subject: Images And A Keyword Research Tool To Drive Traffic [print this page] Images And A Keyword Research Tool To Drive Traffic
We often take the time to optimize our websites or blogs for search engines using some sort of keyword research tool to find the top searched keywords within our niche. However, many people make the mistake of focusing only on text, title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords and post tags. But if you do not take the time to put a few relevant images with an optimized file name, ALT text, and title text then you can be leaving thousands of potential visitors on the table each and every month. Of course, the niche you are involved in can have some influence on the amount of images you will be able to come up with for each post or page.
Rank number one in Google with little content and even less back links
You've seen it in Google, you do a search for a well known person, place or thing and the first thing that shows up at the top of the search results are anywhere from 1 to 10 pictures. The best part about the pictures is that they also link back to the site that they were indexed from. This is ultimately the same as owning position one for the keyword phrase the picture ranks for. Even better, I've seen many websites including my own rank for some high search volume keywords using only a few images optimized using the above methods.
Targeting high volume search terms that return images in Google
If you are making a blog post or entering into a niche that naturally has many images returned in Google's search results, than there are a few ways you can capitalize on this. The first thing you need is a good keyword research tool to help you find low competition keywords that get a respectable amount of searches each month. A good tool should also be able to help you find good misspellings as well. After you have found a good list of keywords and have written your blog post around them, you will want to go out and gather approximately 8 to 12 relevant images (Note: Do not use images with copyright or plagiarize). Post the images on your blog and optimize each image by using your main keywords as the file names, ALT tags, and title text. Also be sure to add the list of those same keywords to your blog post tags. Then you wait for Google to come along and index the website and watch the traffic come.
