This is a sly traffic idea I got from my Kentucky cohort Garrett French. Garrett writes for WebProWorld.com.

Garrett and others in the search engine optimization forum noticed a large number of visits from people using either Google’s image search:

http://www.google.com/imghp

or Yahoo’s:

http://search.yahoo.com/images

The basic idea is this: Some people—likely many—use the image search rather than a strict word search to find websites, products and other information they are interested in.

Who would this benefit? There are several likely possibilities:

1. Site owners who sell physical products

This could be a huge help if you have trouble “topping” the search engines for your best terms. People who are shopping for tangible products are more likely to use pictures.

If you sell physical products, you need to do this now.

2. Sites which are “graphics heavy”

If you sell pictures or use many graphic images to represent the content on your site, you can get solid traffic from image searches. For example, a current events site might dramatically increase traffic by optimizing its current events images.

3. Sites which are Personality Driven

If your site is about a particular person or is a “vanity” site, you can increase your traffic by optimizing pictures of the personality—including their name and industry.

4. Tutorial Sites

If you have instructional materials, optimizing your “step-by-step” graphics can get you multiple listings for your best topics. If your tutorial site focuses on help with a particular piece of equipment or software, labeling your images with that name will associate your site with that product.

5. Regional Sites

If your site is a regional portal site, having images optimized to local search terms can be very compelling. If your site offers “Smokey Mountain Cabins”, labeling a picture as “smokey-mountain-cabin.jpg” is going to be better than “cabin.jpg”. By labeling each individual picture for that cabin like this: “smokey-mountain-cabin-living-room.jpg” will also help get more traffic and exposure.

6. Any site wanting better search rankings

By optimizing the graphics on your own pages (see below) you will likely increase the overall ranking of your page at Google. So, even if you don’t fit the criteria above, you will still want to optimize your graphics in order to improve your overall search rankings.

If you have a web site name, make sure you have a logo as an image which will display that name. You can get a free one custom made for you here (saves you $35+):

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/graphics

You will also want to read about image optimization. You can get the latest scoop here:

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=101562

Optimizing your images is simple and could be highly profitable. Put it to work today and you might just be whistling your way to the bank tomorrow.