ITILII #1: Getting Thousands of Visitors Easily Using Google Images

Here we go with the first installment of the I Tell It Like It Is series. This will be fun

The other day I was drawn to a post claiming I could get thousands of extra visitors with just a couple minutes of work. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

But it turns out, the big secret was to use alt text on your images. Yep, that’s the secret.

It might work, but… I see alt text as a part of web design, not SEO. And considering that specifying an image location, alt text, and width are all required to be standards compliant, the W3C must agree with me.

I was using alt text on my images to make proper websites long before I ever heard of SEO. Even my very first sites in Frontpage had alt text on the images. Hell, I probably read this “secret” in a How to Use Frontpage kind of book.

If you didn’t know, the point of alt text is to describe the image for those who can’t see it. Either people with images turned off or blind people (because screen readers, much like Googlebot, can’t ‘read’ an image.) And using alt text is a very easy way to accommodate everyone.

And I have a feeling that neither Googlebot nor a blind person would want bombarded with keyword stuffed alt tags, in case you were going to pull one of those tricks.

So if you have a properly designed site, you would already be getting image search traffic, which means that you can disregard such trickery.

However, traffic from Google Images is notoriously bad, because they just want to steal your image and leave. Even worse than social media traffic…

So… this trick might come in handy.

Back on topic though, I think the problem here is the onslaught of blogs. What I mean is that, thanks to Wordpress and Blogger, any idiot off the street can setup their site without knowing a thing about web design.

Since this new crop of webmasters does not understand basic web design, they start to spread hype about little things being SEO secrets. I see it all over the place.

Next they’ll tell you that the “title” attribute is an undiscovered miracle to add more keywords to your anchor text…

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