How to become a millionaire from Image Search Secrets
Image Search secrets revealed – 100% Free Video course. Earn millions from home.
How to become a millionaire from Image Search Secrets
01GImageSEO-Intro
Hello and congratulations on getting access to this video course, on How To Rank On Google Image Search.
So this is Video #1, which is the Introduction, and of course getting started. So before we get started I want to kind of briefly go over a few things to make sure that we are on the same page. So first things first, I want to start with mindset. The goal here is not to game the system at all, because Google Image Search is very different than other searches like YouTube and the regular SERPs. And the reason why is because you are going to have an image that’s going to show up on the Google Image Search, and with that in mind, people are going to click on the ones that best fits that keyword. So you want to make sure that you have a high quality image that attracts a certain type of person. Now, whenever you sell a product, you have to think ok, so if I attract a certain type of person via an image, then from that point what is their next step? Are they going to do more research, or how are you going to funnel then into your funnel essentially. So before you can do any of that, you really need to put yourself in your prospect shoes. They all have different reasons for buying from you, so your goal is to try to understand what they are. Can you do that?
So now what I want to do is talk about the video course itself, kind of give you a quick overview of the course itself. And of course, this is Video #1. Video #2 is the 7 Steps Checklist, and the premise of Videos #3, #4, #5, #6, #7 and #8, we are going to dive deeper into those 7. And these are 7 different variables that are very crucial and very important in trying to get your images ranked on the Google Image Search. Now, this is not an exact 100% guarantee system, but this is just based on what we have seen over the years. Video #3 is Wrapping Content. Essentially what that means is the content that surrounds the image, that’s on the top, that’s after it, before and after and all that. The content there is crucial and it really needs to describe the image in a better light, so that you attract the right person. So that way Google knows exactly what that image is about. Video #4, we are going to talk about File Format and why that it's important. Video #5, we will talk about Image Size, and something that you are going to notice is depending on the niche, different sizes can change. And you may notice that Google likes specific image sizes. So depending on your niche and depending on your research, which I will show you step by step, you are going to need to figure out how to resize them. Video #6, we are going to talk about File Compression, or in other words how to compress your files from, let's say for example 1MB and decrease it by 50%, which is 500KB. So the goal here is to decrease or compress the size of the image without losing too much of the quality of the image, so that it can run faster when your visitors actually visit your site. Video #7, we will talk about File Names, why that’s important. Video #8, we will talk about ALT Tags, which appear in the source code of your website. And that also tells Google what your image is all about. So there are a lot of different variables here and a lot of times most people just focus simply on Video #8, which is the ALT tag. And as you can see, it's much more than that. And of course last but not least, once you have learned all of these steps, we can talk about how to automate the process, how to speed things up with pieces of software. Now, I don’t want you to skip to Video #9 straight away, because if you don’t understand Video 1-8, then you are going to miss the point. And if things change, then you won’t be as successful. So make sure you go through this course on a step-by-step process.
And of course you are going to need to have access to your product or service, you are going to have to get an idea of who your customers are, what they want, how that specific image is going to attract them to make the next decision, and take the next step. So really think along as we go through this course, how your images will communicate to your customers, but how your customers will take the next step, and the next step after that, and the next step after that. So with that said let’s move on to
02GImageSEO-Checklist
Hello and welcome back, this is Video #2, and we are going to talk about the 7 image automization checklist. So from here and out we are going to dive into some practical application. What I am going to be doing in the future videos is really reverse engineering things in Google Image Search, so that you have a better idea of why things are the way they are, and you have a better mental picture, a visual picture of what’s happening.
