Saumil’s Babble Belt

First of all, a very happy 60th Independence day (belated) to all my fellow Indian readers.

I had no particular intentions of writing a post on the 15th of August this year, because I was more interested in being a part of the celebrations. It was after a gap of 3 years that I was in India for the Independence day and I wanted to make the most of it! I had a decent time yesterday, although it was no where close to what we used to do when we were at school. I also watched a brilliantly made film called “Chak de India” which added in its own sweet way to the flavour of Independence day celebrations.

I felt like writing a post on the movie itself (yea, it’s that good!) but I’ll point you towards a couple of links and focus on this post rather - Chak De Review by Poorna Shashank (a.k.a Mind Warrior) and my pal Rajiv Dingra

Now that I am done with the intro to this post, let me get to the meat. I had decided that I’ll not open my laptop on the 15th and will actually enjoy my holiday. I had the complete day planned (at least till the evening) and stuck to my promise! However, it was only today morning when I opened my Outlook, did I realise what had happened on Independence day. To start with I had a complete barrage of mails from FeedBlitz indicating that someone has opted in to receive updates from my blog. While I was being happy, I kept wondering what could it be!!

Then I saw a mail from my friend Kedar and here is what he had to say,

Wish u a very happy independence day. Look what I found!

Kedar

… and here is the screenshot,

Apparently, Google had marked “Indian Independence Day” as their search term for their Doodle on India’s 60th Independence day. And my image results from my site were placed at the very top, getting a lot of click throughs!!

The irony here is that the images are from a post that I made on 15th August last year, when I was in London!

Although I have had a lot of #1 rankings for a series of niche sites that I have, none of them have ever got such windfall traffic. I had always heard stories about people making it to the first page of Digg and getting such windfall traffic, but it was good to experience the same!

To give you an idea of the amount of traffic I received, here is a screenshot,

You can easily see the huge spike on the 14th and 15th!

Not just that, I also received a warning from my web host saying they would have to suspend my account if such traffic continued! To be frank, I was more than glad to see that warning and wouldn’t mind a dozen other similar warnings :)

This also brings me to an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization and how images can surprisingly help you get amazing amounts of traffic. Having practised SEO comprehensively, I was always particular in using the “alt” tags (and Title tags at times!) whenever I used images in my posts. It is a small secret that I haven’t shared largely, except with the attendees of my seminars and my close pals, that my blog has always received more than 35% of its traffic from images.

Most bloggers will never take the extra effort to look for good pictures, or take screen shots and paste them in their blogs. This is where smart bloggers can achieve an edge. Over the one and half year I was pretty convinced on the usage of SEO optimized images in my blog posts, but yesterday’s event has only made me doubly confident!

For those of you who’d be more interested in learning how to optimize their images, can take a look at this post from the guys at Market Position.

Well, then that’s it for now! Smart bloggers can start using images intelligently and start driving more traffic to their sites. With Big G’s new ‘mashed’ search results you can only get more lucky!

Before I end, yet another irony, the image that was ranking at the very top of Google’s search results was apparently taken down when my blog was attacked earlier this year by a Syrian hacker. It has since been replaced with a new image. However, after yesterday’s happening I had to post the original image for those of you who want it. Between, the image is a beautiful wallpaper done by the guys at SantaBanta.com and you can find more wallpapers from Indian beauties to India Independence on their site (just a small plug, Santa and Banta, without your wallpaper I’d never get all that traffic!)

Till next time …. Vande Matram!

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