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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.
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.
