This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate 

If you have a real estate website and want to attract buyers, you will probably have visitors from outside your area. I have attracted many buyers to my Austin Real Estate website and I have yet to sell a home to a local who found me on the internet.  Most visitors are from outside of Austin and most of these are actually from outside Texas.

So one thing I have done in order for people understand Austin was to create several photo albums on my site.  If you want to do this, take your own photos – respect intellectual property rights and never use anyone else’s photos without permission.

When you load photos, make sure to add appropriate alt image text.  This is the text that shows up when you hover a mouse over a photo on a web page (if the alt text exists).  Search engines can recognize that an image is on a web page, but can’t tell what it is.  Alt text gives the search engines an idea of what the image is showing.  The other important thing about alt image text is that it gets your keywords on the page.

Another thing you can do is upload photos to Flickr.com.  When you upload a photo, create a good title using appropriate keywords.  Write a good description using keywords and use appropriate tags.   If you do this well, you can optimize the images to be found for your search terms.  You can even point to a page on your website using html with the link embedded in appropriate anchor text. 

The links from Flickr are nofollow now, but that’s not a problem.  I doubt there would have been much link juice.  However, if your images are good and get found, you may get clickthroughs to your site and that drives traffic.  Click to see one of the Lake Travis photos  I just posted.  You will see the title, tag, description and embedded link back to my website.  By the way, if you click on my Lake Travis Photos link, look around a while.  The Lake Travis area doesn’t look anything like what people expect Texas to be like.

One thing I noticed is that if you use html to embed an address in anchor text, Flickr sometimes does something strange when you save the description.  It replaces the http with a #.  You need to go in and edit that and save again in order for the link to work.  Otherwise, anyone clicking the link just stays on that photo on Flickr. 

After your images have been on your website and Flickr for a while, some should be picked up by Google Images.  The pages the images are on will show your web address, but it won’t be a live link.  However, if someone clicks on an image, it sends the visitor to your website – more traffic.  

So get out and take some photographs and get to work!