So what I am going to do now is simply go through the checklist of the 7 items. I am going to briefly talk about each one, but I am not really going to dive into it, that’s the purpose of the videos after that. So the first one is wrapping content. So to give you an example, I went to Google.com, I typed in pizza recipe, and what I want to do is look at the images here, and what I am trying to look for is why the images here are at the very top. And that might change from niche to niche. So let’s just go ahead and click on these right here, I am going to open this one up and open this one up in a new tab. And I am going to go ahead and click on visit. Now, whenever we do this, in the reverse engineering process, I want you to load the blog that the image is located on, and then of course look for the image. So the image is here, so the first item of the checklist is wrapping content. In other words, the content that is surrounding this image is crucial, and we will talk about why it's crucial, what your content needs to look like, what it needs to be, what kind of keywords you should use surrounding this image. That’s the first one. Then of course the second one is file format conversation, meaning the image right here, what type of file format is it, is it the right kind, should we turn it into a different format, what different formats are available out there, why are they important and all that. The next one on the list, the #3, is image resizing. So another question you might have is how big should image be? Should it be 1000x1000, should it be a smaller size, what should that be? So we will talk more about that in that video, and we will do a little bit of reverse engineering in each one of these videos, so that you have a better visual picture of why things are the way they are. And then of course the next one after that is file compression. Believe it or not, what we found over the years is the reason why most websites don’t load or don’t rank really well is because their images just take a lot of space. So in this case, we want to take a look at is a size too big and how can we compress that without losing too much quality and get ranked high for that image. The next one on the checklist is the file name and the page URL. So if we right click here, on the image itself, and sometimes it won’t let us, but in this case if we right click and we open the image in a new tab, the name of the file of the image is crucial, is very important. And I am going to show you why in that video, and it's not, you know, most images are just a bunch of gibberish. If that is a gibberish, what do we do in that case, how do we make it optimized. The next one after that is the ALT tag. The ALT is what tell Google what the image is all about. But that’s just one variable out of this whole checklist. And then of course last but not least, after I talk about each one of these checklist items, I want to show you how to automate the process. But before we talk about how to automate the process, I want to teach you how to do each step manually, because if you don’t understand each step and the process behind it, and you jump to the automated process, then what’s that is going to do is is just going to [tame] things and you are not going to be as effective. So we want to make sure that you are effective, you get the rankings that you are trying to achieve, and go from there.
Alright, so with that said, let's move on to the next video.
03GImageSEO-Wrapping
Hello and welcome to Video #3, and we are going to talk about text that is wrapping the image.
Now, this is very crucial, so I am going to break it down as simple as I can, but the best way to explain it is to by showing you what it looks like. So I am at Google, I typed in the keyword roast beef recipe, and let's just take a look at some pages and get an idea of why Google might be ranking them higher than everybody else. So let's just take a look at the top images here. So let's go ahead and click this one here, we are going to open that in a new tab. I am going to do the same thing for this one and this one. So we will do the top three. So this one was the first one, it says The BEST Oven Roast Beef. So we are going to click on visit. Now, by clicking on visit, we are going to be sent to the page where the image has come from, and that will give us a better idea of what we are dealing with. So we can see that the image is definitely at the top, it says the best oven roast beef is tender, flavorable and perfect every time. Sunday roast has been a tradition in our family for years. So ok, wrapping text means the text that is surrounding the image. It does not necessarily need to wrap around it, but what is surrounding it. So obviously before it, we see roast beef, oven roast beef, we can see is flavorable, perfect, classic recipe, roast Sunday. So Google has a massive database of keywords, and it's very very smart, that it can figure out if the keywords that surround your image are legitimate or trying to game the system. So if it's going to read the text, we can see that the text in the beginning has already kind of set the stage for what the image is going to be. It's going to be an oven roast beef.
Now, if we scroll down we can see there is an ad and it says how do you cook a roast in the oven. Don’t be intimidated by oven roast, it couldn’t be easier, there are few tricks to getting that buttery melt in your mouth roast beef you love. So Google knows just by reading this, ok, it has something to do with cooking roast beef in the oven, something about mouth that taste good. Bring the meet to room temperature - it knows in that case probably that it's a recipe of some sort. So we can see these keywords like hot oil, sear on all sides, roasting pan, Dutch oven - all these keywords relate. And when they combine them together in their own algorithm, they can figure out ok, this is indeed a roast beef recipe. So there is an image here, people are clicking on the image, that’s the reason why it's ranked up high. Now, let's take a look at another one here, just click on visit, and I believe this one was the second image. We can see that the image is surrounded by text. And what’s interesting to me is the format here is very similar to all the other ones. It's probably because it's posted on a platform, such as simplyrecipes.com. So we got the text here, classic roast beef recipe, using rump roast, round roast, sirloin, low heat. See what I am doing? I am looking for keywords that Google is looking for. It says my mother knows a thing or two about cooking beef, so cooking beef, cuts, cuts, local corner butcher, butcher, beef, pork, lamb, meat, counter. So this is what I recomend that you do in your own niche, is to type in the keyword that you are looking to rank on or the keywords that you are trying to rank on, and look at what your competitors are doing, look at the images that are at the top and try to get an idea of what keywords they are doing, what jargon they are using, so that you can get an idea of how to kind of mimic it yourself. Don’t copy it necessarily, but put it in your own words, but get an idea of how things are worked out. So we can definitely see that these two blog posts have content and text wrapped around the image, that are related.
