Who else gets traffic from Google Images?

I have 1 website which gets 4000-6000 uniques a day, and about 75% of them come from google images, very nice traffic.

One thing tho, that site keeps around 5% CTR tho and has been as low as 2%, my other site on the same topic, which gets most of its traffic from regular google yahoo and msn, has about 30% CTR.

So even though it gets more traffic, It still earns less.

But still, it earns about 15 a day alone from google images traffic on adsense, cant complain for a site that i havent updated in 9 months.

 

I get quite a bit, for some reason people find my mma site when they look for Atari images, you know the video game console. I cant even find the thread that the pics are located in.

 

I do although I really don't want it, because people search images are usually looking to use these images on there sites (hot linking)

 

So disable hotlinking to all sites except yours and google. Simple. Works for me.

 

i have been getting alot of traffic from google images lately on one of my sites

 

I have a few sites made to hit googles images. The interesting thing about the image index is that it seems to be independent from the main index. You can be number 1000 in main index on the same keyword that you hit as number one i Google images. Quite cool.

 

Depends on what you mean about whether they convert.

For my site, conversion means signing up for a free registration. I'm using Google Analytics and have defined the "thank you for registering" pages from two registration funnels as conversion indicators. And the nice thing is that Analytics lets me measure conversion by source, so I can tell which conversions are coming from where.

Now, images.google.com and images.google.ca represent only 5% as many hits as Google search results do, but that's climbing. Last month, they were negligible, and the site's hitting the 3-month anniversary of launch tomorrow.

Conversion rates for images.google.* run about 1.6%. This is a higher percentage than organic Google search results, which run about 1.35%, but lower than backlinks from "simpatico" sites (sites that have a theme or purpose very similar/related to mine) which can range from 4% - 7%.

But since the simpatico sites are lower volume, that 1.x percent from Google and Google Images still represent a higher absolute number.

- Greg (this is my first post on this forum)

 

Disabling hotlinking is often based on the referrer string passed by the user's browser. A small percentage of visitors don't pass that string either due to firewalls, proxy servers, or other privacy tools. In those cases, they won't see the images at all.

But let's say that percentage is 1.1 percent and you get 10,000 visitors a day. That's 110 legitimate visitors who are being prevented from seeing images.

As the referrer string is user-created, rather than created by the referrer, you may wish to implement a simple CGI image proxy. It cloaks the true URL of your image, plus you can account for those users who present no referrer string.

It's pretty simple to do. It's just a PHP script that sits on your image server and checks the referrer string, then passes through the image if the referrer string matches a pattern you've defined. But with this you can also set it so that if the referrer string isn't present, it lets the image through.

- Greg

 

wow.. i have never thought of that... i must figure out a way to get more pictures on my site... and remember to give them logical names! Thanks for the tip!

 

Thanks for the info and how can we used the google images from our entertainment site?

 

I have a blog that gets around 7000 hits a day. Each post contains an image. I'm currently receiving around 1000 Google Images hits a day, and that number grows every day.

Once I noticed that I was getting some Google Images traffic I decided to optimize for it the best I could:

1. I make sure that each image file name is keyword rich, with each word separated by a hyphen. I make sure each word is spelled correctly.

2. I MANUALLY type the same keyword rich file name into the ALT text of the IMG element. I separate each word with a space, not a hyphen. I also do not correct any keying errors. I want the ALT text to contain typos (common typos, hopefully).

3. I type a several sentence description directly underneath the image. This description is related to the image.


A few weeks after I started doing this the Google Images hits exploded. As I said before it keeps growing every day. Unfortunately I can't see the search phrases that were used to find the images. That would be very useful, but they are not included in my stats.

I can't say if my "shot in the dark" image optimizing technique had anything to do with the increase in hits, but I keep doing it "just in case".