Make Money from Blogs » Images

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 7

ashish — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:07:39 +0000

The previous post (optimizing sections inside your post structure) talked about some assorted steps you can to optimize your post (such as permalinks, bread crumbs (example, the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin), speeding up your site, and so on).
This post looks at optimizing the images on your site for better SEO. I can just hear some of you saying, Huh ! Why do we need to do something for images. Well, consider that Google Image Search drives a large number of people (on one of my blogs, it drives more than 70% of visitors, and this is not a photo blog), and Google, when displaying search results, many times shows images as a part of the search results, right near the top. If you were able to get your blog in there through some image optimization, would it not be worth it ? Well, if you are convinced, here goes:
- Number one item, you should ensure that all your images have an ‘Alt’ tag filled out properly. A search engine cannot read the image, and can only find out what the image is by the alt tag, and by the context in which the image appears. And of course, you earn credit from some visitors who are visually challenged and use these tags to figure out what the image wants.
- If you are not able to add ‘Alt’ tag properties / text to your images manually, make sure that they are not blank. Use a plugin such as the ‘SEO Friendly Images’ (link – automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes).
- This one is more speculative, but it is believed that if you host your image on a popular image sharing platform such as Picasa Web or Flickr, then you get a slight boost to your SEO rankings for the image.
- If possible, ensure that your images are in a separate folder that is accessible by search engines
- Don’t put too many images per page, so if you load 100 or so images, then it is taken negatively
- Make sure that you change the image file names that come from the camera and make it something distinctive. Don’t use something like P121765.jpg, instead make it something ‘Photo of Sydney Opera House from water level’. This helps in search engine ranking and gives a boost to the image ranking
- Now, something that is different. Look at the words surrounding a photo / picture, and make sure that the photo or picture sits in a section of text that describes it some degree and has some keywords in it. This also boost the ability of the Search engines image search crawler to rank the images higher.
- If somebody requests you for being able to use your photos or a thumbnail of your photos, then consider whether the photo is exclusive enough. If you feel that it is fine to do so, ensure that there is a link to your original blog post under the photo in the other site, since this helps in giving your link popularity a boost.
- When you are giving a link to your photos somewhere, don’t use the words ‘link’ or ‘click here’, instead use descriptive text as the anchor since doing this naming also helps in SEO
- Ensure that your photos have a standard aspect ratio, since search engines show thumbnails and these thumbnails are easier to show when they are of a standard size.

Ad: Click Here for SEO Elite, a SEO software to propel your site to new rankings!

Using Photos in your blog posts

ashish — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:49:06 +0000

I believe I have mentioned this in past blog posts, but more in the nature of a tip rather than an actual focused post. For some time now, I have been reviewing the sources of page visits on the Gadgets blog that I maintain, called Ultra Cool Gadgets (link). Sitemeter provides a simple set of statistics for how the users come to the blog, and if you look at the following Sitemeter site (link), you will get an idea of where a large section of users come to my site from.
Surprisingly, a number of users to my site come from URL’s starting with http://images.google.com …; these are people coming from Google’s Image search. How do I manage to get people to come to my site from searching for images ? This was not intentional when I started, but I had made it a point to ensure that with every gadget that I posted, I also posted an image. But it was not just an image, I also made sure that I did the following:
1. Made sure that the image contained an alt description. Most tools that allow you to upload an image to your Blogger blog do not provide a default to add the alt tag (although I believe posting the URL for an image in WordPress gives you an option for entering the description of the image). You need to modify the code for the image to ensure that the alt keyword has a description added to it.
2. This tip is slightly lower in importance from the previous tip, but try and make sure that the name of the image is also relevant. This is also starting to matter in terms of the discoverability of your images via Google Image search.
Once you follow these simple rules and ensure that images are posted along with the blog post, you increase the chances of making your images being found by more people, leading to a higher traffic for your blog. However, do not stuff images that are not relevant, and do not add description in the alt tag that is false, since that might lead to your images getting a penalty associated with them.
Over a period of time, Google automatically finds these images and adds them to its Images search database.