So we will do the same thing here, we will click on Visit, we will go to the webpage, read it here. We can see again, there is text in the beginning about roast beef recipe, the exact keyword. And this image actually is not only on the image SERPs, but it's also on the main as well. So we can see that the difference here is they have not only text, but they also have a video. Now, I will say a little tip is that if you put a video, especially a YouTube video on your page, that will get your page ranked higher. Google loves to see its own properties on your page. So we can see, we read around it, this is definitely how to cook a roast beef.
Ok. So now that you see why the text that is surrounding the image is so crucial and so important, beyond that how are you going to get keywords? So that’s the next question, is where you are going to get these keywords. One way is simply go to Google, type in roast beef recipe, and just see what you get. So right here is what we call Google suggested keywords. These are keywords that drop down - the reason why they drop down is because they are highly searched keywords. So in other words, in order to appear in the dropdown, they have to be highly demanded search keyword terms. So in other words, thousands and thousands of people are literally entering these in. So this gives us an idea of the different topics that we could potentially write on. So we got roast beef slow cooker, over, for dinner, crock pot. We could also include these keywords in the wrapping text as well. Now, if you click that and you go to the main Google SERPs right here, and you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you are going to see a bunch of keywords here. Now, we can get more specific, like roast beef gravy recipe, scroll down all the way down to the bottom, and see what kind of keywords they give us. And if they fit, I highly recommend that you include them in the text that is wrapping the image. And try to keep it simple, but try to make it interesting, because at the end of the day, you are trying to appeal to the human being that is reading this. And if they like it they stay on your page longer and all the variables match up that we are talking about, and the human engagement matches up, then your images are more likely to rank higher.
04GImageSEO-Resize
Hello and welcome back, this Video #5, and we are going to talk about image resizing.
Now, the reason why you are going to want to resize your images is if they are way too big. Now, this isn’t necessarily proven by the Google algorithm, but if you go to google.com, you type in a keyword that you want, you click on the images, and you scroll down here – so this is the sponsored area, this is not what we are going to look at, but if we keep scrolling down you will see that Google tells you the exact sizes in pixels. So for this niche we have 600x400, 1000x1000, 1000,630. So they are decent sized images. So 800x800. Now, some niches, we’ve noticed that they are small, like 600x600 or 500x500. So what I recommend is always look at your niche, it could be different, and then take a look at what the sizes are. And if you can kind of find somewhat of a pattern, then try to choose an image of that size. If you images obviously are smaller that’s fine, if they are really really big often times images, you may not realize, but a lot of them are very very big. So what you want to do is you want to decrease the size as much as possible, simply because looking at all the other variables, you want to make your images fast. And to make them fast you want to decrease the sizes.
Now, how do you do that, if they have already been uploaded? Well if you have WordPress size, then if that’s the case there are plugins out there that will help you resize the image. So after you’ve done kind of some brief intelligence and research, then you can install these WordPress plugins. So one of them that we recommend is called Resize Image After Upload. So these are specifically for images that you’ve already uploaded. And what this will do is it automatically resizes images with certain maximum heights and widths. So this plugin is quite useful. Another one is called Imsanity, that’s Imsanity, and as you can see it automatically resizes huge image uploads down to a size that is more reasonable for display in browser. So remember, Google is trying to cater to different types of people with different types of display browsers, meaning some have mobile phones, some have desktops, some have Macs, some have Windows computers, some have very different size monitors. So trying to display different sizes to appeal to different people. And that said, we want to make sure that the image loads as fast as we can. A lot of times when you download images from royalty free stock footage libraries, a lot of times they are big, like 2000 or sometimes 5000x5000. So you need to make sure that you are consistently resizing them.
Now, if you are not using WordPress, and you would prefer to do this manually, you can do something like use Photoshop. So we’ve got Photoshop here, and I am going to pull it up here. So this is one way of doing it, and you can actually easily resize an image by opening it up, as you can see here, clicking on image and image size. So we can see by default that this image is about 900x599. Now, we’ve done our research, we found that the top ones in that particular niche are about 600 or even 500, we want to type 500 and click ok. And then of course we can save the file as it is and upload it to our website.
