Pretty much every company is looking to increase their website’s search engine ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest, right? One way to help website ranking is through backlinks.
A ‘backlink’ is a link on another website that points to a page on your website. Search engines use backlinks (as well as a bunch of other criteria) in their determination of where your website is going to appear in results pages. Search engines see a bunch of links from various sources pointing to your site and deduce that your content has value. Broadly speaking, the more backlinks you have the more the search engines will love you – as long as you don’t try to pull the wool over their eyes.
(How? Well, there are a number of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen out there that – for a price – will put backlinks onto a bunch of websites for you. When Google et al find out what you’ve been doing (and they ALWAYS find out eventually) you can find your site ranking in a whole help of trouble. In extreme cases your site can even get banned.)
Using Online Photo Galleries For SEO
Recently, when using Google Analytics to check my website’s traffic, I’ve been seeing an increase in links to KEXINO from all sorts of websites. One growth area in my own backlink strategy has been in people taking images posted on the KEXINO Flickr stream to use on their own websites – and giving credit by putting a backlink in there. Just in the past few months, KEXINO images have been used in online slide presentations, blogs – and even tech news sites.If you’re even mildly creative, photo sharing sites like Flickr can really help increase your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your images don’t have to be perfect – they just need to be the sort of pictures that website admins and bloggers are looking for. As with all things on the web, in order to get noticed you need to find your niche. Pick a topic, create as much visual content for it as you can. Promote your content using your social media channels, then sit back and wait for the backlinks.
A couple of tips:
- Most backlinks will point back to your Flickr page, so make sure that you add your web page’s URL to the image description. You’d be surprised how many people click on the link. I know I was.
- Choose descriptions as if you were writing for search engines (which, in effect, you are). Use keywords that you think would be used if someone was looking for your image.
- Post as many permutations of the image (composition, lighting, etc.) as you can, to give people as much choice as possible
- Images don’t have to be photographs. For example, most of the images on the KEXINO Flickr account are 3D renders, created using Cinema 4D software.
- When posting images to your Flickr account, make sure that you edit the default copyright declaration to one of the Creative Commons licenses. This gives third-parties rights to publish your image with certain caveats (go to creativecommons.org to find out more).
- I’m not saying that Flickr is better than any other photo sharing site. You may find using an alternative site gives you less competition for popular search terms.
Hopefully you’re about to enjoy a well-earned rest over the next few days. Instead of vegetating in front of the TV, why not go outside with your camera (or even a smartphone) and see what you can find?