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! 

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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.

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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.

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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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Focus only on relevant, quality links. Spam links or unrelated sites are almost worthless so don’t waste your time with these.

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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. 

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Remember, the key to a successful blog is to choose something you are passionate about whether it is football, bird watching, antiques, reality TV or fashion.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

This is the main tool that I use when trying to assess the feasability of a topic. The Google Adwords tool is completely free to use and is a very valuable tool. Simply enter a generic keyword and you will be displayed a list of related keywords, helping you to find a specific niche. Click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” column to sort by the most common search terms, showing you approximately how many searches that term gets each month.

The Advertiser Competition column also shows how many advertisers are competing for this term. While the ideal scenario would be a high number of average searches combined with low advertiser competition, these combinations are difficult to find. If advertiser competition is high, it is a good indication that it is a profitable niche.

Google Trends

Another tool from Google is the Google Trends tool which is useful if you are looking for search volumes on Google for different search terms. You simply type in your generic search term (it only tracks the most popular ones) and choose your region (ie. UK, USA, etc) and it will produce a graph showing the trends in this search term over a period of time.

This is a great way of establishing whether the niche you are considering is expanding or shrinking.

Technoranti

Technoranti is a blog search engine which gives you the ability to see what others are writing about your chosen niche topic at any given time. It also has “popular” tools which show what blog topics are hot at the moment. It’s a good way for seeing what information people are currently craving.

Google Blog Search

Google’s Blog Search will help you get a feel for who else is blogging on a given topic. It is also a useful tool for generating ideas for articles.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a very popular keyword-research tool. It is a paid resource, but it does have a free trial that is very useful for helping you determine how many people are searching for particular keywords. Similar to Google Adwords Keyword tool, but it adds a feature to show how many other sites are competing in each particular niche.

Yahoo Buzz

Yahoo Buzz is a summary of information on what people are searching for at the Yahoo search engine.

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The size of the niche can vary - an electronics blog could range from covering topics including digital cameras, televisions and MP3 players, right down to a specific model of Plasma TV - but in general, a niche can be defined as a single, closely related group of articles about a particular topic. In this article, we take a look at why niche blogs are so popular.

Advantages of Niche Blogging

1. Loyal Members

Writing about a particular topic tends to build up a loyal readership base as your readers know that they will find information on topics that interest them on your site. Compare this to a blog which one day blogs about technology, the next sports and the next religion. Instead, pick a topic and stick to it and this increases the chance of your readers coming back regularly to read what you have to say.

2. Community

Creating a series of articles on a particular topic brings together people with an interest on this topic. This can lead to interesting discussions through the comments section, creating a sense of belonging and community around your blog. Word of mouth will also help spread news of your blog on related forums, bringing you more readers.

3. Specialist Authors

Authors of niche blogs have the freedom to really focus upon a topic and don’t feel guilty about doing so. This can lead to an increase in the quantity, quality and depth of your articles.

4. Credibility

If you write consistent quality articles about a particular topic, it won’t be long before you are seen as an expert on that topic. The reputation of your blog will spread and you will be seen as a source of information for people researching your topic. This can have major benefits if you were to write reviews of “recommended” products within your topic to your readers, leading to affiliate sales. For example, if you blog about golf equipment and recommend a particular set of clubs, if you have gained the trust of your articles through quality and consistent articles, they will be more inclined to trust you and follow your recommendation.

5. Contextual Advertising

If you have a niche blog, you will find contextual ad networks such as Google Adsense much more profitable. Adsense tends to work best on sites that are tightly focused, as the ads that are served are directly related to your content, as opposed to generic terms on a wide ranging site. The more relevant the ads to your readers, the more likely they are to click them and the higher your revenues will go.

6. Advertising Sales

Linking back to point number 2, creating a community of people with a close and direct interest in a topic increases your opportunities to sell advertising space. Going back to the example of a blog about golf equipment, if you build up an established readership where you review all the latest equipments, companies trying to push new products would view your site as an attractive place to advertise given your reader base and specific focus.

