Driving Traffic With Google Images

[Sebastien]

Hey folks,

This is a subject that isn't discussed often.. But everytime I check my traffic logs I find a number of visitors come from image searches.

Do any of you know how to make pictures rank highly in Google Images ? Is it all a question of backlinks as in the SERPS ?

So if I want mysite.com/Images/brian-townsend.jpg to rank highly should I get a bunch of backlinks to it ?

Many Thanks

[LadyHoldem]

Not an answer to your question.. but a comment..

A lot of ppl actually block robots from their image files, because generally when your sites are accessed via your images, it's an affiliate borrowing a shot..

Do you think there's a benefit for gamling affiliates to drive traffic from images? Do you think this is something players search widely for?

Sincere question btw.

[Sebastien]

Do you think there's a benefit for gamling affiliates to drive traffic from images? Do you think this is something players search widely for?

Absolutely ! I was talking to Amit Metha from super affiliate mindset, and he told me he gets a *lot* of traffic from a picture he posted holding his american express "black card". People are curious and want to know what it looks like.

Now to come back to poker, I can easily see people watching an online player like durr on Full Tilt and wanting to know what he looks like in real life.

I would argue that video and images can drive very substantial traffic in the field of poker.

[LadyHoldem]

hmm, well i'd recommend making good use of the alt and title tags, maybe adding a caption.

Right now, I don't think googles doing anything real huge to sort out the top ranking images.. aside from maybe the same things that rank the page.

The reason I say that is.. I search for my nicknames in there sometimes, and like pokeronamac.com is always way up there, with any picture that happened to be on the page where i wrote an article.. above images that are actually say LadyHoldem.jpg, he just ranks really well.

That's one example, but I search for images pretty often, and they don't seem real on target with the results..

The top result when searching my name (ladyHoldem) is on a CMS website, in a post, in a thread full of pictures of all the members.. it's 3286216415.jpg

There's no alt tag... no caption.. the only place on the page that my name is even mentioned is my username in the post, just like here.

[LadyHoldem]

More thoughts, and I edited that last post a few times already :P lol..

You oughta try a little expierement, take some fake term, like aoirehiuwhgwiug post some picutures on different pages, optimize for the fake term, and see what really works..

There are though some articles indexed in google on the topic, haven't looked into the subject much.

[Sebastien]

Originally Posted by LadyHoldem

aoirehiuwhgwiug

Dang ! You stole my keyword.

-- Sebastien

[LadyHoldem]

whoops, my bad

[Sebastien]

Taking a look at my logs more closely, it appears image driven traffic is not as valuable as regular traffic.

People don't stay long. They often find the pic and leave, although I've had people browse through a couple of pages.

But it doesn't seem like the best traffic to convert imo

[TRIPAAA]

Amit's Black Amex is totally different, that is a specialty img and very unique to his business of elite and lots of money.

For the average aff you want make your img folder no index. But for special img or ones that will have high value make a separate folder to include them in.

I have a site that get pretty good traffic but 4x that comes from one page that is almost all images of the same person. They come the rape and pillage the images and then they leave.

[TheShortStack]

I have to say that I've experienced this on a small scale.

I bought a domain a few months back that I haven't had time to develop yet. All that's currently up there is a logo and a short form telling people that the site will be opening soon, and to leave their email address if they'd like to be notified once we're up and running.

The site has been indexed (as an experiment), and pretty much any traffic I've had has come as a result of people finding the logo in Google Images.

Now don't get me wrong, it's not a huge amount of traffic, but I must have had about a dozen people leave their email addresses which is a whole lot more than I thought I'd get!