- So Nealey - now I have this, you know, great new food blog,
and I'm taking all these delicious looking pictures
of food and restaurants,
but how do I make sure that my content actually gets seen?
- Yeah, there are so many different ways
you can go about that, but we're actually going to cover
how to actually optimize your images for web and SEO
here on The Journey.
All right, fun facts with Nealey time,
did you know that images are the second most popular way
to search after keywords?
- No, but that makes sense.
I mean, people buy with their eyes, right?
- Absolutely, so leveraging the power of images
with your content is crucial.
And that's why if you want to really make
your business stand out and be noticed,
you have to leverage the power of images with your content.
So there's a lot that goes into it
and I'm not going to do all the work for you.
- Come on, please, help a girl out.
- All right, I'll at least help you.
I'll take you through your own website
and show you at home a quick demo
of how to optimize your images for web and SEO.
- Perfect, Let's do it.
- Cool, compromise.
All right, Alex so let's check out some of the images
on your website, so where do you go and upload your images?
- So I normally go to where it says media.
- [Nealey] Okay, so let's check out some of the content
that you've uploaded.
All right, so all burgers.
I dig it.
- [Alex] Nothing wrong with that.
- So let's check out one of these images.
Cool, so I'm noticing some good things
and noticing some not so good things.
Let's dive into this little bit.
- Okay.
- Alright, so we'll start with a good.
Start with the positive, right?
So I do see here you have some of what's called
"Alternative Text."
Now when Google or other search engines crawl your site,
it can't actually see this delicious burger.
All it sees is that it says "image".
It doesn't know what to do with that.
That's where that alternative text comes in,
so this one you put awesome burgers which is good,
it's descriptive, shows exactly what it is.
But I don't see you have it on any of your other images.
So you definitely want to write some type of description
of what that is, that way it gets indexed by search engines
because like we said before,
it is the second most popular way to search.
- Okay, so every image gets its own alternative text.
- Yeah and you really want to describe it too.
The more descriptive, the better.
This also helps for visually impaired people
that are on your site that have screen readers.
So if they're on your site, it'll have delicious burger,
it'll have this or it'll have that,
versus just going and saying image, is not very helpful.
You got to keep the site successful to.
Moving on to title, your titles aren't bad.
I've seen worse, I've seen the ones that are like
screenshot dash this date dash blah,
again that's not really helpful,
you want to be as descriptive as possible.
- [Alex] Okay.
- [Nealey] So this one says beef dash blur dash bread
and then some numbers.
- How do I make it better?
- So we can probably just get rid of the numbers.
Again it has to be descriptive of what the image
is all about, so beef dash blur dash bread, that one's fine.
You want to have those dashes in there,
'cause that's what's going to show up in the address bar.
- [Alex] Okay.
- It's also something that Google
kind of takes a look at, as well.
And then WordPress saves in real time,
so as soon as I clicked off of that it saves.
So you kind of have the same trend here,
blur dash buns dash burger, those numbers,
just get rid of the numbers.
All right, the next thing you really want to look at
are the captions of the image themselves.
The captions are one of the most read parts of a website,
so having something there again, as descriptive as possible.
Now if you got this image elsewhere,
usually caption has the source of where you got that image.
These are your photos and since you're Alex eats food,
so it's yours there, and then description, same thing.
As descriptive as possible, the more descriptive
the more keywords you can add to your website's images,
the better you are going to be in search engines.
- [Alex] So what would be a good example for a caption here.
- literally just really describe it.
Juicy, delicious burger.
I can't type today
I really can't type today.
With tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, and Dijon mustard, sure.
So it's a pretty solid caption,
and I really cannot type today.
- Let's add burger in there too.
- Oh yeah, maybe I guess.
Burger, there we go.
Nope, not there.
Let's put it right here.
I'm struggling today.
I'm just hungry, it's about that time.
- [Alex] (laughs) A mustard burger.
- Juicy delicious mustard, all right.
All right now with this it's not really
optimizing it for SEO, but it is optimizing it
for your website itself.
Now what you don't want to do is have an image
that's like 5000 with by 5000 height.
It's way too large, my screen is definitely not that big.
You want to keep them condensed.
If they are pretty big, you can resize them on a computer
and re upload them.
You can actually resize directly in WordPress
by going to edit image, and then right over here
there's new dimension, you can literally just type,
say I want this to be 800 width,
it will automatically constrain it down to by 533.
Click scale, and then It'll shrink my image
so it's not as large.
You also use the plugin WP Smush, smush.
And it'll basically do what exactly what that is,
it's going to smush your images so they're not as large
because also the faster your website is,
the better search results you'll come up with,
whether it's text based search results
or image search results.
- Good to know, perfect.
Well thanks so much Nealey,
hopefully my great burger pictures
will get seen a lot more now.
- Yeah.
- Be sure to let us know in the comments below
what kind of videos you want to see in the future.
- Yeah, and while you're there,
make sure you smash that like button as always.
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