a memorable domain name. You want to pick a domain name that is easy to remember, easy to spell, and that relates to what you’re selling. When people easily find your website you’ll want to make sure that your home page content is dynamic so they keep returning.
Dofollow Blog List - How to Find DoFollow Blogs
As we have covered in previous articles, building relevant links to your website is a vital component of SEO. If we think about how Google works, we would understand that Google wants to rank highly those sites which are the most relevant for a chosen search term. It follows then that by obtaining links from similar sites, our ranking for such search terms should increase.
One of the most effective ways to build free, one-way links to your website is by commenting on related blogs. Not only does this help with our SEO efforts, but by commenting in the right way, it can help build our reputation and drive traffic to our site if we are seen as being a credible source on a topic. We will cover how to comment effectively in a future article, but for now lets find out exactly what a dofollow blog is.
What is a Dofollow blog?
Search Engines find websites via their spiders, which crawl websites by following links. Logically therefore, the more links there are to your website the more frequently the spiders will find them. This will result both in your pages being indexed more regularly, as well as your site being ranked higher as the search engines begin to trust you more if other sites are linking to you.
It is important to note that the links must come from quality, relevant sites. If your links are coming from spam or untrusted sites, the search engines will lower the quality score of your website. Focus on getting quality links from related sites. One good link is worth much more than 100 spam ones.
Website owners can control the movement of the spiders though by using “nofollow” tags on certain pages, which block the spiders from following links. Most blogs will use this method to stop the spiders leaving their site and passing PageRank to external sites. For that reason, the only benefit to commenting on most blogs will be to drive traffic - you will not get any SEO benefits.
However, there are a number of dofollow blogs which will bring you SEO benefits. Although these blogs are difficult to find, they do exist. There are many reasons why a blog would be set to dofollow - perhaps the owner sees it as a way to drive traffic and encourage interactivity in their comments and forum section, thus building the blog in a way which would be difficult to do if it was set to nofollow.
How to find Dofollow Blogs?
You could opt for a painstaking Google search - or you could simply use the resources we have listed below!
Dofollow Blog Directories
- “Do Follow” Blog Directory
- Follow List
- Bigfoot Web Marketing’s Dofollow Blog Directory
- Dofollow Directory
Dofollow Blog Search Engines
- Dofollow Diver
- DoFollow Blog Search Engine
- Dofollow Search
- My Blog Follows
- Dofollow Blog Search Engine Beta
- W3EC’s Dofollow Blog Search Engine
Tips for Commenting
We will soon be providing a more indepth article for commenting on blogs, but for now, here are a few basic tips that you should use.
- Don’t spam. While it is tempting to comment on every single post, this will look unnatural to both the blog owner and the search engines. Spread your comments out, perhaps comment on one post from every site each day.
- Subscribe to the RSS feeds so you have a stream of new posts coming through for you to comment on. Being the first to comment makes your comment stand out and can drive traffic.
- Add to the conversation. Posting a useful comment on the blog can catch other readers attention. They may feel you have helpful information to share and check out your site. This would drive actual traffic as well as having an SEO benefit.
- Focus only on relevant, quality links. Spam links or unrelated sites are almost worthless so don’t waste your time with these.
7 Free Backlink Checkers
Link building is one of the most important elements of an SEO campaign - obtaining quality backlinks from quality, relevant sites increases your trust score with Google and helps to move your website up the search engine rankings. It is important to monitor your link building efforts to keep track of what sites are linking to you. Crucially, you can also keep tabs on which sites are linking to your competitors - giving you ideas about sites to target with your link building campaign.
Below are 7 of the best, free backlink checkers which you can use to track links to your site and to your competitors. Each have their own unique features, so feel free to pick one or two favourites and use them.
SEO Pro’s Link Checker
This is my favourite backlink checker. Although it can sometimes be slow to load, it provides a wide range of useful information. This tool will show you the page rank of the linking page, how many links are on that page, and whether or not the link is nofollow. You also have the ability to check the number of backlinks for all of the pages on your site, or just the top domain.
Enter your competitors URL and look for sites linking to them from a high PR page. It may very well be worth enquiring if they would be happy to link to you in a similar manner.
Smart Page Rank’s Backlink Checker
This free tool checks the PR of all pages linking to a website, as well as the anchor text used.
SEO ToolBag’s Backlink Checker
This tool as well as providing the url, and page rank of the referring page, also informs you of the anchor text used in the link. After all the results are processed, it provides analytics of how often each anchor text is used. This is a very useful addition as it’s important to vary the anchor text you use when getting links to your website.
The Link Pop (We Build Pages’ Backlink Checker)
A very basic checker that gathers numbers from 4 different search engines for a very quick check.
iweb Tool’s Backlink Checke
A rather simple tool that displays the url of the page that links to you, and also the page rank of the refering page. It is very fast loading, but the downside is that you can only make 5 requests every hour unless you have a gold account, and every page of backlinks is counted as a request.
w3tool’s Backlink Checker
This tool is the best if you wish to compare sites, as it lets you check up 10 ten pages at a time. This is a great way to compare how many links your website has against your competitors.
dnScoop
Although the backlink checking function for this tool is pretty basic, it also provides you with lots of other useful information about your stie such as the domain name’s age, it’s page rank, it’s alexa (traffic) rank, it’s ip address and other sites hosted on the same ip address, the estimated value of a single link, and the estimated value of the domain name.
