421 – Small changes to your graphics can mean big traffic: Tom talks Image Optimization

Episode 421 – Image Optimization
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode four hundred twenty one is Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about image optimization. And I know that doesn't sound sexy, but I'll tell you what, this is a very simple way you can improve yourself by being found online. And this is one of the common mistakes people make on their Web sites. And it causes them to miss out on an important feature of Google called image search. I'll tell you what you have to do to easily fix that problem in just a minute. Now, I hope you didn't miss episode 420. That was Chala Dincoy. She has fielded more than 20000 pitches from vendors trying to get their products and services in the big companies. She fixes their elevator pitch and tells you what to do to approach buyers who could give you large sums of money. That was Episode 420. Of course, any time you want to find a back episode, you got to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number. Her's 420. But I guarantee you you're going to want to repeat this one episode 421 because this is really going to help you. All right. So how would you like to hear your own voice here on screen, the commute? Well, if the show has helped you out at all in your business or giving your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it because it's good of you to come and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voice mail, click on it, talk into your phone or computer and tell me how the show has helped you out.

[00:01:57] And hey, put your website in there, too, so you can get a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute. Now pick up a copy of our free ebook. I guarantee you you're going to thank me if you just implement part of what is in this book, because it has saved me millions of keystrokes, lets me grab customers that somebody else would have gotten because I get back to him faster, save me all kinds of workload. So check that out and grab yourself a copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. We sell his book for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's at screwthecommute.com/app, where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. OK, I would like you to get your wallet out and buy a scholarship to her by her tuition to my school.

[00:03:04] It's the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. Probably the world is certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. No Internet person on Earth has gone through the trouble I have to to get certified for a school. I mean, background checks and criminal checks. And most people couldn't. Most of a lot of these Internet marketers couldn't pass a criminal check. I'll tell you that. But anyway, it's hard core skills that I have been living and breathing by and making a fortune with for 27 years now since the commercial Internet started. And we've got students making money a few months into the class, into the course, because every business on Earth needs these skills. So they can either have their own business, they can sell their own stuff or both, and they won't be coming home and living in your basement if they're working at Starbucks for minimum wage. All right. So this is not only good for young people, it's a great legacy gift, I'll tell you that, for your grandchildren, nephews, nieces and your own kids. But if you have your own business, some of the things listen to this, some of the things you pay for, for your online presence are costing you up to a hundred times what they should cost if you knew what you were doing. And they're done by people that could care less about you.

[00:04:32] They're probably done by people that you're one of 100 clients and you get the bare minimum to shut you up and you don't really get the benefit of it. But if you knew what you were doing, you can do it yourself or you can hire a high school kid even to implement a lot of this stuff. So check out my school at IMTCVA.org. And a little later I'll tell you how you can get a scholarship to the school that you can either use yourself or gift to somebody if you're in my mentor program.

[00:05:00] Let's get to the main event. Now, most of the information I'm telling you about today about image optimization comes straight from the virtual mouth of Google. All right. Now, as hated as Google is, in some ways, they are happy to tell you pretty much exactly what to do to please them. If you do what they say, you have a much greater chance of being found and what I say today does not negate what I have been preaching for the past five years, and that is I quit depending on search engine positioning over five years ago, maybe more. I can't really remember. But at the same time, I quit worrying about search engine positioning. I still have taught my mentees and anybody else who'll listen that there's no reason to quit doing the simple basics of search engine optimization if it doesn't take you too much time and effort or any money.

[00:05:59] So why smack Google in the face and tell them to go away if you can easily incorporate simple things to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot with Google and all the other search engines, which pretty much follow Google's lead? Now, the first thing you or your webmaster should do is join Google's search console, it doesn't cost anything. Just Google it and it'll it'll come right up. Google will look at your site and pretty much tell you what they don't like about it. I mean, so so you can take the steps to fix it. Today's episode is not about all the things you can do with the search console. I just want you to know about it now. Today, we're going to hone in on one specific aspect of pleasing search engines and in this case, in particular, Google image search. Let's talk about why you should pay attention to Google image search. And and like I just said, any search engine would have similar results when it comes to images. Now, the reason. This should be on your radar is because many people use Google image search instead of the main search. Well, why is this important to you? The first reason is that image search is far less crowded than the main Google search, so your pages with images can rank higher, easier. The second reason is that most pitiful webmasters just want to get paid to slap up a Web site for people that don't really know any better.

