Over the past few months I have been experimenting with many SEO techniques,
from back linking strategies, such as article
submissions, bookmarking, and link wheels to name a few.
When you are doing organic SEO, you have to be really patient with things. Sometimes its frustrating , because if you are like me, you get really excited about a new site or niche in which the numbers in regards to search versus competition is really good.
So then you go about creating your template , be it either Wordpress or html site, then you add your content based around the targeted keyword. Then you submit your new domain to the search engines, create a site map and submit that to your
webmaster tools account, create a few articles for back linking, and then the waiting begins.
This is the part that requires patience. In the end , no matter how good the keyword research stats may appear, you never really know how a site will rank when it comes to Google or any search engine for that matter. Sometimes the site gets picked up really quickly and traffic starts to come in within a matter of a week or so , other times it can take many weeks for things to get rolling.
This is all part of the internet marketing game. During this time I will usually continue to add content and back links for the site in question, however I made a very interesting discovery.
A while ago I put up two very similar sites in regards to niche, both were of identical design and were using the same html template. The keyword stats were pretty much identical in regards to search volume and competition for both niches, however I noticed that one site was starting to get traffic pretty quickly(within a week) and nothing was happening with the other. Both sites were indexed by this time.
When I would check my Analytics account, I noticed that I was getting most of my hits from Google image search results. I then took a look at my webmaster account keyword search results, and found that almost all of my pages in the serps were ranking from the images search results and not the actual pages of my site.
I had done one thing very differently between these 2 sites. The site that was getting traffic results had 5 separate images with alt tags describing a different keyword for each page. For the other site, I had just created an image "bar" composed of the same 5 images, but it was all on 1 jpeg. I never put any alt tags on that one and every page was using the same jpeg.
I have never really gave image alt tags that much consideration until this point, however it is now part of my growing arsenal of SEO techniques. My advice to anyone who is putting up a new site is to take advantage of this very effective method. I think the reason why image search results are so effective is that there is less competition with images at this point. Where as there are many more web pages that are optimized for specific keywords than images, it much easier to rank with keywords on images.
If you want to get your new site ranking as quickly as possible make sure that you have at least a few images with your keywords in the alt tags on every page. It is also important to make sure that the image is related to the keyword, otherwise
people will be less likely to click on your image in the serps. For example if your keyword is "cowboy boots" make sure that the image is of a pair of cowboy boots and not of fishing boots, this is very important.
It is very easy to get free images. Just do a search for your keyword and find as many different sites that have images. You can right click and "save image as" of in some cases you can simply hit 'Print Screen" button that will save the whole page. You can then past this image to your default "paint" program in windows, crop it and re-save.
Hopefully this will add a little more traffic to your new or existing site.
