And they’re both free!

With Wordpress, you can schedule blogs to become public, months in advance.  The only blog I manage is TexasSurfers.com, and I admit I write blogs months before they roll out. Whenever I find something interesting that pertains to Christmas, I write a blog on it, and schedule that blog to show up on or near Christmas day. I write blogs for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the birthday of the blog, Valentine’s Day, anything I can think of. Sometimes I just click through surfing related websites and find things to blog about, and write each blog but schedule them a week apart. Sometimes blogs are scheduled months in advance. This keeps my website fresh with new content, and if I get sick, go on vacation, or just don’t feel like writing, I never have to worry about my blog having new, fresh content for my readers.

But having new, fresh content is just half of what I need in order to maintain a professional website. I need to be sure that when people come to TexasSurfers.com, they immediately see the newest content. Here’s how I do it, and you can do this too, for free:

There’s a picture on the main page of the website. If you go to TexasSurfers.com, you’ll see this large picture. When I schedule a blog to go public on a certain day, I also schedule a picture to be the first picture that shows up on that particular day. After so many seconds, the picture changes to a random picture. But the first one is the most important because it’s the first one people see when they come to the website. Let’s say I’m scheduling a blog to come out on Christmas day. I’ll also login to my Stoked Pictures account and schedule a related picture to show up on Christmas day. This picture will have some text on it that talks about my newest blog; if you click on the picture, it takes you to this blog.

With this simple setup, people know immediately what my newest content is and how to find it. The day after Christmas, that picture won’t show up first anymore, unless I want it to. I could have it show up first for up to 10 days with Stoked Pictures.  When another blog rolls out, I schedule a related picture to again show up first. I always want my website visitors to see the picture that pertains to my newest content.

When I first setup TexasSurfers.com, a program with this capability didn’t exist and I didn’t know how to program, which meant I was just stuck not having it. After a year of managing the website, I decided to learn how to write programs, and I created Stoked Pictures, which is the program that does everything I’m talking about.

There’s another feature I decided to add to Stoked Pictures: the most popular pictures can be shown first. This means that while randomly showing your pictures, if some pictures are clicked on more often than others, those pictures will be shown more often than other pictures. This “popularity” feature (which can be turned off or on) increases the click-through rate of your website. This means your bounce rate will go down, which is a good thing. People will be more likely to stay on your website and continue reading your content because they’re shown content that other people found the most interesting.

In addition, I wanted the pictures to be search engine (SEO) friendly. I used to run an SEO company so I know the value of optimized pictures and web pages. The pictures shown through Stoked Pictures can have alt text, a caption, and you control whether their links open in the current window or in a new window. You can also control how many seconds each picture is shown, giving you full control of your website.

The biggest benefit of Stoked Pictures is that your website will be seen as a professional website that constantly has new, fresh content for people to read. As opposed to websites that are never updated and just get stale, people will see your website as a website worth bookmarking and returning to in the near future. Of course, it’s up to you to write and schedule new content and pictures. Stoked Pictures makes it easy for you to let website visitors know that your website is a valuable resource worth returning to.

Stoked Pictures is SEO optimized, meaning it’s ready for search engines to read the picture content and increase your traffic by doing so. The one blog I manage, TexasSurfers.com, gets a LOT of traffic via images that show up in Google Image results. They show up because I optimize them correctly, and I built Stoked Pictures to optimize pictures the same way.

When you add pictures to Stoked Pictures, you can add alternate text, which is the text that shows up if the picture can’t show up (for example, because of a bad or slow internet connection). The really good news is that alt (alternate) text shows up for search engines no matter what. Even if people see the picture on your web page, search engines like Google will still read the alt text. This helps search engines accurately file your pictures for their search results. This feature is build into Stoked Pictures.

You can also insert captions with your pictures, which goes even further toward telling search engines how to file your pictures in their search results. The more descriptive you are in your alt and caption text, the more often search engines will show your pictures in their image results. And believe me, from experience, optimized pictures equal traffic.

A feature that is not included in Stoked Pictures, but that you need to be aware of, is how to effectively name your pictures. Your pictures should be named in a descriptive way before you even upload them into Stoked Pictures. For example, I have a blog that talks about what to do if you’re involved in a sudden shark attack. It gets a lot of hits from the picture that’s on the page, and that picture is named shark-attack.gif. It’s alt text is “Shark Attack!”  When people go to Google and look for a picture of a shark attack, they find this picture. You can’t rename pictures after they’re uploaded into Stoked Pictures, so please be sure to name them properly before uploading them.

Alt text, captions, and properly named pictures lead to SEO optimized pictures that will bring more traffic to your website.