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.

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.

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!

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?

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.”

Getting Over the $100 Adsense Hurdle: Talks about the process that one has to go through to get past your first hundred bucks with adsense. I read it and thought, man, this article was written for me. Very encouraging, specially if you are going through one of those phases where you feel that everything you do to monetize your site(s) is worthless.

Want to Boost Adsense Earnings? Then Start Testing: Talks about what you can try to do to increase your adsense earnings by experimenting with ad location, format and colors, and keeping track of them by using adsense channels. It’s a mini tutorial for Wordpress users as you’ll need a page that can execute PHP (however a javascript example has been included for other users).

Very useful stuff. At least for the little guy, like me…

Download is now working.

Theme: Whitey
Version: 1.1
Download: whitey.zip
Demo: Wordpress Blog Directory

Description:

- Simple, white & blue theme for OpenLD.
- Quick Search box on front page.
- “Adsense ready”.
- Top blue navigation bar.

Installation:

1. Upload the unzipped “Whitey” archive to your themes folder (openld/themes).
2. Login to your admin panel and select “themes” from the admin menu.
3. Select the “Whitey” theme.

To Include Ads: (best for 728×90 banners)

1. Open index.php
2. Paste your code after line 82:

place your ADSENSE code After this line
Paste Your Code Here
place your ADSENSE code Before this line

In support of the OpenLD project.

Some of the features of 2.3 include:

• plugin and core update notification
• built-in tags support
• faster javascript
• SEO-friendly URL redirection

“Only test the beta if you are comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously.”

Download Wordpress 2.3 Beta I here, if you feel you are up to the task.

This is also a way for me to keep track of blogs that I like or that I think provide quality content. I am constantly adding sites to the directory, so don’t be surprised if your site has already been included.

The directory itself is an open source script called OpenLD. Like Wordpress, OpenLD has a variety of independently developed plugins and extensions that add more features to the script. You should check it out if you are thinking about setting up your own link directory. The theme of this directory was designed by me to fit wp-blogger.com and is available for free download here.

Badi Jones over at seologs.com released a pluging called “Duplicate Content Cure“, that helps you get rid of this problem:

“Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.”

So, go ahead and say bye bye to your duplicate content.