Friday, November 03, 2006

Images generate free traffic

Images generating free traffic? Well actually the answer is yes! How
does this work? Well, it's quite simple really. Google want to be the
best search engine in every aspect when it comes to websites, images,
and videos. Just like the normal google search engine, there is also the
google image search engine. People do searches for images there. Simply
type in the image subject, click search, and you get millions of images
you can choose from. Of course these images all come from websites like
yours or mine. Remember that some of the images google spits out of the
search engine are not really what was being searched for. This is where
google saw an opportunity to improve their image search results. The
only way to improve the image results is to label the images better. Now
what a massive job that would be! Ah... yes but as you know google is
mighty clever. So how is google doing this then? Well, pretty ingenious
if you ask me. Google created a sort of competition or game if you would
called "image labeller". You and a partner get shown the same image,
which you need to label. If you both come up with the same label, the
image is labelled; you both earn 100 points and are shown another random
image. Label as many as you can in 90 seconds! There is a point sore
board there showing the image label gurus most accumulated point for the
day, and all time. There are thousands of people all around the planet
playing this cool little game. I have tried it and it can be fun.
That's all well and fine, but how do you get google to start processing
images on your site? Wait for a google bot to spot your images? The
answer is no, you must join up with google sitemaps. Inside the google
sit maps there is a setting which allows google to index images from
your site. Make sure you check the box and google will soon be indexing
your images. You don't need to worry about the labels of the images or
the file names of the images. The labelling of your images will be done
by someone pretty soon somewhere on the planet by the image labelling
gurus merrily playing their little game!
Since I set this image indexing setting in my site maps account I have
seen a dramatic increase in traffic to my site.