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How Image Captions Help Our Sites Grow

There seems to be a direct influence of image captions to search growth on Screened.

By Ethan Lance  |  Feb. 16, 2011

This post is for nerds who like stats and are interested in how a nascent wiki site like Screened grows in monthly visitors.  If a site does not grow each month, it's dead.  I spend alot of time pouring over graphs and charts; noting what small changes to wiki code or what wiki task initiative had a perceivable effect on daily visits.  For example, around January we began making a concerted effort to add descriptive captions to our image galleries.  What do you think, is the  image search spike in January-February a coincidence? 
 Sept 2010 - Feb 2011 image search traffic
 Sept 2010 - Feb 2011 image search traffic
The effect wiki editors have on the site is easy to see.  We've more than tripled the amount of new visitors to Screened who reach us because they found one of our images in Google image search.  And we've more than doubled our over all visits from new users who reach us via searches on Google.

 Sept 2010 - Feb 2011 overall search traffic
 Sept 2010 - Feb 2011 overall search traffic
From what I see in google analytics, our quotes pages and images gain us the most new users.  You know what's cool about that?  Quotes and images are also the easiest way to contribute to the site.    The task queue can be found here.  In preparation for some secret upcoming editorial features, the current task initiative is "Car Chase" movies. 
4 Comments
PerryVandellon March 2, 2011 at 3:35 p.m.
Interesting... Approximately how many new users does it take each month for a website to stay successful?
Bishnaon March 2, 2011 at 5:20 p.m.
I really enjoy stats. More blog posts about stats would be very much appreciated. In addition I think i will start adding more captions to images if i can.
PatVBon March 2, 2011 at 11:16 p.m.
Man, I never get tired of seeing stats and charts. And of course, I always make sure to caption my images!
snide staff on March 3, 2011 at 11:47 a.m.
@fullmetal216 said:
" Interesting... Approximately how many new users does it take each month for a website to stay successful? "
I think around here we care about two things specifically. 
 
  1. Is the overall traffic for the web-site growing?
  2. Is the database / wiki growing.
 
Take Screened.com for example. We launched it less than a year ago and while it pales in traffic compared to Giant Bomb or Comic Vine it is absolutely destroying in the database / wiki realm. That makes us super happy and is the reason we try to support that community and provide fun editorial content. 
 
In the end I guess we believe in building communities ahead of building large web-sites. It's easy to build a large web-site and spend your time gaming SEO from google. It's extremely more difficult to build a place people want to hang out and contribute to. 
 
It's also certainly more fun for us. I don't care how big you are, who wants to build an empty, soul-less website?

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