So that’s another way of doing, but personally I would recommend just using those WordPress plugins, because they are a lot easier and you don’t have to fiddle with this manually. But this is one way to decrease the size of your images.
05GImageSEO-Conversion
Hello and welcome to Video #5, and in this video we are going to talk about image conversion.
So why would you want to convert your images from one type to another? Well, as far as what we’ve been talking about, how to make the images faster, load quicker, so that the experience for your visitors are going to be a lot better.
So there are different types of images out there. We’ve got PNGs, we’ve got JPGs, we’ve got GIF files and we have all sorts of other files as well. JPGs are a lot of times very compressed, they kind of lose their quality, but at the same time they are compressed, they load quicker. So it really comes down to how much of the image are you willing to lose, are you willing to make it just a little bit fuzzy, but not too fuzzy, so that you will be able to make the image load faster. There are several different options that you can take. You can either, if in this case you are using a WordPress site, you can convert your PNG files to JPGs. So there are different plugins out there that you can use. One of them, which is PNG to JPG, and another one that we’ve tested, and that we really like is called Kraken.io. Kraken.io is very efficiently, but yet it does cost a little bit of money to use, but it takes your images and you can tell it convert it to JPG. And what it will do is it will try to take, lets say for example a 1MB file and then decrease as much as possible, down to maybe 50%. And that’s a huge amount of speed, if you think about it, if you have a 1000 images, multiple that by 500KB – that’s amount of files that you could potentially save and speed things up for your viewers. So as you see here, it support JPG, PNG and GIF, including animated GIFs, but sometimes converting the images from one to another will actually speed things up. To give you a better view on this, I want to head on over to Photoshop and we discussed and used this example in the previous video, but I want to use it again. But let’s say for example I wanted to convert this image from one file type to another image file type. So if I go to the top and click on File, and then we do Export, and Save As For Web, and we click on that. This is a really good example of the type of files we are dealing with, but also the amount and the size. So we can see by default this image here that we resized earlier is about 488KB. Now, how can we get that down. So what Photoshop will do is it will give you 4 different examples. So we can see kind of how it loses the quality here. So we can see this one has lost a good amount of quality, but it’s 12 KB. So this will not be an issues if we have tons and tons of images. You really have to think about it, if you are in the photography business and your images are very very important, then you may want to think about not using these images and maybe something like this. But if you are not in the photography business and your images are important, but they are not as important to your visitors, then you might want to use these.
So this is PNG right here. Now, let’s say for example we want to change them to JPGs. So these are JPGs here. Let’s say that I am going to change this one from PNG to a JPG. So we will do JPG. Now, with the JPG there is a range. You can either tell it to convert to a lower quality, medium quality, high, very high, to maximum. So if we do low, you can see it’s gone here. If we do medium, it’s gotten little better, and if we do high the quality looks about the same compared to this one, but the difference is this is 400KB, versus this one is about 20KB. So that’s a huge, huge reduction if you think about it.
Now, you could change from PNG to GIF file, but I personally would not recommended that, unless you are dealing with some sort of animation. But as you can see, it’s pumped up from 20KB to 72KB. So I just wanted to show you this as an example, of what happens when you change the file type. Now, JPGs are usually very friendly in terms of websites, so that’s just something to bear in mind. So if you click on Save, we export it, and we upload it, will save a good amount of space just by changing the file type. And thereby getting it to load quicker and faster, giving our viewers a better experience.
06GImageSEO-FileCompress
Hello and welcome to Video #6, and we are going to talk about file compression and why that is important.
If you’ve noticed lately, Google has put a big push on websites loading as fast as they can, and the reason why is because Google wants the best experience for their buyers or their customers, essentially people who search on the internet, that is their customers. So what their customers want? They want sites that load really fast, because they want information that loads really fast. So they are going to look at how fast your website loads, and more importantly, how fast your images load. And through test we’ve realized that they put a lot of emphasis on images, and you will see in just a second. So in this example, I used the previous example with the Google keyword term, roast beef recipe, and let’s just go ahead and click images. So what I want to do in this case is do a quick test to show you different speeds, different images and why they might be ranked higher than others, and why that is the case and how to fix the issue.
