Many tasks have forever been altered with the advent of the Internet. Letters were replaced by e-mails, telephone use now competes with programs such as Skype, and even printed photos were replaced in our digital era. Photo sharing sites have become extremely popular because pictures can be shared instantly with family members and friends all over the world.
Yet another category of savvy online marketers use photo sharing sites to enhance their site traffic and build up their online businesses. By properly adding and managing pictures on photo sharing sites, you will be able to get your website or blog in front of more people and increase your traffic.
When setting yourself up on a photo sharing site, focus on organization. Make sure that users are able to easily spot your photos. Visitors usually search within particular niches when looking for photos, and you want your relevant pictures to appear. To draw people into your images and make a better showing on site searches, create content-focused albums built around highly searched keywords.
Nobody appreciates hunting for an image and turning up dozens of poor quality or irrelevant shots. Make sure your pictures are superior in all aspects. Put yourself in their place and consider the impact such images would make on you. If you are using photo websites to attract visitors to your business, the quality of the image will define you before you have a chance to get the people to your site. Thus, it is of paramount importance to use only good quality and relevant images in order to create a favorable impression. On a similar note, make sure not to include images that are in no way related to your business. For example, unless your main site involves the swinging life of the bachelor or car care, the picture of your brand new car has no significance to the general public and hence should not be put up for public viewing.
Creating a vanity URL will increase your album visibility. A vanity URL is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or domain name that is designed to spotlight a subject that is indicated in the title of the URL. In a large number of instances this is done in order to direct attention toward a specific service, product, or, in this case, photo album.
Such vanity URLs are often made up of words that are not easily forgotten, thus separating them from basic Internet URLs. Vanity URLs help your desired audience locate you on the World Wide Web. They also assist you in standing out with Internet search engines by enhancing your ranking related to the keywords you have specified in the URL.
Examples of vanity URLs can be seen on most photo-sharing sites. They often appear with the subject located after the domain name, such as www.flikr.com/photos/wildnevadamustangs.
Participating in groups within your area of interest on the photo site is another method for finding interested potential visitors to your main site. You will find it a lot easier to attract people if you already have interests in common. For example if you are in the travel business, by joining a holiday adventure group, you can direct traffic to your site. The traffic that gets directed to your site through such efforts will consist of those interested in your topic and not just casual visitors.
Tags are another way of making your presence known. Photos that are not tagged are not likely to show up on search engine results pages. It is important to select photo tags that use relevant keywords to refine the search results and get people to your albums. Do research on the popular niche keywords which can be used in the tags.
While all the above mentioned activities are important, equally important is linking the final photographs to your main website. Your efforts will be in vain if you neglect to link up. You want your fans to head on over to your site, boost your traffic, and possibly earn you a little money.
Although photo sharing websites host thousands of albums from an equally intimidating number of photographers, it is possible to leverage those websites to work for you. Set your photos apart. Give importance to the quality of the images, your photo organization, and the searchability of each picture and album to attract viewers whom you can funnel through to your main site. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.