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.