So let’s just take a look at the images that are on the very top website. So we saw this image here was also on the main website. So let’s just go ahead and click this here, and this is the image, so we will click Visit, so that we can visit that particular page. And what we are going to do here is we are going to analyze this page. So what I am going to do is grab the URL at the top here, I am going to copy that, and then next I am going to go to the page speed insights. And this is essentially a speed tester that Google is providing you for free, and all you have to do is simply go to developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed. Now, to get here, to kind of ease your way, is simply go to google.com and type in Page speed insights. And all you have to do is simply enter the page URL here and then click on analyze. And what this is going to do is it’s going to analyze that particular page and give you an idea of the speed, the rating that it gives you, and then of course how to improve the rating. Now, you got to realize what it’s doing is it’s analyzing the whole webpage, not just the image itself, but what this will do is it will give you an idea of what can be improved. So we can see that screen images, if we improve that, it will save us about 5 seconds. So even a site like this, with the images ranked high, there is still improvement. So there is still hope, even if you are not 100%.
So what you want to do is you want to compress your images, and as you can imagine, that’s going to be a very tedious process if you do it one by one, manually. So we’ve actually tested many different plugins out there, different WordPress plugins, and there are other systems as well that can help you if you simply upload the images and you get them optimized. Kraken.io is one of the sites that we tested, that yielded really good results. And what it did was we put it on a website that had about 2000 images, so you can image that will take a long time. We were able to install the WordPress plugin and compress those 2000 images within less then a few hours. Now, Kraken.io has many different plans. They have a free version, which can help you up to a 100MB, just to test to see if it works. Now, if you are not using WordPress it also has a web interface where you can simply upload the images and get them compressed download them and then get them onto your website. But what this does, as you can see, is it optimizes your images. So imagine you have an image that’s 100 images that are 1MB each. So that’s about a 100MB download, and you definitely want to squeeze that down as much as you can. So what Kraken.io will do is it will analyze the image and it will try to squeeze it down maybe 50%, from 1MB to 500KB or even 200KB further, as much as possible, without losing the quality of your image. And that’s something that I know that many of you are probably concerned about, it’s whether the image will be reduced, whether it will become fuzzy, because we know that images are crucial, we know that they are the first impression that our visitors see. And believe it or not, this will actually help you without really decreasing those images. So you can get an idea here that Kraken.io – you can see their original image and what the improved image look like, and this example here, it says 51% reduction, and you can see that the image looks pretty much the same. Now, why is that? Well, the image usually contains more information besides just what it looks like, so what it does is it removes that information to try and decrease the file size. So as you can imagine, Google is trying to make sure that your page loads fast, and what we found with majority of tests is – the #1 issue is images, images are way too big and by compressing them you will get your pages loading faster, rank higher, and higher through the SERPs.
07GImageSEOU-FileNameRL
Hello and welcome back, this if Video #7, and in this specific video we are going to talk about file names, why it’s important, and we will talk about page URL as well.
Now, the best way to show this is to again reverse engineer what Google ranks as popular for specific keyword terms, and then taking a look at them and getting an idea of what you need to do in your own website. So here I am at google.com, and I went ahead and types in 30 minute chicken soup recipe, just because I am hungry for some chicken soup. So as someone who is interested in this particular area, I’ve types it in, I’ve clicked on the images, and I am looking for something that really appeals to my eye. So images search is not just about trying to game the system, but really trying to appeal to that specific person who is typing in that keyword. So it needs to be presentable, it can’t be something is trash essentially. So as I am going through here, I clicked on this one because this one actually caught my eye. It’s a big bowl of soup, a chicken soup, it’s got a ton of vegetables in it, so I am going to go ahead and click this. Now, I want you to specifically watch carefully as I am doing this. So for example, I am looking at the image here and the next step is to click visit. So we are going to visit this person’s website, and we are going to look for that specific image. So obviously there is going to be many images, we don’t know if it’s going to be the first one, the second one or what. So let’s just go ahead and scroll down, click X there. So we go that there, we minimize this to about a 100. So we see it right away that this is definitely the first page. That’s interesting. Now, what I like to do is regardless of what browser you are using, whether it’s Google Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer, what you want to do is you want to right click on that image, and then you want to click on open image in a new tab. And the reason why we want to do this is this. So we can see here that this is the file name, it says chickennoodlesoup-5.jpg. So Google is going to read the file name, so they can see that it is chicken soup, noodle soup, and if you think about that’s what I typed in, chicken soup, so that’s relevant, right? And it’s going to look at the URL as well. So it’s not just going to look at the file name, but it’s going to look at the category name and all of that. We actually going to take a look at the page it’s on, and the – of course, like we talked about earlier, the words that surround it.
