This guest post was written by Herbert of Digital Media Break, where he writes about the latest digital technology. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I’ve always loved WordPress Hacks for the practical advice they offer, a recent example of which would be changing Wordpress Permalinks to be more SEO-friendly. Thus, I guess you can say I was inspired to talk about my own experiences with SEO. I’ll explicitly say this right now - I’m no qualified SEO expert, and the stuff I’m about to offer you isn’t going to work 100% of the time. I pulled off many of my traffic spikes by choosing the right images for my posts. With almost every post, I try to include relevant images. Some are screenshots that I’ve created myself, but most are images I take from other places on the web. I have personally discovered that the images that bring in the most traffic are usually already found on the first page of Google Images and are perfectly timed.

What’s so great about using images as opposed to worded listings?

Let’s think - why the heck would you want to use images to draw people to your site in contrast to worded listings? Firstly, every blog author out there would be thinking to target words that the chances of one particular blogger (us, in this case) making it to the front page is slim to none. Also, in many cases, there are much bigger sites and blogs that target the same niche that we happen to be in which have higher PageRanks and incoming backlinks, making the chances for us to appear on the first page even slimmer. Secondly, Wordpress makes it soooo easy to optimize your images for search engines that it’d be impossible for you to not try out.

Alright - what do I have to do?

Firstly, resolve to add maybe around 2-3 images for every post you make from now on. I’m not going to lie - this isn’t a one-image thing that you can nail, but rather like all SEO, it is a process and good habit that you can commit to. Those 2-3 images could be from a variety of search engines I suppose, but I’ve only given Google a try. Search for a picture of whatever you happen to be writing a post about, then try to select images from the first page on Google Image results, and copy the URL of the image and paste it right into Wordpress’ Insert Image tool. Yep - it’s fine to do that, but you have to remember to give credit (I do this in italicized text right below my image).Whoops, a special thanks to David Robertson for pointing it out, it’s actually not fine to use just any picture on Google Images - you have to ask for the author’s permission or use an image that’s not copyrighted (when in doubt, use Yotophoto or SXC.hu). Speaking of credit, this is where most people make the mistake when it comes to using images effectively. When inputting image options, be sure to actually input an image description in the “Image Description” field. As an amateur, I used to input the source URL into the description. As you can figure, I didn’t get any hits at all from those images. The image description is actually the text that will appear on the search listing (surprise - well it was for me!). For example, if you are using a Final Fantasy XIII image, I suggest using “Final Fantasy XIII” or “Final Fantasy XIII Character” as the description instead of a credit “Source:http://blahblahblah.com/image.jpeg”, which I suggest relocating underneath the picture. A little blurb about timing - when Microsoft was bidding for Yahoo!, I had written a series of posts tackling the subject. Sensing that this would make for great SEO, I used my cunning to input Yahoo!’s logo into my posts (to be honest, it was dumb luck that time). The next morning, I was shocked to see hits flooding into my blog via that link - wow, I had learned the power of image SEO. I recently ended up writing about how Sony turned their fortunes with the PS3 around, and fitted in various games I thought would end up fixing their fortunes. Thus, I found a picture of Final Fantasy XIII, and wow - tons of hits from that one. I believe that was my most successful one ever, actually.

Of course, the hits continued for a few days, but after the Yahoo! buzz and Final Fantasy XIII hype cooled, I didn’t receive many more hits.

A grain of salt..

Is there any particular reason why the images aren’t always targeted? Yep - and here’s why: from firsthand experience, when was the last time you Googled an image - and actually ended up looking at the site material? You can’t remember, right? Neither could I. Thus lies the weakness in image SEO - the traffic-to-reader conversion is very low. I’m sure that of the thousand visitors I had received, a couple would have stopped and read some of my other material, and I’m grateful that they would do that. As a relatively new blogger in the blogosphere (a mere year!), I really don’t have as much traffic as other blogs such as Engadget, Gizmodo, and Hack Wordpress, so I found image SEO to be a Godsend to me. If you’re looking for ways to get more traffic, image SEO is a great way to add to statistics. But, the last thing you expected up my sleeve was…

A little trick to counter that grain of salt

Of course, I had to figure out a little solution to this grain of salt thing. After all, I couldn’t leave you hanging there, could I? I remembered the last time I stopped to look at a site for a random image, it had a huge header at the top with the text “If you came from Google Images, read this!” I then ended up spending a few minutes to glance at that bottom frame - I never actually returned, but they had me for a few moments there. This is a minor landing page strategy, and might not be embraced by all in the blogosphere, as it does take away from the quality of your original post. I don’t know about you, but usually I don’t have the time to change it because I am either already working on another post or because the spike is over by the time I notice (a couple of days later, usually).

