Yeh you heard it right most folks don't use this technique that is truly underused and growing at a 90% rate every year. Its called images.. Using Google image optimization is really an underused area of optimization. I myself get a crap load of image hits every day. Read more about why you should be doing image optimization and how to do it. Read it here
i never heard about it much... but one of my blog's traffic counter (i use stat counter), i've noticed a lot of referring links from images.google.com
only thing about images are that people are searching for images, most come along, steal your images and dont even look twice at your site.
Yep, totally agree. Useless traffic. I mean if you're selling xxx products on your website ... & a potential customer is looking for xxx products ... they're hardly gonna do an image search are they!
I had to take some images off of my site because I was getting a lot of worthless traffic from them. Most of the people only want to see the images and don't explore the rest of the site. Even worse, some people stole images and put them on other sites. Edit: I forgot to mention the worst problem of all: I discovered that several people had hotlinked my images, using my site's bandwidth to display the images on their sites.
I wouldn't say it's completely worthless traffic, but it is certainly of a lower quality than other types. I call them 'fast-lookers' - they just come to the page, glance at the image (and maybe take it), and then leave. But, hey, there's an opportunity there: come up with a way to stop those people in their tracks and make them look at your ads & sales crap...
I guess it really just depends on what market you are in if it is going to be favorable to your business model.
Image traffic usually converts at a lower percentage but why let it go to waste?....A nice trick that I used in the past is put keywords in the meta information that is embedded in the images
I actually do search via images a lot of time. If I am searching for a weird part I use it. IE I was recently searching for didymium goggles. Because lots of sunglasses are didymium and asshat webmasters pepper their page with keywords that dont apply, it was easier to go to images and look quickly through several hundred sites at a glance for the ones actually selling goggles not safety glasses or sunglasses.
It's actually so good, that the traffic was irritating for a while, but I figured that with Google ads, the extra traffic would pay for any bandwidth increase I might need - if that even became an issue. But I realized that Google does read the "alt" tags. When my stats trace back to images, its because they say something like "landscape design photo" rather than "Ore_3424". And "landscape design" is a better image tag than just "design" or "landscape" as single words.