[00:07:43] And as long as the images look nice, they don't have to do the things that are in this episode. I would contend most webmasters don't know or care about what I'm trying to cover here, but you should. It's your Web site. They just want to get paid so they can get on to the next sucker. That doesn't know any better. So with a less crowded environment that still has many millions and millions of users a day and with most other websites doing images all wrong, you have a great opportunity with a little extra effort to get more free traffic off Google and, of course, the other search engines. And again, I'm not advocating you go crazy paying SEO people. I mean, I want you to learn paid traffic so you'll get results faster. That's what we concentrate on now. But I want you to know about these things so you can make simple changes to get whatever free traffic you can. Anyway, let's talk about Google image search and what it does when someone searches in the image search. Google presents preview images for the searches to browse and Google gives the attribution of where the image came from. That would be you and the headline from the page where the image is. Now, people on this can expand the preview to find more about your page. There is a button that they can click to visit your page directly.

[00:09:18] Now, I remember a few years back you used to be able to click on the image to take you to the Web page where the image was, but when when Google changed this to webmasters were screaming out of the worlds, come and do it and oh, my God, we'll lose all this traffic. Well, as far as I can see, making you click the button instead of on the picture hasn't made the sky falling. It still can get a ton of traffic. This from this. Now we're talking about Google image search right now, but as a bonus, images can end up in the regular search results, too, and they're usually right near the top of the results. By doing a good job at what I'm discussing here, you could pass up very powerful sites on the first page of Google within almost a number one placement. Now, that is powerful. Now, first, I'm going to give you the simple things that you can do to help yourself, and then I'll give you a little more advanced stuff you can learn to do or give to a competent webmaster. If you can assist, if you can find ones that are now. So you could even go further with this. But the simple stuff is pretty simple. All right, let's start right at your cell phone. Most cell phones will take gorgeous pictures that you might want to put on your site.

[00:10:41] The problem is the default setting on most cell phones is set to high quality, high resolution pictures. Well, so what's wrong with that? We want high quality pictures on her site, don't we? Wow, yeah, we sure do. But most people don't have a full understanding of how it works. Websites and e-books that are to be read on screen are considered low resolution. High resolution is needed if you're printing a brochure or a postcard or something that's going to be printed, high resolution pictures have a large file size, really large. So here's what happens when you put a high resolution picture on your website. Well, since the screen is low resolution, the picture doesn't look any better. It just takes longer to load. So all this stuff I teach you today would be negated by your page taking too long to load, which is an absolute kiss of death to the search engines. They have to load instantly. And plus, your visitors feel the same way to. So everybody's going to hate you. The search engines and your visitors, if you put a high resolution picture and you're going to get pushed to the to the end of the search results and your visitor is going to leave because they won't wait. Now, I'm not saying here to change your camera settings, I want you to start with a nice high quality picture. But after you get the high quality picture, I want you to convert it to low resolution.

[00:12:23] Now, there are plug ins for WordPress that will do this and other photo programs that are easy to use and free. I happen to use iPiccy.com and of course we'll have it in the show notes. Now, your images still need to be good quality, so they look good in Google image results and little thumbnails. Like I said, good quality does not technically mean high resolution. It means in focus. I mean, the main items should fill the frame, which means you need you may need to crop the original photo. Those kinds of things. And. Overall, on the page, you need high quality content, I mean, just having perfectly tuned images won't save you if your overall website sucks. See, Google considers quality of the overall site and the page when they rank the images. And this next thing is SEO 101 is make sure the page titles in the headings of the page are relevant to the page. Remember everything on a website? They look at the whole, but they also look at individual pages that can come up in the search engines when people are searching for stuff. OK, so we covered file size, you want to keep it low for low resolution? Now, the next easy thing you can do is to name your pictures with keywords. And what this is called your your image, you are structure, so the whole link to your picture should be easy and makes sense.

[00:14:08] So, for instance. I might have Antion.com/images, and so that is an image folder/public-speaking-tips.JPG. See dashes are OK for an image URL. That's fine with me. You never buy a domain name with dashes in it anymore. That's been out for years and years and years. You can but don't do it. OK, that's a whole different subject. So don't do something like this. Antion.com/images/image00638.JPG. See that doesn't help you because the search engines are looking at the name. They're looking at a lot of stuff. So one of them is the name of the photo. It should say what it is and what it's about. The next simple thing you can do is called the ALT description or alternative description. This is for a sight impaired people so that their readers can tell them what the photo was, if they could see it, which they can't. So and this is important if you happen to do any government work with the Americans with Disabilities Act, that's required. But it's just a good idea to do around in any fashion. And it's very easy to do if you're in WordPress. It just you know, when you pull the graphic up, it asks you, OK, what's your prescription? So it should have keywords in it, but it should also be descriptive so somebody can tell what the picture would look like.