Conclusion

Image SEO is a great way to draw spikes of traffic to your blog, and if you’re good at it, the same people might end up coming twice on different image results and as a result, stop to read your blog. Look at it this way - even though the traffic-to-reader conversion rate might be a bit smaller than usual, at least you’re getting an extra couple of readers. And all it took was finding someone else’s image and some luck (now that I put it that way, it sounds easy, right?). Either way, if you want to give it a try, do it over a period of time - say, a month or so. That gives you around thirty (on average) posts with 2-3 images, some bound to be quality ones. That gives you around 60-90 images out there in Google Images - I believe that at least one of them will end up drawing huge amounts of traffic. How about you? Have you ever experienced a spike in traffic due to your simple image SEO? Or are you feeling a bit skeptical? I welcome everyone to comment - I’m looking for constructive criticism, but also for discussions (please, no flaming).

Edit: Check out this followup post by Herbert Lui: Copyrighted Images and Ideal Solutions.

This guest post was written by John of The WordPress Expert, where he writes about WordPress tips, services, themes, plugins, and more.  If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

The links importer allows you to import links from an OPML file. In previous versions of WordPress, the links importer was located under the Blogroll section. However, with the admin menu redesign in WordPress 2.5, the links importer isn’t even on the menu anymore!

WordPress 2.5 still has a links importer, but you have to go through a few extra steps to get to it:

1. Login to your WordPress admin
2. Click “Write”
3. Click “Link”
4. Look under the “Related” section on the right
5. Click “Import Links”

From there you can use the link importer like you would in WordPress 2.3.

Funny that the links importer still uses the term “Blogroll,” even though it’s been changed to “Links” in other parts of the administration.

If you don’t have a lot of coding knowledge, you probably find that you use widgets a lot for your sidebar content.  I know many bloggers have come to rely on widgets and now WordPress 2.5 has changed some things.

If you would like to learn how to use widgets in WordPress 2.5+, I recommend you check out the WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide over at WordPress Max.  He does a good job of getting you used to the new look and feel of the new WordPress widgets system.

I know this is soooo 2007, but this post is just a quick note to let you know that I finally got around to creating a Hack WordPress group on Facebook.   If you are a Facebook user and you’d like to join, you can join the group here.

Also, if you are interested in adding me as a Facebook friend, you can add me as a friend here.  Now, back to writing WordPress posts!

Sometimes creating a page within WordPress can be frustrating because it reformats the post and will sometimes break links or cause things not to display correctly. It can also be difficult to display videos or buttons within a page if you use the rich text editor built into WordPress.

One thing I typically do in these situations is to create a custom page template for certain pages where I need more control over how it displays. One example of this is my advertising page which was created using this method. I wanted to use Paypal buttons for each type of advertisement, and I wasn’t able to do this within the rich text editor that WordPress offers.

So, here is what you need to do. As a quick note, you will need some very basic HTML coding knowledge to write your page by hand, and you will want to make a backup of your theme before attempting this for the first time.

What I did was make a copy of the page.php file within my theme. That is because WordPress uses the page.php file when creating your themes pages. Rename the copy whatever you want, as long as it isn’t already in use (I just went with advertise.php in my situation). Now you will need to name the PHP file. Once that is done, go to the middle of the PHP file you’ve created and delete out the content code, which usually looks something like this:

<?php the_content(__('[Read more]‘));?>

This code might vary a little based upon the theme you are using, so it may not appear exactly like this. Now, you’ll want to paste the text/code you want to use on your custom page. Once you’ve got it how you want it, you’ll want to upload it to your site.

The next thing you need to do is to create a new page in your WordPress dashboard like you normally would. Once you’ve created a title, leave the rich text editor blank and go to the Page Template drop-down box in the right menu. Locate the named page you created earlier in the drop-down menu and select it. Now publish your page.

You’re done! Go check your site to see how it looks and make adjustments as needed.

Hopefully I explained this well enough. If you have any questions, please post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them, or will update the post accordingly.