Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic
25 COMMENTS
This is the third part of the SEO Tips for Beginners Series
Search Engine optimization is not like a Ghost, you should not be afraid it. If you have read the earlier parts of SEO Tips for Beginners Series, you may have noticed that it is not so difficult to optimize your blog for SEO as it may seem. The only difficult part is that you do need a lot of reading and practice to become a SEO pro. And I am trying to make it easier in these set of tutorials ![]()
Image SEO
Once you have optimized your posts for major search engines like google and bing, you need to gather more sources of organic traffic, like the image search. Though, the amount of traffic that one can get through google search is very large and more effective than the google image search, but it is still worth the time.
Each image has certain attributes like the file name in terms of the name and the extension (eg. a.png), and also the title and the alt tags. Searches usually consider the file name and alt tag of the image as a basis of indexing images.
File Name
The file names usually used by bloggers contain underscores for eg A_black_book.png. The problem with this name is that A_black_book is treated as a single word and so it will not show in results that have keywords like “black book”. To remove this problem, use a hyphens (-) instead of underscores (eg. A-black-book.png).
Alt Tags
Alt stands for alternate text. It shows up if the image is not loaded or in the process of loading. Alternative tags should be used to describe the image. Make sure that you don’t overload with keywords because that would not good for seo purposes. On a side note, alt tags also becomes a part of the content. So, in a way it also helps in seo for text content based search engines.
Wrapped Around Text
It is not as important as alt tags but it still plays an important role in indexing of images. The text around the image is usually considered for seo. So, you can use the space around the image to describe it.
Nofollow Links
A lot of bloggers who are not aware of this fact may be shocked, but it is actually a fact. Google penalizes websites if they are linking to a website which is either inappropriate or is of bad quality. The websites you are linking to should have certain quality, because those sites will get indexed on google and they can’t be your referral links.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t use referral links on your website. After all, most of the blogs survive due to the earnings they get from serving advertisements and earning affiliate commissions. The only thing you need to do is to add a nofollow tag to it. Nofollow can be easily add using rel=”nofollow” in your link tag (a href=”your-link” rel=”nofollow”). Nofollow tag tells the search engine to not follow the website being linked, so it does not get indexed.
Do you have any queries regarding seo? Have a tip to share. Comment and let me know.
| This entry was posted by Gautam on April 5, 2010 at 12:23 am, and is filed under seo. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |








about 1 year ago
Optimizing the images for SEO is one of the most important factor that many blogger forgets. I usually get 100+ visits per month from google image search engine. I know it is not a big number but it is still a good number.
.-= Genius geeks´s last blog ..iPad Jailbrake Is Possible: iBad News For Apple =-.
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April 8, 2010 - 7:05 pm
Hey, that is what I said, the number may not huge, but if you have a little time, you can get some extra icing to the cake in the form of additional traffic
.-= Gautam´s last blog ..Guest Blogging Contest =-.
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about 1 year ago
These are two questions I have had and for some reason have not been able to find a clear concise answer like you just gave even with searches. Thank you!
Maybe you can answer the exact steps you took to use the flikr photo and add credit? Do you have to contact photo owner for permission?
My tip of the day: Practice wagging more about everything you do!
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April 5, 2010 - 2:05 pm
HEy, first of all i have used flickr search to find out photos for my post. The best thing about flickr is that the list the creative commons license specified by the author. If it is allowed to distribute for free, thn you can add it to your blog.
If that is not the case, then they might ask you to link to their website if you are using an image.
These are just some techniques i use to find and give credit to the image.
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April 7, 2010 - 12:38 am
Be careful with creative commons. When you read the fine print, most people demand credit for their images, so just taking them and using them may be a bad idea. Make sure you carefully read about what they want in return for use of their image (it’s usually credit with a link).
.-= Alphabetix´s last blog ..Get Twitterpated – Feedback Tweets =-.
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April 8, 2010 - 5:40 pm
I just see the creative commons badge and also the comment by the author. If they want a linkback for a specific keyword, they specify it in this comment
.-= Gautam´s last blog ..5 steps to building a power blog =-.
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about 1 year ago
I never thought of replacing underscores with hyphens, great idea, in future I’ll have to make sure I remember the tip
.-= Karen @ Blazing Minds´s last blog ..Blazing Minds Weekly Round Up – Google Chrome, FireFox, Google Pagerank =-.
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April 6, 2010 - 2:25 am
Yeah, I agree I’d never thought of replacing underscores before but it’s definitely something I’ll think about now.
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April 8, 2010 - 7:00 pm
Yeah, using underscores is a big no-no. Peoplre who are not aware of image seo make this mistake.
And plus an Image plugin can convert this hypen structure into a set of words for the alt tag. So you just need to change the name of the image and the alt information is already tagged along with it
.-= Gautam´s last blog ..5 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for Bloggers =-.
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about 1 year ago
I learned using hyphens a few months back and I’m getting a lot of traffic from images ever since. Also don’t forget to code all your images with alt as this is more important to get your images indexed on seo. Use this with caution though as a lot of bloggers can steal your images over the internet. Try adding a watermark on your pictures.
.-= Bogcess´s last blog ..Outstrip Competitors through Market Penetration =-.
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April 8, 2010 - 7:04 pm
Yes, content scraping is a big problem and watermarks is one of the solutions. But the alt tags can be easily placed with the help of a simple plugin
.-= Gautam´s last blog ..How To Use Email Marketing To Draw More People To Your Website =-.
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about 1 year ago
Nice tips Gautam! I really get a lot of traffic from Google Image search everyday for my blog. The ALT text plays a vital role for the ranking.
.-= KS Chen´s last blog ..Win the Prizes for SEO =-.
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April 8, 2010 - 7:07 pm
Nice to know that you are getting the benefits from image seo. ALT is one of the most important factors
.-= Gautam´s last blog ..How to Connect With Your Social Media Followers and Fans =-.
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about 1 year ago
Great tips.I am following and will be following all these tips for better SEO of my blog
.-= Blogging Tips´s last blog ..Blogging Tips Contest – Win upto $180 worth prizes =-.
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about 1 year ago
In fact, on one of my gadget websites, half of the traffic is from Google image search.
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April 8, 2010 - 6:53 pm
That is a fantastic news, getting almost 50% traffic from image search is an achievement in itself.
This tips have helped me get a sizeable amount google image search
.-= Gautam´s last blog ..The Great Social Media Debate : Twitter Monetization. Is it Ethical? =-.
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about 1 year ago
Never thinking about giving dofollow link gives a bad effect. Thanks for this post. Makes me thinking twice about image alt..
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about 1 year ago
Thanks for this well written article!
Appreciate your efforts in putting this together.
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about 7 months ago
is there any way to no follow an image name ?
Tamil´s last [type] ..Watch delhi belly movie online
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about 4 months ago
Hi,
You mention the “nofollow” tag, but do you use it on img links as well as href links?
Michael
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