It’s no secret that ranking for good keywords is a difficult task now a days. Your best bet is probably generating quality content that might catch some attention (backlinks!), eventually bringing traffic to your site. I’m no SEO expert, in fact less than two years ago I didn’t know what SEO was, so I can’t give you advice on this matter. However, I can share what I’ve been experiencing this past few days regarding one of my sites and the traffic that Google Image Search brings to it.

My Experience

To me, this traffic has been pretty much useless, but I think it’s starting to change (I’m seeing some promising results as of yesterday). What have I learned from Google Image Search traffic?

• Visitors rarely stay on your site
• Hotlinking
• Traffic that does not bring conversions or benefits (no readers, no exposure, no money).

Sure, a couple of images on my site rank in the first 3 positions in google, cool, but what’s the point if I can’t see any tangible results from this. Unless I’m trying to promote my ugly face online, I really have no use for it.

To the Point

It’s not that hard to figure out. It shouldn’t be a surprise that people searching for images are really not that interested in reading your article. At least when I’m searching for a picture of Adriana Lima, I’m really not that interested in reading about her hobbies (don’t tell my wife). To add to this, Google puts your site in a frame with a “See full-size image” link. The link is sitting there to fulfill your needs: SEEING THE PICTURE without any obstacles.

Visitors don’t have to look around for the image on the page and are not exposed to your content. And that’s it, your site becomes a picture on a white background. By now, it really does not matter what site they are visiting.

But if the frame was not there, and the visitor had to stay on the page to check out the picture, they might get interested in checking other stuff out. Let’s say I’m checking out Adriana Lima’s pic, then my eye catches a picture of Giselle Bundchen. Well, I may actually stay and check out other pics, maybe I’ll even find out what’s Giselle’s favorite color.

The solution?

Some people call it a frame buster. It’s a simple script that will avoid any attempt of putting your site in a frame, redirecting to the original location. I have been using this script for less than two days, and it’s really making a difference. Page loads from traffic generated by Google Image Search have improved by over 100%. Meaning that some visitors are now actually checking out other stuff, visiting other pages, etc. Still, there are visitors that leave immediately, but this now seems fair to me.

Just put the following script in your header:

I will report again after some time, but I expect more positive results from this change.

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It’s late at night and I’m almost ready to go to bed, when I hear that one of the guests on the Jimmy Kimmel show is the guy from MySpace, you know, the guy that when you create a myspace account instantly becomes your first friend. Well, his name, his name is Robert Paulson, and he’s the president and co-founder of MySpace. Just kidding, his name is Tom Anderson (let me know if you know who Robert Paulson is). Well, I really didn’t care about who Tom Anderson was, but I had to stay and watch. I guess one gets curious about a guy that has more than 200 million friends on his myspace page and that sold a website for 680 million dollars.

I remember that when MTV aired its first video, “Video Killed the Radio Star” in 1981, the rumor was that the radio was going to become extinct because music videos had made it obsolete, the radio stars where now on TV. Well, it’s happening again, but now the “stars” seem to be online, they just don’t look like the guys from KISS anymore.

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While driving home today I started wondering about the world oldest website. Well, as I found out, Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN (the picture shows the historic NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. It was the first web server, hypermedia browser and web editor). The address for the world’s oldest website was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which contained information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and an explanation on how to search the Web for information.

As some of you may know, the world wide web was invented in 1989 by a man named Tim Berners (developed in 1990) and his idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, this would result in having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. There are no screenshots available of the original web page and, of course, changes were made daily to the information available on it as the WWW project developed. You can find a later copy of the site (from 1992) here.

Now, do you want to now who is the world’s oldest living person? Check out Edna Parker. As of 30 November 2007, she is 114 years and 224 days old. Amazing!

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Well, the story about my jumping eyelids goes back some months now. I don’t remember exactly when it started, I just know now that it comes and goes. I do remember however that it came out of nowhere, one random day my right eyelid started going crazy. A couple of minutes later my left eye followed. It’s a very awkward feeling, as if a little vein under my eyelid started twitching. It’s not painful, it’s just really uncomfortable and it makes you stop what you are doing for a moment to think of how annoying it is.

I didn’t do anything about it for some days, thinking that eventually, it was going to go away. Then I started thinking what could be causing it, and I couldn’t think of anything that I had done differently those days. After a week of the jumping eyelid dilema, I decided to do a little research on “old pal google” to find out what the hell was going on (sometimes I’m not sure if having all this information readily available is good or bad, as it can sometimes develop into major “l could have a tumor” freak outs). To my surprise there’s even a term for it, it’s called Eyelid Myokymia. Check out the medical definition for it:

Myokymia is the spontaneous, fine fascicular contractions of muscle without muscular atrophy or weakness. Eyelid myokymia typically involves the orbicularis oculi muscle of one of the lower eyelids; occasionally, the upper eyelids also can be affected. In most cases, eyelid myokymia is benign, self-limited, and not associated with any disease…

And the causes for Myokymia according to this same article:

“The cause is unknown but may be associated with stress, fatigue, and excessive caffeine or alcohol intake“.

I’m not a big alcohol or coffee drinker, so that’s not my case, however I do suffer from insomnia every now and then (and that’s a topic in itself, maybe for another post). I do remember that around that time I was not getting enough sleep, something that is not uncommon for me. I have a three year old daughter, and sometimes the only time I have to get stuff done is at night, when everybody’s sleeping. After a week of relatively good night sleep, it finally went away. Then I forgot about it…

Yesterday, it came back again and it’s about the fourth time it happens (as I mentioned earlier, it comes and goes). I guess I’ll have to learn to live with it…Anybody out there having the same problem?

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I’ve been meaning to talk about the Language Switcher WordPress plugin for a while. It’s a plugin that could be very useful to those of you wanting to make a bilingual blog. My wife is using it at a bilingual (spanish-english) site she runs, and it works great. However, I do have to warn you that there’s some work involved in installing this plugin, but if you have decided to make a bilingual blog, then you have already decided to do the extra work. And as I said, once you set it up, it does the job nicely.

This plugin allows you to translate a post, and then have the option to select that translation from within the same post. This means that you don’t have to create two separate posts and you are in control of what your translations are going to look like, and this is what I was looking for.

“The Language Switcher WordPress plugin allows you to create a bilingual or multi-lingual blog, using WordPress. The way it works is that you write the content for your blog in multiple languages, using special tags to tell the plugin which text goes with which language…The Language Switcher plugin will then let your blog viewers choose a language for viewing your blog, and put all the text on the screen into the right language.”

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