Once you have your domain all set up and you’re ready to start driving traffic to your website, it’s important to make a decision regarding image hosting. Depending on where you host your domain name, you may be offered image-hosting options within your own server. However, there also are a variety of other image hosting options, such as hosting your images on a third party image site and linking them to your domain through cloud computing. These third party image sites are often free to set up accounts, and include such companies as Photo Stream and Flickr. There are many different ways that a person can ensure they are getting the best traffic potential through their images, between optimizing them for SEO and also ensuring they are being hosted on the best possible site in order to increase traffic.
One of the best ways for a user to maximize the traffic to their website through images is to upload and host their images on Flickr. Flickr is an image-hosting network that allows users to upload public photos to share with friends, family and anyone else who might be interested. Not only can a user maximize their bandwidth on their domain by using a third party site like Flickr, but utilizing Flickr can also help a person direct traffic to their website through the use of SEO tactics. Photos uploaded to Flickr can be tagged with keywords, so they will come up on an image search on a search engine such as Google. For instance, if your website is a blog about traveling through Europe, you can upload photos from your trip to Flickr and tag them with keywords such as “European vacation,” “London at night” or “Paris, France.” Utilizing searchable key phrases and tagging photos with those phrases will allow people searching for those terms to come across your website. There are some downsides to Flickr, however, including that you cannot tag individual people in your photographs and also that it is difficult to make some photos private, if need be.
Photo Stream is another image application, available to Mac users. Apple has released Photo Stream to allow users who take a photo on their iPhone, for example, to automatically store that photo on all devices linked to their iCloud network. For instance, a photo taken on an iPhone would be stored on an iPod, an iPad and a laptop Mac computer if all those devices were linked. A major benefit to this is that it is simple for users to save. However, there is still an additional step involved because the photos are stored on the device itself, and must be uploaded to the domain or to a third party image hosting site.
Utilizing a third party image hosting site, such as Flickr, is also useful when your domain is utilizing cloud computing. For instance, if your domain is on Rackspace Hosting, you would be able to link your account to your Flickr or Photo Stream accounts. This way it allows you to maximize your bandwidth while still having easy access to all of your different accounts and information.
When attempting to get the most traffic to your website, it’s important to consider maximizing all aspects of the website for SEO. While this includes images, it is also important that a person who is operating a website gets the most potential out of the domain itself. By having a quality name for your domain, you can also ensure more web traffic. A short URL that is easy to remember, and highly associated with your website’s content, will make it easy for users to find in search engines and also remember so that they can return to your website on a regular basis. Between a strong domain name and SEO maximized images, your website is sure to get the traffic you need in order to be a success on the web.
