A lot of this was taken from one of my previous posts, but I've done some more digging and added to it and feel this is a more appropriate place to discuss this.

I have a couple of just-for-fun personal sites I have set up. The one I want to talk about is http://www.rbookman.com that is a freebie one page deal I got with the domain registration several years back. I put four pictures on it and a silly (I had a few beers writing it.) but all true biography of myself on it and basically left it alone. Earlier this summer, I removed the link to my former employer, dropped in the Google Analytics code snippet, and promptly proceeded to ignore it again.

Last week, I was looking at the stats for my mortgage site and decided to look at the rbookman.com stats. OMG!!! 1094 visits in the last 30 days! As it turns out, 97% of that traffic came from image searches. Analytics shows them as referrals and while the largest share came from images.google.com, images.google.pl came in second, followed by .es, .de, and .it! In all there are over 50 different images.google top level domains, so somehow without even trying, I'm getting hits from all over the world! I did get some web hits and the keywords were either for my name (2) or for some variation of Honda Shadow (the rest), my bike!

Of course, the next thing I did was do a Google Image search (not web search) on Honda Shadow both with and without quotes and WHAM! First page, top row both times!

Now I've done a little more digging and can give a bit more info. Only my "portrait" has an alt tag. However, each photo and the caption that goes with it is in a separate table element. Each photo is not a thumbnail, but full size and uses the width attribute in the img tag to control its display size. This is a static html page and the photos have been there several years. The keywords below are included in the keyords meta tag for the page.

Doing Google Image searches on these keywords yields top 10 results for one or two of the photos: Ron Bookman; Honda Shadow; Richardson, TX; and Prairieville, TX.

Characteristics of the Google Image search results pages:
1. clicking on the image itself just shows the full size image.
2. clicking on the domain name below the image shows the page the image is on.

General characteristics of the images on the first page of a Google Image search:
1. They are full size images, not thumbnails. If shown on a page smaller than actual size, it is done with attributes.
2. They are on static html pages or aspx pages with no parameters.
3. They are on pages that seem like they have been there unchanged for a while.
4. None of them are in dynamic image gallery components or add-ons.
5. None of them are on photo sharing sites such as snapfish, webshots, etc.
6. I only looked at about 20-30 images and their origin pages, your milage may vary.

Misc. Thought:
I believe the hits reported by Analytics are from people clicking the link to see the full page since the Analytics code snippet is in the page html and won't be triggered by just pulling the image. Also Analytics is pretty good at eliminating 'bots from its results.

Now I just need to brainstorm some ideas on how to take advantage of this. Marketing and site monitization is still really new to me. The AdSense that's been on the page for quite some time just isn't producing any revenue, moving it to the top of the page from the bottom would be one obvious improvement. I can't move the pics because if I change their URL, I will loose the traffic. I would also like to keep its 'feel' as a personal page.

Comments or ideas anyone?

Hey Ron,was ckin out your site. Idon't know the answer to the ? ya just asked but your site looks great on the Mortgage side. Do you know anything about SEO optimization? If so could ya Ck our site out, and give us some feed back how to optimize it? thxs JerDon & Sara

Thanks, Jerry!

I've taken a quick look at your site and think you've gotten off to a great start! One thing I'd like to mention here is one item of your off-site optimization - your signature. It isn't a clickable link! Although I don't consider myself an SEO expert - yet - one theme I hear over and over from people who I think are is that you have to optimize for both people and bots at the same time. Here are my thoughts on your current signature:
1. The large red font makes it stand out to people! Good!
2. It's not clickable - some (most?) bots may not recognize it as a link. - Not good.
3. It's not clickable - people have to copy and paste (or type it manually) in a new browser window or tab in order to get to your site. - Also not good.

I'm about to leave town to meet up with family and will be back tomorrow. We can pick this up again then either through PM or start a new thread if you would like to use your site as a public "case study!"

Good Luck!

Ron,

I've noticed more traffic to my site from images in the past few months, too. I believe Google recently revamped things so that images would be more prominent in search results. I'll take the visitors.

I always put an appropriate phrase in the alt tags when including images. It makes them more "searchable" by the engines.

Regarding Google ads, It has been proven that you get more clicks from those ads that are above the fold on the page (before you scroll down).

Jerry,

Ron is right about your signature. If you don't make it a clickable link, it looses it's value. Here is how to do it...

Go into your profile to edit and find the tab that says, "Forum Settings." Where it says signature, just type in http://www.letsmakemoneygrow.com

If you want to have specific words link to your site you have to put it the code like this
[url=http://www.letsmake moneygrow.com]We Build Millionaires[/url

Except close off the end of the last bit with the ]. I had to leave it off for the purpose of you seeing the actual code and not just the linked phrase.

Hope that helps.

Hey guys, I'm back! Good trip!

I had a bit of time to think about this a little more, and decided that adding the alt tags and repositioning the AdSense wouldn't inadvertently kill my image ranking so I went ahead and did that this afternoon. The AdSense ads that are showing are not relevant to the photos though, so it looks like I'll have to get text more relevant to motorcycles on the page...goodbye autobiography...

I'm a little concerned about removing the bio since it is a top three result for my name in a text search...then again, so is ronbookman.com and I can brand myself there too.

This will do for the moment, but a more long-term plan is beginning to come together in my mind.

I did a little research on image SEO, but what little is out there we've pretty much already covered and seems to agree pretty much with my first impressions.

What really does surprise me though, was the number of top-ranking images without alt tags. Another thing that surprises me is the quality of the top-ranked images -- like maybe tracking the clicks of Google Toolbar users to help make some sort of quality ranking since the bots are 'blind users' and can only evaluate text.

Happy - Yeah, I'll take the traffic too. Interesting you should say a couple of months - I put the tracking code on the site in late June and looking at the history from then, traffic was a slow trickle. But suddenly in mid August, image traffic more than tripled and has remained pretty steady ever since.