This is a re-post of a great article on the importance of photos to enhance your own content as well as being a tool for driving targeted traffic to your site … Enjoy!

Increasing Website Traffic Through Google Images

By Adam Ada

Optimizing images is very important when optimizing any website or blog. If images are optimized correctly, they can bring a huge amount of traffic to your site. Image optimization is highly advantageous but the most underused when it comes to optimizing websites to increase rankings and traffic.

Depending on niche and images used, one may be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. Following are a few points you can put into practice when optimizing your website:

1. Insert Keywords in your Alt text

This step is the most useful and important when optimizing images. Select a keyword or phrase which is relevant and popular to describe your image and web page. This alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file.

For example:

Here are a few more specific rules:

If the image is just decorated text, put the text in the alt attribute

If the image is used to create horizontal lines, bullets in a list or other similar decoration, it is fine to have an empty alt attribute (alt= “”)

If the image represents a lot of important information, try to summarize it in a short line and ass a longdesc link to a more detailed description.

2. Optimize the page with the image

Optimizing the actual page for search engines improves graphic images search. Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy. It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. Also text within the anchor tag and next to the anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find a short description of around 20 characters below every image; the keyword is listed in bold as well.

3. Name images with Descriptive Titles

If you have an image of Bill Clinton, you could use the term “bill-clinton.jpg” to name your image file, instead of just using the original file name which could be something like “c789.jpg”. You can name the images exactly the same way as my alt text.

4. Determine overall content relevance using AdSense

This method can be used specifically used for Google Image Search. It is not very important to follow this but it is very useful to determine the relevance of your content with respect to your image. It will tell you how Google thinks about the overall theme of what your page is about. Keep changing your content until the AdSense unit on the page reflects the keywords you want to target. This method does not only apply to Google images but it is a generally a helpful method and it improves your overall latent semantic indexing. Your site will appear more relevant to Google for targeted keywords and phrases.

5. Use Social Site Tags for your images

If you are using images with little or no textual content, it will be useful to tag your images using internal tagging or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it rank better. And if you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use appropriate keywords as well.

6. Make your image file accessible to search engines

Check that your robots.txt file does not restrict search engines from accessing your image files. Try not to use javascript links on image files as it will limit search engine access as well.

7. Hotlink Images from Google Search Results

Type a search query for the image you want. Then visit the original web page and copy the image location to your own website (hotlink it). Your website might show up high among image search results. Most of the images in the top row are actually hotlinked and rank better than the original image source. Well this method is frowned upon by most webmasters because it violates copyrights issues.

8. Use Images about ‘Hot topics’

Deliberately use images to catch visitors who are searching for hot topics or trending topics. Through Google Trends you can find this out. Make sure your content is relevant to the image used for more impact.

9. Add an optimized web page on your website and link the image to that page. Users can access this page via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page when they find your page through Google Image Search.

10. Monitor the Number of Indexed Google Images

An important aspect of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google if you have taken the right steps to optimize your image. Just type site: vinfotech.com and check the images indexed for vinfotech. Instead of vinfotech.com, just type in your website to get indexed images.

The author of this article represents a professional
Social Networking Website Design and Social Networking Web Development company. It also offers design and development solutions.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Adam_Ada
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The “Marketing Guru” Seth Godin provides another of his insightful interviews discussing the “New Face of Marketing” in the 21st Century.

Through the interview, Seth Godin describes how it is necessary to “tell a story” to the consumer in such a way that they believe the story and sell themselves.

During his explanation, Godin names three key factors each story must have to enable the consumer to be “self-sold”:

• First, the story must provide something the consumer wants;
• Second, the story must be true and authentic; &
• Last, the story must be remarkable ….

Watch the video below and listen to the marketing master reveal the details of selling via story-telling:

Now take your notes and spin your yarns (authentically and remarkably of course) and apply this insight into your own home-based business marketing efforts ….

