I was searching Google Images for some images today and I found that 80% of the images that I needed were indeed hosted on blogs from all around the web. One important thing that I would want most bloggers to notice is that the search engine bots e.g. Google Bot do not only crawl your content but also your blog images and completely index them in their Image Search.

Traffic From Image Search Engines

Many bloggers underestimate the traffic driving power of self-hosted images or in most cases do not even know the huge impacts of hosting images on their blog. Here is a list of reasons why bloggers prefer not to host images on their blog:

1. They Think They Save Bandwidth

Trust me the world is not at your shoulders. You are not going to do any good by saving your blog bandwidth. If you think that by saving your bandwidth you are making future investments or helping the poor then you are absolutely out of your mind. This is the virtual world, the web world, and here no one is poor or rich. By not hosting images on your blog you are straight away telling search engine bots “I don’t want traffic please don’t crawl me”

2. They Think They Save Time

If you think that the world is relying on you to give your precious little time to them, better think again. I don’t think that getting free quality traffic from search engines at the cost of 5-10 minutes extra work on your blog is going to do heavy losses to you. By hosting images on your blog you are not only getting traffic but saving your future time which may get exhausted in heavy search engine optimizations.

3. They Think Its Easy

Hosting your images on services like Photobucket, ImageShack and Flickr and then using the generated codes to show those pictures/images on your blog huh? You call that easy? If you are using either of Wordpress or Blogger platform for your blogging needs then hosting an image is just easy as click of a button so don’t waste your time doing uploading elsewhere and then copying codes to show your images.

4. They Think Its Safe and Secure

I agree to some extent with the fact that hosting images on services like Photobucket, ImageShack or Flickr is 100% safe as there is very little chance for you to lose any image ever but if you have a decent host then most likely you won’t lose your images from your server too. After all Image hosting services are also run on normal dedicated hosts and not something out of the skies. DreamHost is the most reliable host I know especially for bloggers so if you have your blog hosted with them or with hosts of similar potential then hosting images on your own blog is totally safe and you should not worry a pint about losing your images or about their security.

Tips To Build Traffic From Search Engines

Now that you know what bloggers are mainly afraid of in hosting their images on their blog and its relative impacts let us discuss some tips which can help us assure that search engine bots index our images in image search results.

1. Start Uploading Images On Your WebHost

This is the key to the door which brings in your traffic. For a search bot its not the page where the image was found and crawled rather the server or host or site where the image is apparently located. Make an upload folder on your blog and start uploading the images you use in that particular folder so whenever a bot crawls your pages it indexes your images on image search engines and gets you traffic.

Uploading images on your server means you are communicating with the image-search bots in a I-Have-It-Come-Get-It tone.

2. Use Good Keyword names For Your Images

If you have an image of Google logo in JPEG format and you save it with the name 1.jpeg just think yourself how will the innocent image-search bot will know what the image is about? and certainly it will tag the image for the keyword “one” or “1″ instead of “Google logo”.

In this case you lose your real site traffic too and get ranked for unmatched keywords which is just destroying your Search Engine Ranking Position structure and doing you no good at all. So be creative and give your images names which actually match to what they really are.

3. Use The ‘alt’ attribute in Image Tags

Just like the Image name there is another important factor that the image search bots keep in mind while ranking your images for a certain keyword.

Its the very sweet ‘alt’ attribute which most of us do not use in our Image tags because we want to save our time or mainly because we think its useless. The ‘alt’ attribute is very important to place while writing the tag code for your image as it servers another keyword targeting purpose for image search bot.

It can be the same as the Image name but is targeted by image search bots for the purpose of ranking your images for a keyword.

4. Enable Google Enhanced Image Search

As Google is the primary search engine everyone uses and talks about. Its good if you use the Google Enhanced Image Search functionality in your Google Webmaster Dashboard to take use of this feature and rank your images higher in Google Image Search.

To enable the images on your site to be used with these types of tools, simply, access the site in webmaster tools, then choose Diagnostic > Enhanced Image Search. Once you have opted-in, you can opt-out at any time by returning to this page and clearing the checkbox.

5. Enable Access To The Image Uploads Folder

Make a robots.txt file in your main blog directory or most probably you will already have one. Just allow access to the search engine bots to your Image Uploads Folder so they can crawl your directories and enlist the images more properly and accurately.

Make sure to add this in your robots.txt file:

# The Googlebot-Image is the image bot for google
User-agent: Googlebot-Image

# Allow Everything
Allow: /*

I hope the article was useful and informative. I enjoyed a lot writing and sharing my experience with your people.

[tags]Google_Image_Search, Image_Search, Build_Traffic, Search_Engine_Traffic, How_To, make_traffic[/tags]