Image Usage: Traffic Building

Images tend to spice up your websites and add vibrancy to them. In Layouts, images create buttons, highlight important features, create nice category headers, serve as logos, and generate traffic. In this first article about Image Usage, I’ll focus on Image usage to generate traffic.

Building Traffic with Images: Photo Traffic

Gimmick Images inserted in your content like this one from Google Image can actually serve as a way to bring in web traffic. Have you ever seen a really cool image in Google Images and clicked on it to see what the site looked like? Although organic search listings using keywords gives better targeted traffic, images that draw a lot of attention can give exposure to sites that do not quite yet rank well. The image to in this post is an example of one such image. To get your images indexed, simply place a good image on a page that has content, preferably your home page to speed up the indexing.

Enhancing Google Image

To enhance your image’s search result, you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools and click the site you own that you wish to enhance the image’s ratings for. Then click the “Tools” category and click on “Enhanced image search”. Follow Google’s instructions from there.

There may be two intermediate steps that you may have to take:

1. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll have to register first.

2. If you haven’t used Google Webmaster Tools before, you may be required to verify that you own the site.

As with blog posts, the best traffic generating materials is unique content. Creating your own images through Photoshop or taking a picture with your camera and then editing it with an editing software.

The industry standard is Adobe Photoshop, which has a promotion currently for $150 off, but it is still a hefty sum. This is the program that most pros use.

For those of you who can’t afford Photoshop, the best free image editor is GIMP which is a GNU project.