Now, speaking of files names, if your file name, let’s say for example, in this case chicken noodle soup, you main keyword is chicken noodle soup, but you have a file name that says something like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 -!.jpg. If that’s the case, then that’s a big mistake there. And all you have to do is simply change the file name, link it and that’s it. So in terms of file names or page URLs, that’s all you have to do. So we can ovals see that this is the third highest ranking image for that keyword term, and Google sees this as relevant. Now, if we go back to the search that we did earlier, and let’s just scroll all the way down to the bottom somewhere. And just see kind of an idea as to why maybe they are all the way at the bottom. Now, another reason why a lot of these are at the top is because people are clicking on them, and that tells Google that they are relevant. So a lot of these may not, as we can see, we scroll down further and further down, they don’t look like the normal chicken noodle soup. And that’s because people are interacting with it. So that’s why I said you can’t really game the system, because this is all about human engagement and interaction. Now this one here says 30 minutes chicken soup, and that’s a YouTube video, so we are going to go – keep going down. Tomato chicken soup, this one here. So lets just click this. Now, you can see the images are really big. Remember, Google likes a certain type of image. So if we click this, we click visit, and we find the image, let’s just see what happens here, so we can see Sandra’s Alaska Recipes, we scroll down, image is little big, the text that’s wrapping it may not really relate. See that? So the file name is way too long, the page URL is way too long, and that’s another thing, when I talk about page URL and file name, they are all together, clumped together, but your page URL, you want to make sure that it’s short. You don’t want to have it too long, so we can see that the file name here is Chicken [present] to the noodle soup. Cheddarcornbread.jpeg.
So the problem with this is that there is all these %2 signs and all that. What you need to do is if you have spaces use hyphen. So it should look like this, like a hyphen. Don’t use underscores, just use hyphens to kind of signify spaces. So it should be as simple as chicken-noodle-soup.jpg. So as you can see here, this is reverse engineering this, that this is all the way at the bottom, this is probably number 100 or more, and it’s all the way at the bottom and it’s got a long page URL and very long, very confusing file name. So you can get an idea now as to what you need to do. So let’s just scroll back up here,
Now, in terms of how to change the file name if let’s say you’ve already uploaded it, and the file name is already there, how do you go about changing it? So to do that, there are several ways, it really depends on what website you are using. If you are using HTML, that’s not WordPress, then you will need to change that file name on your computer. Whether it’s Mac or a Windows computer, you simply right click that, click rename, and rename it as such. Now, if you are using something like WordPress, you can simply go – usually you can go into the image editor, and you can change the name there, or sometimes, a lot of times, what I recommend is installing a WordPress plugin such as Yoast, Yoast SEO. That’s yoast.com/wordpress. And if you just go here and you click on Yoast SEO, install that, you will be good to go. And it will allow you to essentially put ALT tags for the images and you can also, within WordPress edit your file names.
So hopefully that gives you a better idea of why it’s very very important to essentially change your file names, to make sure that they are the keywords that you are trying to rank on. Plus, all the other variables that we talked about, like the text that wraps around it should relate to that keyword.
08GImageSEO-ALT
So ALT tags are tags that are associated with an image, and they are located in the code, that tells Google or other search engines what your image is all about. So like we talked about in the previous video, Google and other search engines will look at your file name, but they will also look at your ALT tag. So it looks at a variety of variables, and that’s why we have the checklist here, to make sure that they all add up.
So very similarly to the file name, the ALT tag is a keyword that would be found in the source code. Now, to give you a better idea, what I am going to do here is use a very similar example that we used in the previous video, with the chicken noodle soup. So what I like to do to reverse engineer it is simply go to Google, type in the keyword that you want, find the image, which we clicked on that, and then we landed here. And then remember, we right clicked and we opened the image in a new tab. The reason why I do this for this specific task is to get an idea of what the file name is. So what I want to do is simply copy that. Now, if you are using WordPress, which this lady here is definitely using WordPress – WordPress can sometimes take your image and then of course create many different sizes and formats, so that depending on the device that you are using, it will show that image. So that shows Google that they are indeed different platform friendly, meaning different mobile phones, different computers, different operating systems, different computer monitor sizes. So we can see that here. What we want to do is we want to right click and then click on view page source. Now, I just want to prepare you and say don’t be scared. You are going to see a lot of code that may look unfamiliar to you, but don’t freak out. It’s actually lot simpler as it looks. I am just showing this to you so that you have a better idea of how it works, and why it works.
