Quick and Easy Way to Get Thousands of Extra Visitors a Month

written by BlogEx on September 11, 2007 in Blog Marketing and Blog Optimization with 21 comments

The more blogs I visit, the more I’m amazed at how few people actually use this incredibly simple method of gaining extra traffic… Images!

Well, to be more specific, image attributes. Lots of bloggers use images in their posts, but only some of them use them correctly. And really, if you’re using WordPress to power your blog, there’s just no excuse. When you click on the little tree picture to include an image in your post, a little input box pops up that looks a lot like this:

As you can see, the second field asks for an image description. This is also known as the image’s alt text and since search engines like Google and Yahoo can’t yet “read” images, they rely on this little description to figure out what the image is. By simply entering a description of your image in that field, you can gain extra visitors every month. For example, if you do a Google image search for “cardinals spanked“, the first two images you’ll see is a cartoon from toonrefugee.com (a small plug for my old man’s hobby site). If you click through to the page that image is on, you’ll notice the word “spanked” doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. It is however, included in the images alt text and therefore ranked in Google’s image search. So, how many extra visitors can you get this way? Well, one of those abandoned blogs I mentioned a while back, receives a few hundred visits a month from image searches and I’ve seen numbers into the thousands per month depending on the site.

Ok, so you now know you should put something in that field but what? Well, there are really a couple schools of thought on this. The first being to plug in terms or phrases you target on your site. For example, on this site I might put “make money blogging” as the alternate text for an image. DoshDosh is a great example of a site using this method. If you view the properties of an image on the site, chances are you’ll see an alternate text of “internet marketers” or something along those lines, even though the image is of an anime character.

However, I prefer to type in a very short description of what the image is. For example, on the image above, I’ve typed in “WordPress Insert Image” as the alternate text. While this is not quite as keyword rich, I believe people are more likely to click on an image that looks like it pertains to their search term. In the cartoon example above, if the alt text was something like “baseball player”, I just don’t think someone searching for an image of a baseball player would be looking for a cartoon cardinal. Whichever method you choose for your site is obviously a personal choice, the important part is using the alt text.

And there you have it, a quick and easy way you can attract hundreds, if not thousands more visitors to your site a month. It will literally only take you a second or two each time you use an image to insert alternate text and as I’ve shown you, it can be generate thousands of extra visits to your site per month. Stay tuned tomorrow for a quick trick to capitalize on all this new image traffic you’re going to be getting.

Update: Now that you know how to get more image searches, be sure to Make the Most of Your Image Searches.

For even more tips on how to maximize your traffic from image searches, check out Dosh Dosh’s list of 19 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images.

---

Related Articles