I've been blogging for a long while now, and have built and maintained several blogs. Almost all of them were pretty much entirely verbal. That's because I love writing, and just never had the time to take photos in the first place, let alone add them to posts.
Anyway, I've changed this approach greatly on one of my blogs. It's a local blog about my city called The Real Perth Blog. I write many posts about different locations in the city. And where I appropriate I include my shots of them.
I've noticed a couple of things. Firstly, people come via verbal searches for photos quite often. That is, they'll arrive via queries like "Perth arena images". They'll also come via the specific image search route from time to time.
It's usually pretty easy to get to the top of image searches for those specific local landmarks. That's because while there are numerous snaps of them up on the web, very few people are naming them accurately. So if you just label the files well, you'll appear way ahead of the vast majority of them. (I know that many bloggers recommend including alt tags with your keywords in them. But it still helps a lot simply to put them into the file name.)
The other thing I've noticed from my stats is that visitors who come looking for images do like to have a look around for others on the blog. (That is, they'll click on the "photos" and "landmarks" tags.)
This is just a hunch, but I suspect this effect is particularly pronounced for local blogs like that one I have about Perth. Nothing gives the sense of what a locality is like more than photographs, after all.
Anyway, I've changed this approach greatly on one of my blogs. It's a local blog about my city called The Real Perth Blog. I write many posts about different locations in the city. And where I appropriate I include my shots of them.
I've noticed a couple of things. Firstly, people come via verbal searches for photos quite often. That is, they'll arrive via queries like "Perth arena images". They'll also come via the specific image search route from time to time.
It's usually pretty easy to get to the top of image searches for those specific local landmarks. That's because while there are numerous snaps of them up on the web, very few people are naming them accurately. So if you just label the files well, you'll appear way ahead of the vast majority of them. (I know that many bloggers recommend including alt tags with your keywords in them. But it still helps a lot simply to put them into the file name.)
The other thing I've noticed from my stats is that visitors who come looking for images do like to have a look around for others on the blog. (That is, they'll click on the "photos" and "landmarks" tags.)
This is just a hunch, but I suspect this effect is particularly pronounced for local blogs like that one I have about Perth. Nothing gives the sense of what a locality is like more than photographs, after all.
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