Relating your Flickr photos to your WordPress blog

ashish — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:41:02 +0000

There are many different ways you have to express yourself, such as doing so through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, through photo sharing sites such as Picasaweb, Flickr, Photos on Facebook, personal blogs, and so on; similarly you can share on blogging sites such as WordPress, Blogger, and so on. Unfortunately, many of these sites are not linked, and you would be finding yourself duplicating some of your work. Consider the example of a great photo that you want to put on Flickr, and also share on your blogs at WordPress or Blogger. So, what do you do ? Well, the hardest way is to upload these to all the services individually, while manually tracking the status of which photo has been updated to which site. The smarter way is to figure out how to upload at one place, and use elsewhere in a smart way with minimum effort. Google already does that at Picasaweb since it owns both Blogger and Picasaweb; so a photo updated to Blogger actually is stored at an album in Picasaweb.
If you are a great user of Flickr and WordPress, then there is a solution available to you as well. This is in the form of leveraging the Flickr API to make this connection, and here is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to do that (link to plugin page – called Flickr Photo Album for WordPress). Read more on the site:

This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site. And if you want, you could also hook it up with Lightbox or any other number of display libraries.
On the backend, this plugin will also add a new Flickr icon to your WordPress edit screen which will allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks. You can either have your inserted photos link back to your WordPress Flickr photo album or directly to your Flickr.com photo page.

Installation instructions along with a detailed feature set are available on the page.

Ad: Click Here to learn how to make money from WordPress!

Resizing your photos – Webresizer

ashish — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:55:58 +0000

The web demands richness, and having images in posts and on pages is one way to ensure that the content is rich and attractive to users. However, for those users who are not good at using desktop imaging tools, the very thought of putting images into a page elicits the fear of alignment problems, about the size of the image and so on. How often has it happenad that a page that has been beautifully laid out somehow seems totally out of whack when an image is introduced ? Don’t you just hate it when that happens, and would prefer that there was a simple way of ensuring that your images are of the right size when you are putting them in the page.
Further, images can be large, and increase the amount of time that your viewers have to take to load your pages, and you certainly don’t want your users to have to struggle to load your site, because there is a chance that they would get frustrated and leave even before the page has been fully loaded.
Well, here is a free online tool that helps you do that.
http://webresizer.com/
And what all can you do with this tool ? You can:
- reduce image size
- crop photos
- sharpen
- resize – change width and height
- rotate
- adjust contrast, brightness, saturation
- convert photo to black and white
- add a border

How to add / upload an image to a WordPress Blog

ashish — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:45:09 +0000

In the previous post, I had described how to add an image to a blog hosted on Google’s Blogger platform. However, there are a number of people who prefer to have their own domain names and also host the domain names on their own (by that, I don’t mean that they own the server, I instead mean that they sign to any of the good commercially available hosting service, and host their blog on that; see this post for a list of the better hosting services).
Wordpress gives a way to directly upload a photo when creating a post, but last I used it, I found it a bit unwieldy, and now I use a somewhat better way to do post. Other posts recommend the use of some free sites that allow posting of images, me, I use Google for this purpose. Let me review the steps from the previous post with a few modifications, and you will understand how do this:

—-Copied from the previous post from this point——
Let me take an example, consider the case of a photoblog such as http://snapsfun.blogspot.com/ (a collection of unedited photos with some description and a photography tip that is related to the photo).
Now I want to add a new photo to the blog in the form of an new post. So what should I do next ?
1. I find the location of the photo (either on my local machine or on a URL located somewhere on the web)
2. I go to create a new post, and there click on the photo button

3. Clicking the button launches a new screen where I can either select the location of the photo or enter a URL for the photo (in case the photo is available elsewhere on the internet)

When the upload is in progress, and not yet completed

The upload is complete

4. Once this dialog comes, click on ‘Done’ and go back to your post. The image will have been uploaded and will be at the top position of the post. Add some ‘Alt’ text to the image (for better search purposes), and move the image to the desired location. Congrats, you are all set.
5. This image is also available at the following location (also owned by Google): http://picasaweb.google.com; login in with the same user ID and password that you use to log onto Blogger.

———-copying ends——-

This was applicable if you were doing a post to Blogger. But you are using WordPress, so how do you do this ? Well, the key is, once the image is added to a Blogger post, it automatically gets added to Picasaweb, and is available for you to use elsewhere. So, you need to do something very simple. Create a Google account by going to Blogger.com and creating a new account with a blog. This will be your shell for the purpose of image hosting. Next, there are 2 ways to proceed:

1. Either you can get the location of the image from your picasaweb account (after step 5), and directly use the Image URL from there
OR,
2. You can copy the entire Image code (from the HTML tab of the Blogger post window) just before step 5, and add this code to your WordPress post. It will fetch the required image from Picasaweb, and do the job for you.