7. Search Engine Optimisation

As we have continually emphasised in other articles, Google loves relevancy. For any specific search term, Google wants the most relevant site to rank at the top of the search engine results, thus delivering a page to the user which is exactly what they are looking for. For this reason, creating a focused site will boost your search engine rankings and deliver highly targeted traffic.

8. More Posts

If you want to write about a number of topics, break them down into individual blogs. It is better to write once a day on five blogs, than five times a day on one blog. Your readers need time to absorb new information and too much too soon can overwhelm them.

9. Expansion

As your blog and readership following develops, you can expand it into related niches. Creating spin-off sites into similar topics can help transfer your existing readers and quickly establish new sites. It is also a means for your blog to expand in a natural way rather than covering too much too early and eventually falling flat on it’s face through lack of focus.

10. High Conversion Rates

If your ultimate goal is to make sales, you have more chance of doing this if your blog is well focused. Trying to be the master of everything is one of the major downfalls of bloggers. Instead, focus on building your reputation by establishing yourself as a credible source on a topic. This increases your reputation and once your readers trust you - there’s a high chance they’ll follow your advice.

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Step by Step Guide to Setting up your Online Business

1. Choose your area of interest

The first thing you have to do is come up with an subject for your online business. At this stage in your career, pick something simple. Trying to compete with the big boys for competitive terms is not going to work as you don’t have the knowledge or the expertise. It is impossible to make huge sums of money on the internet overnight, even the top gurus had to go through a long, slow process.

For now, pick a topic that you are passionate about, because this is the best way to learn. Don’t worry if you don’t think you can make money from it - you will be surprised how profitable most topics can be. The key is to do something good - if you are interested in it, others will be too and if you do it well, you will make money. Here are some useful guides to helping you choose your topic.

How to find your first Niche Website
Finding your First Affiliate Niche

2. Setup your Blog

If you really don’t know what you are doing (although we’d recommend using this method even if you do), then we are going to run your blog using Wordpress.

Before we can do that, you are going to need a domain name and a hosting package. We recommend using Hostgator, as it allows you to run several sites for the price of one.

If you need help installing Wordpress, contact us and we will be happy to do this for you for a small fee.

3. Choose a Design for your Blog

Wordpress comes with a default theme, so technically you could start creating content for your website without making any alterations to the default design. However, there are literally thousands of free designs for Wordpress, so it makes sense to take a little time to give your site a new, fresh look.

Read our guide to the best Wordpress themes.

4. Plan the Content for your Website

Before you write a single sentence for your website, you should think about what areas you want to cover. Of course, you can also add more later, but the more thought you put in just now the less hassle you will have later.

Think about what topics you are going to cover and how you are going to structure your content. You should decide which sections (categories) you are going to create. This will both help focus your writing and make it easier for your readers to navigate around your site and find relevant content.

Read our guide to planning the content of your website.

5. Start Writing Content

You’ve no doubt heard this phrase already but if you are hearing it now for the first time, I assume you it won’t be the last. CONTENT IS KING.

Forget trying to trick the search engines with spammy SEO techniques. If you want to rank well on Google and obtain regular, loyal traffic, then all you need to do is write good quality, useful content and if you are patient, the traffic will soon start to flow. One of the most important articles on our site explains how Google works.

When writing content, make sure it is unique, relevant and interesting. Put yourself in the eyes of your visitors. Would YOU be interested in what you are writing about?  Are you adding useful content to your topic, or are you just rephrasing what others are saying?  If it is the former, you’ll find fairly soon that others begin to reference your site and traffic will flow.

6. Build Relevant Links

As well as writing content, the other main thing you have to do is receive links from other websites. You should ensure that you aim for relevant links from similar sites, rather than low quality spam sites as those would do more harm than good.

