Holiday home advertising is quite a competitive area these days. It therefore requires a lot of creativity from your side. Every smallest opportunity should be employed and made work towards the goal of letting your home.

Did you know you can attract visitors to your holiday home site using Google Images? Google Image Search that is. This has proven to be the source of high numbers of visitors for several home owners. Not many of these visitors would turn into guests, but even one real guest out of many visitors is worth the effort.

How does it work? Go to Google Image Search and look up “italy pool villa”. See the results? One of these pictures could be your Italy pool villa picture, attracting potential guests to your personal rental site.

In order for your images to appear in the search results you need to do a few things. First and most important, image filenames should say exactly and precisely what is shown on the picture, that is:

italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg

instead of 2369878.jpg, which tells nothing to a search engine. italy-villa-001.jpg isn’t good enough either because it does not include the details. Best to be precise and include any details in the filename.

Next important bit is specifying picture description in the alt and title attributes of the img tag. As below:

<img src="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg"
alt="Italy pool villa front"
title="Italy pool villa front"
/>

Width and height attributes are always good to include (with width being a little more important than height). It is a good practice and Google appreciates good practices. So the final img tag will look like this:

<img src="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg"
width="200" height="200"
alt="Italy pool villa front"
title="Italy pool villa front"
/>

In case you link to images with anchor tag (using “<a>…</a>” that is) use the detailed description phrase as link text:

<a href="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg">
Italy pool villa front view
</a>

At last make sure your images are accessible by Google. If there is a restriction at all, it usually exists in robots.txt file (or less often in .htaccess file).

That’s all for now. With Google Image Search you can significantly increase the number of visitors to your personal rental website so this small effort is worth it. Have fun with your holiday home advertising!