Website Marketing

Website Marketing Using Image Search Engines

Did you know that images can help bring more visitors to your website? It takes a little bit more time to do this but leveraging image search results is another way to increase traffic. Think of the image search engines as a way to supplement your existing traffic.

A Picture Of What?

What do you need to do?

1. Use descriptive names and captions for the images.
2. Build up links back to that page (which you should already be doing).

It seems to work best if you use the names of products, people, or places. I’ve found that stuffing in every keyword under the sun doesn’t work at all for us (but it might for you so try it and see what happens). Calling the files something useful to people like gold-rolex-watch.jpg instead of image1.jpg gets the attention of Google (ditto for the captions).

Getting image search engine traffic from Yahoo and Live is still a mystery to me. Maybe someone reading this will have pointers?

Where Are The Knives?

I’ve tried to do this for a while but didn’t always do it intelligently. For example, one of our older articles included a picture of a type of cooking knife. I naturally named it something-knife-something.jpg. That article and this site have nothing to do with cooking knives of course. We rank well in Google for a variety of cooking utensil keywords now and occasionally, we get a visitor here looking for knives. Oops!

No Thanks. We’re Just Looking.

One of our sites uses this extensively and we get a lot more traffic because of the images. Roughly a third of its search engine traffic came from Google images over the last thirty days. That’s the good news.

Unfortunately, the conversion rates are craptastic so far for us. The visitors referred by Google’s image search don’t stay on the site as long and don’t click ads and affiliate links as often. Eventually, we’ll figure out how to monetize that better (hopefully) but it kind of stinks right now.

Ideas For Better Results

I think you need to really experiment to see where it works best. Based on my limited experience, I’d say if you’re selling pictures or anything where people regularly look for pictures before buying, then it’s definitely, definitely worth pursuing.

A celebrity blog or forum could really take advantage of this too. So if there’s a good picture of a famous person’s tattoo then call that picture the famous-person-tattoo.jpg (use their name instead of famous-person of course).

Another thing that might work is using image search to funnel traffic into your money pages. So setup pages or blog posts designed to get image traffic and put up recommended products or whatever there.

Do any of you have experience with image search engine marketing? Are your results any different?

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Image courtesy of abnelphoto.com