There are many ways to build links. You can exchange links with other websites, but you will find by writing quality content that you will receive links without having to ask.

When you get links from other websites, you will find that they are more useful if the anchor text (the text which links to your site) is of one of your main, targeted keywords.

7. Next Steps

The above 6 steps cover the basics of getting your website online, if you are a complete newbie to the world of making money on the internet.

Of course, there is a lot more that you need to learn but you can’t run until you can walk and once you have gone through the above steps, you will be in a much better position to start tweaking your website and making improvements.

I hope this article has been useful and don’t forget, if you would like personal, 1-on-1 SEO training, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to guide you through either the basic or more advanced steps to help you make money online!

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If you have been following our advice on long tail keywords, your reader has perhaps stumbled across your site via a Google search. If your article is well structured and interesting enough - and it should be if you’ve followed our content writing advice, you have an opportunity to win them over as a regular visitor or even an RSS subscriber.

Research we have done on a number of our clients sites shows that one of the most frequently visited pages is the “About Us” page, which means it is worth further analysis.

Why the About Us page is important

Your “About Us / Me” page is your opportunity to provide an overview of your site. It is where you can show off your credentials as well as explaining what expertise you can offer your visitors and what problems you can help them to overcome.

As an example, you might find an article on a blog and on first impressions find it useful. But before you can fully trust the article, you want to know the credentials of the author. Does this guy (or girl!) know what they are talking about and can they back it up with results?

How to Write your About Us page

For bloggers, it’s an opportunity to talk about your expertise, any relevant qualifications or knowledge you have about your niche. If you are offering a service, don’t be afraid to give some results (financial if you are selling a product) or SERPs (for SEO) for example to back it up.

For ecommerce sites, use this page to give background information about your store. Tell your customers about the size of your operations, where you are based, the history of the company. You can detail your range of payment methods, customer service and return policies. All this information helps to make the user feel more secure about your store and increases the chance of them making a purchase.

Key Elements to Include

• Who you are and the overall purpose of your site
• Your expertise and credentials (show results where possible)
• What problems you can solve for the user
• How they can contact you

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First and foremost, your content should be sensibly structured into appropriate sections. For example, if you look down the various categories on our website, you will notice that we have created categories such as “Blogging”, “Content Writing”, “Google” and “Wordpress”. The purpose of this is to assist users who are looking for information on a particular topic.

Therefore, if your agenda is to improve your content writing, you will find a selection of articles relevant to this topic under the content writing section. Organizing your content in this way helps users quickly locate what they are looking for, rather than having to sift through a number of irrelevant and unstructured articles to find articles which relate to what they want. If you don’t organize your content, your users will get bored and will soon leave your site and try and find it elsewhere.

URL Structure for SEO

As well as making your site user friendly, your URL structure can also have a positive impact for SEO. In a previous article, we looked at how selecting a keyword domain can bring significant SEO benefits.

The same can be said for longer URLs, by including your main keyphrases in the URL. First, let us look at an example of a bad URL structure.

http://www.domain.com/2007/02/17/archives/p=?2176

There is nothing in the URL structure to tell the user or Google what the article is about. In contrast, lets look at how URL’s are structured on our own website.

http://www.howmakemoney.co.uk/seo/title-tags-page-title-tag/

As you can see, the URL structure we use is much more user friendly. As well as including the category (seo), we have included the page title of “Title Tags - Page Title Tag”. Not only does this tell the user what the webpage is about, but it also tells Google.

By including our keywords in the URL, it gives us a boost in our search engine rankings, assuming the keywords we use are relevant to the content of the article.

Having an optimal URL structure for your website straight from the beginning is very important, both because it will attract more readers and because it will be really difficult to change it afterwards.

Optimal URL structure for Wordpress

Wordpress users can set an optimal URL structure by going into the Control Panel, then Settings, then Permalinks. After you check the “Custom” structure and insert /%category%/%postname%/ as a custom structure. This will display the URL structure in the same format that we use.

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