So we are going to click on view page source, and we are going to get this. I went ahead and did it, because it takes a few seconds, that way you don’t have to wait. So what we are going to do now is try to find that image. So the reason why I looked at the file name was so that I could get the file name, and now I am going to do a search. So I am using a Windows computer, I am going to do a search for that file name. So there it is. So I am going to zoom in here, so that you can see it a little bit better. So now let me do a search for that file, and we can see it there. Now, like I said, WordPress it’s going to create several different sizes, so we see that here. But if we scroll up, and I am going to make this a little bit smaller, like that. So if we take a look at, the image tag is always going to start with this sign, img, space class equals how you want it aligned, and the image source, which is this. And then of course you have the ALT tag. So this is telling Google ok, how big it is, you know, how it’s aligned in the content and the content that surrounds it. So in other words, when Google comes to your site, they are not really looking at your site, they are really looking at the code. So this is what they are looking at. Now, we see ALT equals Easy 30 Minute Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup – Classic, comforting, and tastes just like grandma made, but way easier and faster. !! This soup is AMAZING and it will be your new favorite recipe.
Now, what’s funny about this is they are using the keyword inside it, but it’s really a description. So in hindsight 2020 this looks like more natural. It doesn’t look keyword stuffy or like they are trying to game the system. It’s simply something that somebody would write right off the bet. We can see the image size and all that. Now, that’s the ALT tag, so 30 Minute Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup. And that was in the beginning, and you want to make sure that they keyword is in the beginning. Now, if we do this again, let’s just go back over here and reverse engineer again, and this time I am going to click the second one. So click Visit, I am going to keep an eye on that image, I believe that’s this one here. Let’s just take a look – yeah. Bread on top, butter on the right, here we go. So that’s the image that we are dealing with and of course I am going to right click Open image in a new tab, to kind of get an idea of what we are dealing with. Now, obviously this one is long, but it says 30 minute chicken noodle soup. So, remember how we talked about when you are naming your files, that if you have a space to make sure that you use hyphens? Thyme did that, 30-minute-chicken-noodle-soup. And of course they put a bunch of information that just tells Google what it is, like the size and all that. But they could have kept this simple and they would have gotten the exact same.
Now, if we go back here, we want to figure out what the ALT tag is, right? So click No Thanks, right click, View page source, and we know the image is at the very top. So what I am going to long, since this is so long, I am just going to copy the first part of it, close this down and let’s take a look. So we can see that this is here. Now this is actually part of the metadata, so let’s scroll down further. Ok. So if they were our competitor, we can get an idea, we can see that they are definitely using, it looks to be like a Yoast SEO plugin or some sort of SEO plugin that is creating all this metadata. And metadata essentially is data that the search engines use. So this one is a little bit more difficult to see. Let see, ALT…
Ok, so after looking for few more seconds, I found it here, this is here. So if you are thinking well, this looks too complicating, just try another image, go to a different image, get an idea. And I am really just showing you this as a way to reverse engineer it, to give you a better idea of how it works, you don’t have to necessarily do this yourself. But this is a good way to figure out what you competitors are doing. So we can see here, it says IMG, and let me zoom in just a little bit. And we can see IMG SRC – SRC means source, the image source equals this, this is the file name, and then the ALT equals 30 minute chicken noodle soup. And that’s what we typed in – 30 minute chicken soup recipes. So it’s not exact, but it’s very very similar. And that’s why all these different variables that are surrounding the image, like the recipe and all that – those actually will help you rank on many many different keywords, versus just one. So I am very sure that this specific site is ranked, on not just one, but many – 10, 20, 30 different keywords that are related. So that’s why ALT tags are so important, so you can see here the file name is here, the ALT tag is here, and those two work hand in hand. Now, depending on what platform you are using, if you are using HTML, you are going to have to edit the ALT tag yourself, but if you are using something like WordPress, it’s very easy, as long as you are using something like Yoast. All you have to do is click on the image, and with Yoast it will give you the image details like this, and it will say alternate text, alternative text is what ALT tag means, and you enter that here. So this, in this case will be the 30 minute chicken noodle soup.