As Bob Dylan once wrote and sang … “The times they are a-changin‘” and a digital shift many initially thought a mere fad; social media is proving it is not only here to stay but it has started an outright revolution!

The following video by “Socialnomics” provides not only an entertaining view of social media’s impact on both our life and business; it is an extremely powerful one as well …

Give a watch, then reflect about the potential impacts to your business marketing strategy …

If you would like to learn more about “Socialnomics” or check out the background sources for the video, visit the site by clicking on either link above (both name references are active).

What’s your next move?

Either subscribe to the RSS feed or email notifications for this blog to be the first to hear about new articles on social media marketing strategies, techniques and trends as they periodically hit the new post position!

As a home-based business owner interested in online marketing in the 21st Century, you may well be struggling with the “techie” details about websites and then how to gain great page position on search engine results.

Many people will provide great advice regarding the use of blogs as your initial website platform for reasons discussed on a previous post on blog traffic.

Beyond the fact that blog sites can be magnets to both people and the search engines like Google, blogs make great focal points (also referred to as central hubs) for your online marketing efforts.

Using a blog as your central hub enables you to build a “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine” as described by Charles Heflin of Social Media Sciences in the following video:

Hopefully you noted Charles describing the steps required to build a “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine” including posting quality blog content to your central hub, then syndicating the content via your social networks and creating social buzz.

Want more insight on the process and the “how to” of combining quality blog content with syndication of that content via your social networks to generate social buzz and build your own “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine”?

Click on the “Social Media Science” banner link located on the right-hand sidebar to gain access further information about SMS and the Synnd Network.

I have personally used this system to gain fantastic search engine page position and drive traffic to blog sites less than two weeks old!

The power of this system and approach is truly amazing and completely revolutionary!

So elevate your home-based business Internet marketing game to 21^st Century standards and combine the power of content syndication and social buzz and kick your “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine” into high gear today!

Being a “baby boomer” and looking out to the future towards retirement, evaluating options to protect my income has been steadily on my mind.

Given the economic upheaval of the last few years, many of us have been faced with this very question.  As last year’s election cycle wound down, even the politicians were finally admitting we were indeed in a recession.  Although recessions are not uncommon, this one is the worst in decades resulting in substantial impacts to a large portion of our society.

Further evidence of continuing economic strife was signaled in a Business Week article indicating:

• Retail sales decreased in July compared to June and
• Unemployment claims rose in the second week of August compared with the first.

So how does anyone better prepare to avoid a financial heart-ache and make your income recession proof?

Many people are starting to look very seriously at ways to lessen impacts from job loss or income reductions by evaluating home-based business opportunities.

Thoughts of service-based businesses (home repair, accounting, financial planning, specialty retail shops, etc.) often come to mind when thinking about home-based businesses since they are commonly operated from home.

But this my friend is the information age meaning a whole new and bold world of home-based business opportunities awaits on the horizon.  Those opportunities wait for anyone willing to use even simple computer skills (already possessed or readily learned with the proper coach) to tap into the power of the Internet.

Why is the Internet so powerful?

Mainly through a combination of ever growing number Internet users (~360,000,000 in 2000 rising to almost 1,600,000,000 by 3/31/09) and the amazing social resources including open social media sites like blogs, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Every person willing to connect with the right team, find the right home-based business opportunity and work to develop their business can literally have the “world” at their fingertips!

Taking the proper steps will help protect and recession proof your income which is something everyone (baby boomers, genx and millennials) should be considering.

Now the big question is ….. Where to begin?

One of my business associates and online marketing mentors, McKay Earl recently produced a two-part video series “Recession Proof Your Life”.  Through these videos he provides a wealth of information about the different ways to tap into the power of the Internet as part of numerous home-based businesses.

Complete the form below to gain complimentary access to this awesome, information-packed video series and begin to unravel the secrets of using the Internet to identify and grow potential home-based business opportunities!

You’ll be glad you did ….