The Power of Keywords in Images to Gain Traffic
I started blogging in October of 2008 after reading an article that putting up new content on a regular basis can drive traffic to your site. Before that I had an Amazon affiliate site selling acai berry related products for about a year. Well, I think I had about 5 people visit my site the entire year and didn’t sell a single item. Wait, oh yeah, my dad bought one product. I was so frustrated that I decided to get rid of that site all together and try this whole blogging thing.
I had heard of blogging, but I didn’t really know what exactly it was. In fact, before I started reading up on it, I just thought it was like an online public diary. The more I researched, the more I got excited. I realized I could write about anything I wanted, I could possibly make some money at it and turn it into a business.
So…I started Sweet Fuzz. Sweetfuzz.com started out as just a personal blog about things I’m passionate about: nutrition, style, skincare, and the environment. I posted my site on as many blog directories as I could to start getting traffic and that helped. As I started to view my traffic stats I could see that certain posts were getting a lot more attention than others. For example, my celebrity style guides were contributing to most of my traffic. Not only that, but most of my traffic was entering from Google images.
Then I found a glorious piece of information that has changed my site. I found out that you can put keywords into your images to attract search engines. For a novice like me at the time, this was super valuable. I went back through all my posts and entered key words into all my images and did the same with any new posts. My traffic jumped from 1,161 unique visitors in January to 98,363 in April! I was and still am amazed!
This is how you can add keywords to images on your site.
If your blog has a lot of pics in it, be sure to add keywords between the ” ” after alt in the html of each image.
For example:
With no keywords: alt “”
With keywords: alt “style, fashion, celebrity style”
Only add keywords that are specific to that image and don’t use any more than about eight for each image, or else search engines will consider it spam. Also check out the keyword tool under Google Adwords. This helped me out tremendously. It will show you how popular a specific keyword or phrase is. Use keywords that get plenty of traffic, but aren’t over saturated.
Since January my Alexa ranking dropped from somewhere in the 700,000s to 197,570 today. Needless to say I’m pretty stoked, but this is still just the beginning. Now that I have a good amount of traffic coming in, now is the time to go after advertisers which is a whole other story. In the meantime, I hope this will help you gain more traffic through images on your site.
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I have done the same with one of my travel blogs and been receiving good traffic from all the image search…
Good job !!
Great post. One question though….you mention a limit of 8 keywords. Is that 8 individual words, or 8 sets of comma separated keywords and phrases? Thanks for sharing your ideas with us.
Hi Julie, thanks for commenting. It doesn’t have to just 8 actual words, just 8 key words or key phrases.
For example:
alt”swimwear, bikinis, designer swimsuits, designer bikinis”
One more thing, you don’t have to have exactly 8 keywords, it can be even just two or three. I just wouldn’t use more than 8 to avoid being considered as spam.
Good luck!
Thanks for the reply Kate. Having read the remainder of the thread, I am now confused. Should I have a single keyword phrase that is converted into a question, or should it be a series of keywords? In your example would you see this as being four keywords of a possible eight, or six words of a possible eight?
For example with my blog could my alt be “should i smoke during pregnancy, pregnancy, pregnancy questions, pregnancy answers, pregancy” without raising any spam flags?
The example you gave above should be fine. As far as I know questions or phrases are not considered spammy, just having too many of them or if they don’t relate to the image can result in being considered spam.
Thank you Kate. You are an angel.
Great tip, often overlooked by any beginner. Always use Alt tag, not just on blogs but on all your website. It helps to increase adding secondary keywords. Remember that you should not use more then the recommended number of the same keywords on any page.
Fred
LotCon Biz Solutions
I’ve use this trick for a long time, drive traffic to my site and monetize them with adsense. I have a huge blogspot blog network using this techniques, because adsense is not my main income source, its almost set and forget. I just check my stats occasionally and add contents to them once and a while.
This is a very nice idea for sure, I am using it and I have 2 posts with high traffic because of the photo gallery on it.
Your story is somehow so similar as mine
I was about 3000 per month in January 2009 with an alexa of 2million lol. Now am at about 80000 visits per month and alexa of 160K
The tip really work and I advise everyone to try it.
Great post.
Very overlooked with wordpress’ point and click image insertion doing all the work.
It’s always best to add alt text to the HTML remember your blind ‘readers’ who use text to speach. alt text is read out to them too.
alt=”alt text key words”
This is a great post. One question for the blind readers and using the alt=”alt text key words” then is this alt tag in addition to the regular alt tags? Thanks for all your help
Great tips. I’m aware of the tricks but doesn’t really knows that it work to such great effect. Thank you for sharing.
wew, that helpfull artikel
i love it
I can honestly say that I have had much good luck for increasing traffic in the past with many different blogs using this idea. However, I have had even greater success with targeting a specific keyword and not only putting in the alt but also naming the actual img file with the keyword in it!