And of course you could put dash if you want. Not, bear in mind that not only is this going to be search engine friendly, but it’s also going to be handicapped friendly as well. So folks who are maybe blind, and they are using special software to allow them to hear what is going on on the website. If you have an ALT tag or ALT Tags, it will tell them what is this image going to look. So you could be more descriptive, essentially/
So hopefully that gives you a better idea on why the ALT tag is important and how to edit within your site.
09GImageSEO-Automation
Ok, so I just want to say congratulations on finishing this course. Now that you have learned all the basics and how to manually do everything step by step, we are going to talk about automation here. The reason why I wanted to show you how to manually do it was so that you can fully understand the reasoning behind it and how to do it yourself. Now that you understand that, you can use tools. A lot of people make the big mistake beforehand to actually use tools first, and by doing that you aren’t really aware of why things worked the way they do. So if things change, you don’t realize why they changed. So now that you have kind of a better insight into how things work step by step, how to it manually, even how to outsource it if that’s the case in the future.
Let's talk about tools that will actually help you automate the process in terms of finding and searching all through your website, figure out perhaps what file names need to be changed, what images need ALT tags, and all the different little variables that we talked about in this course. So the first tool that’s really good is called Screaming Frog, and you can get there by going to screamingfrog.co.uk. Now if you go here, basically what this tool is is a website crawler that you can download onto your computer, and what it will do is it will scan. For example, we want to figure out, out of all of our website, which images have ALT tags and which images don’t, or which images have ALT tags, but their ALT tags are just very generic and not very targeted. So basically what we are trying to figure out is how can we make very small tweaks with a powerful punch, if that makes sense. So go to the site, you can see that it's a website crawler, and we are specifically interested in the search engine automization right here, so go ahead and click that. And you can get an idea of what it offers essentially. But we are specifically interested in the SEO Spider right here. So let’s just go ahead and click that. So there is a free version and there is a paid version. I recommend that you download the free version, to make sure that it actually works on your computer. But the reality is that the paid version is really where it's at. And yes, it does cost money, so does the other tools that we are going to talk about. In fact, this one is actually cheaper. But it will really give you a better view of what’s going on in your website, versus you going through and trying to figure out what is actually ALT tag, what is targeted, what is not, and all that. It is very time consuming and tedious process, as you saw in the previous videos.
So as you can see, click on Download, and they actually have for Windows. Now if you are using a different operating system, just be aware that if you are using a Mac it works here, and if you are using Linux, it works here as well. So basically it works for every single popular operating systems, Windows, Mac and Linux. So as you can see here, it finds broken links, which is crucial, but that’s not really what we are trying to figure out here. We are really doing image automization, but really what we like is, if you scroll down, the Visualise Site Architecture kind of gives you a map of what your site looks like. It always crawls Java script websites, but beyond that it will actually tell you whether the image has an ALT tag, what the file names are and it will tell you a lot more detail in terms of trying to get those images search engine friendly, get them into the Google Search Engine very very easily. So I can guarantee you, this is something that your competitors are most likely not using. So in terms of image automization and other SEO audits, this would be the tool to go to.
Now, there are other tools like ahrefs.com, and this is something that we’ve used before. And this tool is a little bit different, it's more extensive, it's lot more expensive, but it's extensive in the sense that it allows you to not only get a better idea of what's going on in your site, but how it ranks in the real world. See, Screaming Frog, all it does is mainly - it crawls your site to give you an idea of what’s happening on the inside. Ahrefs on the other hand will give you an idea of what’s happening not only on the inside, but on the outside, how you rank against competitors, where you rank on the Google SERPs, what rank it is, what content is the most popular. And that gives you a better idea of essentially how to take your business and how to take your website to the next step, if that makes sense. So as you can see here, it gives you an idea of the backlinks, who is referring to you, what kind of organic traffic you are getting and all that.
Another great tool is called MOZ, moz.com. MOZ is very similar to ahrefs, in the sense that it will tell you what’s going on your business, but it will give you a better picture of what’s happening beyond that as well. So what I would say is start with Screaming Frog, if your intention is the image automization process. And once you are done with that, then go beyond that and take it to the next level, and use either ahrefs.com or moz.com. Either or is good, but the main one is Screamingfrom.co.uk.
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