Interesting thread on DigitalPoint this morning about the influx in traffic from images indexed in Google Images and other image search engines, and how they can attract a decent amount of traffic.
In some circumstances, a well optimized image file with a keyword rich filename, alt tag and title (if it is hyperlinked) can show up fairly high in image search results with little effort.
I’ve got some animal pictures that get thousands of visitors every day (make no money though, just kids looking) from being number 1-3 in google images.
I just checked and the pictures don’t even have alt text or title, although the filename is the name of the animal, so I guess that might be pretty important.
The other common factor is that the pictures are quite large – more than 350*350, which I think helps. I believe the surrounding text is as important as the picture itself.
The members do however, debate on the quality of such traffic, stating that the image search traffic does not convert quite well.
I have added a bodybuilder book. As the cover looked quite ugly I purchased the rights to a another (real image) with a body builder couple and that’s what I have called the image “Body builder couple”…and hey, more than 400 unique visitors per day ..no SEO …nothing …but as already mentioned: non-paying traffic …so I have added some bodybuilder banners on top and a popup… I’ve to wait and see if I can moneytize on this traffic
Other members are using AdSense and CPM ads to try and make money off of the image traffic. I think this should be judged on a case by case scenario.
- People looking for animal images are probably children or normal Internet users doing research or leisure searching.
- Optimizing for the images of a (please forgive me) exotic dancer or celebrity sex video will bring in the potential of tons of traffic, which can be driven to affiliate programs.. but the competition is huge.
- Optimize for ‘smoked turkeys’ or a company name and you may see your images served at the very top of Google organic results, being that Google Universal Search serves images first on some occasions.
But does image traffic generally convert? If you’ve had any experience here, please feel free to share with the readers.
