As we all know, creative content does the best in the social bookmarking realm. Photos seem to have a very high success rate. This could be due to the fact that they do not take long to process, they can be shared quickly, and everyone likes looking at art (I think so?). Outside of direct keyword searches, photos have historically been the #2 item searched for on the web, of the 4 Google verticals. News comes in at #3 and Videos are #4. With blended search results, news and video searches are definitely on the rise, but photo searches still dominate the web.

So, you promoted your image to a social bookmarking site, it hits the homepage, it sends a large amount of traffic, and you might even get a few links back to your site. Wow it was that simple! Well not really, getting your content to homepage of a social bookmarking site is very difficult and I will save that for another day.

Well what about all those people that now use your image in their blog posts or webpages, but don’t link to you? How do you find these juicy potential back links?

Simple you have two sources: Tineye and Google Image Search!

Tineye

Tineye is a reverse image search engine. It is amazing cause all you have to do is place the url source of your image and hit go! It does its thing and returns very accurate results of pages that have used your image.

Google Image Search

Google image search is a little bit tricker. You need to search for your image with various keywords till you see your image being used by another website.

Once you compile the list of sites using your image simple contact the owners or leave a comment if its a blog post asking for credit of the image.

I really liked your article about “…………”. I think “Say something insightful”…

BTW I noticed you used our “image name / description” in your post. “Drop link to your site that references that the image is yours”

Would it be possible to get credit for our image? A simple link back would do.

Thanks again.

Now, these website owners do not have to link back to you at all, but if you ask nicely 8 out of 10 times they will drop you a link back.

It’s that simple!

Now for a quick real life example to show you that this actually works and is worth your time.

Last year we created a “Google Bot” that hit the home page of digg. YEA!! We got a bunch of traffic and some backlinks. Fast forward 3 months later we start ranking in Google Image Search for the term google bot. I then noticed that other website were ranking as well, but with our image! So, I contacted the webmaster or dropped a few comments and bam BACKLINKS!

Today I used Tineye and found even more potential links.

So, there you go folks! Have fun Tracking Down Your Lost Link Love From Your Creative Images!

Hey remember to follow us eVisibility and me(ImNotADoctor) on Twitter! If you need any search engine marketing services you know who to call!