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Is the Weight worth the Freight
I wrote in July 2007 about “Photos an Overlooked Part of Your Real Estate Blog Traffic” In short when you host your own photos and reference them in posts the photos and the URL to those photos get indexed by the search engines. They store those links and people doing image searches will find your site when they click on those images.
The Door To Quicker Load Times
I’ve been reading a lot lately about what you can do to speed up your blog load time and keep the site from blotting with images. The main suggestion is letting Flickr host those images and put the links to the images in your posts rather than host the images yourself.
We use Yahoo’s servers and bandwidth and not our own when those images are displayed.
However, we also give up the link back to our site when those images are found in the image indexes of the search engines.
Is there value in the traffic coming from those image searches vs the decrease in load time and size of your home page in kilobytes?
Testing A Theory in The Lab on Images and Load Times
For the past week the images I’m using in my Tucson Real Estate blog posts have been hosted on my Flickr account. I don’t have any way of knowing if it is decreasing the load time yet. But i should have some idea of the homepage file size in a few days as I see it and other post pages sizes returned in Google searches.
I’ve been one to like hosting my own images. I’m also in favor of making those pages/posts load as fast as possible.
What do you think? Do you host your own images? Do you link to images from a Flickr account or some other photo sharing source?
I’ve learned a few things about putting Flickr images in posts and getting the captions to appear around them. I also learned about putting images on Flickr but keeping them out of the photo stream and onto blog posts. More on that this weekend.
What I’m really interested in is how you are handling images in your blog posts.
Post Tags: Flickr , google searches , image indexes , photos , tucson-real-estate
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9 responses so far ↓
1 Ismail (5 comments.) // Sep 13, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I don’t run a blog anymore, but when I did and I remember posting this before “I got more than 25% of my traffic from images” which is something I can’t easily give up.
As for optimizing them for seo, the only thing I do is adding the description and the title, sometimes I even change the file name as I have noticed that Google image results also count the file name as well.
Ismail
2 Rob (1 comments.) // Sep 13, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I strongly suggest hosting images on your blog and using them for SEO purposes. Make sure the alt tag includes your keyword, and I link the image back to the article it’s in. I get a lot of image traffic to my site, and it boosts regular search traffic, too.
3 Petersburg VA Real Estate (1 comments.) // Sep 14, 2008 at 10:57 am
Dave, I would think that hosting an image on a different site such as Flickr would actually slightly increase your load time because it necessitates a call to a second server. Your images still have to load, no matter where they are hosted, so hosting them elsewhere does absolutely nothing to reduce the weight of your page. Weight of page = weight of the HTML page + weight of the images–no matter where they are hosted.
4 Dave Smith (556 comments.) // Sep 14, 2008 at 11:03 am
Mike (Petersburg), Studies have actually shown it does reduce your load time because you now have two servers which are splitting the read time between them so the load times are reduced.
Flickr no doubt has faster and more reliable I/O and bandwidth than a local hosting package on a shared server.
This is why I asked the question is the weight worth the freight.
5 Ki Gray (3 comments.) // Sep 14, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I host my own images. I try and avoid large images. If the filesize is too large I throw them in photoshop and reduce them. On the other hand there is some decent traffic for images out there but I wonder how useful it is as far as conversion. I assume there are more people looking for pictures of houses for projects or whatnot than are in the market to buy a house. It would be interesting to look at image traffic and see how those visitors travel through a website.
6 Ned Carey (5 comments.) // Sep 21, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I am a relatively new blogger. I host my own images in part because I never thought of doing it another way. I have reduced the size of some images to help loading time. I am starting to use the captions for the copyrights on the photos.
What do others use for photos, sources and how handle copyrights.? I almost never see a copyright attribution for photos.
Ned Careys last blog post..A Cool New Tool
7 Sam With Traffic Is King (1 comments.) // Sep 23, 2008 at 12:39 am
You know what Dave? I think it depends on the subject matter. If you look at any entertainment blog that has pictures of celebrities, models, etc, they get a ton of traffic because people search for those images. So it would be to your benefit to have your pictures on your own server. The downside would be the bandwidth issues. I have a site dedicated to ipods and I host my own images with that site. A good 60% of my traffic is from image search because people want to see what the latest ipods and iphones look like, especially with accessories. I think if your making money from your blog, you almost have to optimize your images for search and host them yourself. But if you have subject matter that would have a low volume for image search, flickr is not a bad idea but then it wouldn’t hurt to host them either because the traffic won’t be as much. I guess its just a matter of preference.
Sam With Traffic Is Kings last blog post..This Free Service Is Like Google Analytics On HGH Steriods
8 Dylan Darling (1 comments.) // Sep 29, 2008 at 10:21 am
I typically host my images on my blog, or my website. While this topic is up for debate, one thing that should be noted is USE PROFESSIONAL QUALITY PHOTOS! I’ve seen some great blogs/websites with horrible photos. Customers like to see professional grade photos.
9 Dave Smith (556 comments.) // Sep 29, 2008 at 10:28 am
Dylan,
I agree and talk about the quality of images here often at the Lab. I’ve been using flickr hosting for my images now for about a month. For me the jury is still out.
I’m leaning now toward going back to hosting my own.
I think for Google it does matter if the images are stored indexed by then and it counts for something to have those images indexed.
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