I have always believed that the title=”keyword” was what google image engine looked at for keywords. Not the alt”keyword”. I notice that you also have title attributes used for your images. are you sure that the alt is doing all the magic?
Jeramie,
I’m not the author of the article, but I can tell you that I’m 100% sure that the alt tag is doing all the magic. Do a Google search on using the alt tag. It is a big SEO factor.
This is a “trick” i knew but didn’t stick to. After reading this post, i can feel the impact of using alt “”. Will make the effort to go through all pictures to tag accordingly. Thanks again for the great tips.
Hi
I built my first site in May 2002, prior to building it I read about 5 books and one of the things that was mentioned was about putting keywords in the image ‘alt’ tag. I’ve been doing that every since and I do get a significant amount of traffic from Google images.
The key thing is to make sure that you only use keywords that are related to the actual image, it might seem obvious but I know that some people stuff totally unrelated keywords into this particular image tag and use it purely as a way to spam the search engines.
What a great idea! I am sadly lacking in this regard as I very rarely add images to my blog posts. Can anyone recommend a good site that has a large selection high quality images and that does not cost a lot of money? Thanks, for the great information.
Hi cavpres
This is a great site:
http://www.istockphoto.com
Thanks for this great piece of advice. I have struggled to understand how keywords work with images and so I have avoided dealing with them up till now. You made it easy to understand. I hope I reap the same benefits!
Putting relevant keywords in the alt attribute of images has been long recommended by SEO expert. It’s so sad that some people abuse that fact just like they did for keyword meta tags now deemed not so relevant by google. The Alt attribute is much more about web site usability by screen readers then an SEO nugget. Rather then keywords, I recommend putting a short description of the image or picture in the alt attribute: that’s what it is intended for.
I want to second Manjonka’s comment. The alt attribute was created for usability. It was created to “provide an equivalent experience” for users that can view images. It is the alt attribute that browser readers access when they come across and image.
So, if a blind person comes to your website and hears “style, fashion, celebrity style”, are they getting an “equivalent experience” to someone who can see the picture? I don’t think so.
I’d recommend using a descriptive phrase that is also keyword rich … just like you would do for a headline.
So maybe an alternative alt text for the example above could be “Celebrity Angelina Jolie exhibits style with her new fashion.”
You’ll see that I used all the keywords above, but made it into a sentence that describes the photo for someone who can’t see it. The alt text is kind of like a caption that is not readily seen.
Another thought: Remember that many browsers will display the alt text when visitor rests their cursor on the image. Do you really want them to see a bunch of keywords strung together?
That is a great tip for new people starting out. It is something that I have used for years. Another tip for keywords with images that also works with niche sites is to use the alt tag in the form of a question that relates to your niche. As an example: Say your niche is training dogs and the page you are using the image on is about training Shelties not to bark, use your alt tag as so:
alt=”how to train shelties to stop barking?”
This will help to increase your traffic to that page. When someone types this question into their favorite search engine box, your site will come up, as long as you also are also using related keyword term in your content.
This is a great information.
I shall start applying that to my blogs.
I have been doing the same thing and still only getting about 1100 to 1200 unique visits and I started back in Jan lol
Very, very interesting. I’m going to try adding some keywords to my blogs and see what happens. Thanks for the great advice. fr Heather
wow…good news… i’m going to try to my blogs. thanks for you.
This is definitely something people need to do on their blogs as well as websites. It’s easy to put a picture in for effect and forget what effect a little extra effort will have if they put in the keyword or keyword phrase that pertains to that particular picture. I started wrong, but went back and changed most of my ALT tags.
I have already started using this technique some time back and saw an increase in traffic. This sure works,
hey I use keyword in description, is it works??
Thank you for sharing this. I always knew something more could be done with images, I just wasn’t sure what.
Hi cavpres,
You can go to http://www.sxc.hu for images, majority are free to use, just check details for individual photos for terms of use.
Love this article and I think you hit the nail right on the head. It is crazy how many people have been finding my blog because I put a picture on it about random things. I actually wrote a post about going to the The Players Championship and added photos that I took at it. Those photos get me traffic on a daily basis. Weird thing is, most my alt tags have one and maybe two keyword phrases in them. Thank you for the reminder that I can and should be using this more in my regular posts.
Good tips. You are doing image marketing, thanks.
great stuff that so many people miss
I have pictures on Flicker and tried adding the keywords to the html and it wont save it. How do I do this to where it will save it? Or do I actually do it on the wordpress format…..
I really don’t know too much about Flicker, but as far adding keywords to the html, I always do it in WordPress under the html tab after I’ve uploaded the image.
Though image search is becoming competitive, it is still less competitive then normal search. I think optimization for google blog search is another great idea. If you have any experience about it, please provide us.
I’m putting you to the test! I’ve just installed your MaxblogPress Optin form. I have to say I’m pretty impressed with how easy it was to setup. I have set up several optin forms in the pass and this by far has been the easiest! I’ll definitely tweet about it! Keep up the great work. Thanks for this app being user friendly!