Everyone wants more people coming to their websites. It’s the entire point of building a site, after all.

One trick that can work well for some people is to make sure their images are easily indexed and search engine friendly. There are some risks to this, but overall it can be a decent tactic.

Optimizing images is not too hard. It’s a matter of naming the image well and of inserting it correctly into your site. The name of your image should be descriptive, and use hyphens to separate the words - pretty-picture.jpg, not prettypicture.jpg or pretty_picture.jpg.

When you put the image into your site, you should include it’s height and width as well as a descriptive alt tag. This is constructed as alt=”pretty picture” within the code for the image. Some people suggest doing the same with title=”pretty picture” but others feel that could be overdoing it.

Your code should look like:

img src=”pretty-picture.jpg” height=”100″ width=”100″ alt=”pretty picture”

enclosed in the usual brackets, of course. This means that Google and other search engines now know what your picture is about. You may start getting significant traffic from the images you optimize this way.

There’s just one problem with this kind of traffic. For many kinds of sites it is not the stickiest traffic nor is it particularly likely to buy. Even more annoying can be the people who are just looking for images for their website, and hotlink them for their own use. You may be attracting bandwidth theives.

You should always keep an eye on what’s using up your bandwidth. This is how you find out if someone is linking to one of your images without your permission. You can them contact them and request the removal of the image. If they refuse, rename it. You can either let them deal with the broken link or put up something that will make them look bad. Your choice, and it can be a lot of fun, depending on how the person reacted when you requested they remove your image from their website.

You can, of course, refuse to let Google index your images by disallowing your images folder in your robots.txt. This is a good plan if you find that your bandwidth is being eaten up by allowing this, but you aren’t seeing any of the results you wanted. You’ll lose the image search traffic, but if you aren’t getting good results from it, that is not a bad thing.

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