[00:15:45] Now, the next easy thing you can do. All right, I got to tell you a story about this, but make sure your image is relevant to the topic of the page. I've been preaching this for years and years. You know, I've critiqued over 10000 Web sites over the years. And I get this. I'll get a Web site that lets say somebody got this one tree sitting out in the middle of a beautiful meadow in there that say there their site is about leadership. I don't know. So so I say, hey, what's this picture doing here with just a tree? What does that mean? And they go into this long spiel about, oh, well, if you're out there alone and you got to get people to follow, I mean, all this stuff is just in their head. It doesn't that thought doesn't leave between their ears. Nobody else on Earth is thinking that. Google is certainly not thinking that. So you're screwing yourself over by putting, you know, some waterfall picture. Well, as things come over to the horizon and and fall into the pool below all this stuff, that's just ridiculous. So don't do that. Make sure your pictures are relevant to your topic if you want this to work. If you don't, then put any kind of crap you want on it. I don't care. OK. Let's see, place your images close to the relevant text that has something to do with the images.

[00:17:17] And then here's another thing I've been preaching for, I don't know, a thousand years, put a caption on the image, see, they've done retinal tests where people look at something, they look at the graphic first, then they read the caption and the caption should describe the picture and be exciting enough to make them want to read the text. Nobody goes directly to the text and ignores the pictures. Check yourself out next time you look at a web page or I just automatically boom goes right to the picture. So the caption is next keywords in it because again, Google is looking at it and that should make them want to read the text. Now. Your most important images should be near the top of the page, see the search engine start from the top of the page and work down with the spiders. And so your most important should be at the top. See see the search engines want evidence. All these different things work together. The quality, the page, the name of the picture, the all description, the quality of everything to see if you are worthy of a high ranking. Just like I said, just doing a great job on the picture and your whole other w rest of your site. Socks is not going to get it. You got to do the whole thing. But you should be doing that anyway if you want your site to work for you and bring your business.

[00:18:41] All right. Next thing, mobile testers site on all devices. You know, you know, Google and everybody's known for the past, I don't know how many years more searches are done on mobile than desktop and laptop, and I'm going to get a little later, tell you, OK, and some advanced stuff. What you can do if or, you know, maybe you can't do, but maybe your webmaster would do if it doesn't look good, if the picture that looks great on your desktop looks like crap on a cell phone. I'm going to tell you what to do in a minute anyway. So you see all these simple things you can do from cropping your picture to making sure it's in focus to naming it properly to put in the all description in make sure it's relevant to the text around it. Those are all simple things. They're all common sense things. But I guarantee you 90, 98 percent of the people listen to this when they go check their website. None of this is right. None of it. All right. So you go back and you hit up your webmaster or you learn to do it yourself or we teach you how to do it. In my mentor program, which I'm thrilled if you would join, but it's got to be done if you want to really maximize your potential being found by the gazillions of people that come to Google and the millions and millions every day that use image search.

[00:20:11] All right. So before I tell you, the advanced methods, just sort of remind you about my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. You know, it's unique in many ways. I mean, people at my level were charging 50 or 100 grand upfront. And, you know, a lot of them would never do anything or give you 10 percent of the things that I gave you. In fact, I dare them to come and put their programs up against mine and nobody will do it because they know they can't hold a candle to it. So it's all one on one here. You don't have to worry about being lost. If you're a beginner, you're safe here. If you're advanced, I'll talk to you at your level. You're not lumped in with people of different levels, which just is frustrating for everybody. Then my success is tied to your success. So for me to get my big money, you have to make really big money. So for me to get my 50000, you have to make 200000. You pay an entry fee to get in and then it's you pay nothing after that. And there will be some small amounts of money you'll need to pay for your tools as you go along. But but I've known as very frugal and I protect your money like crazy because you have to profit for me to get my big money.

[00:21:24] So I'm not going to have you buy and stuff that's worthless. And then you get the scholarship to my school. You get an immersion weekend when covid lets up where you actually live in this estate home of mine. And we shoot, we have our own TV studio where we shoot videos for you, edit them, put the graphics on and ship them to you. When you get home, you get an extra trip here with it's just you. The the only group we have is about four or five people at the retreats, but you get to come back again and just shoot videos all day. All right. So very, very unique. And you know, I'm just a fanatic for service. And so check that out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com gives you kind of the ideas and the financial investment. And I just call me there's no high pressure here and I'll be able to answer any questions in and get you going. All right. So let's get to some of the advance things that you could do. Most of you would not do these yourself. I can't do maybe one or two of them. I can do myself. But most of these I would farm out to a competent webmaster if you can find them or, you know, if you're into my mentor program, my guys will figure it out for you.

[00:22:44] The first one is not quite in your total control. There's a thing called Google Discover where if you have enough traffic, Google can put you in a special section on mobile devices and show people stuff that the person with the mobile device has proven to be interested in. But you have to have enough traffic for that. So that's called Google Discover. Now, the next thing is and the rest of these are under your control. The next thing is called lazy loading. Now let me tell you how this works. Let's say you have a page with a lot of graphics and you just can't get it to load fast enough to please Google and your visitors. You can implement lazy loading where the entire Web page is not loaded until it's needed. So if if someone is looking at the top of your page, there's no need for everything at the bottom to load right away before they can see the top of the page. So it loads stuff where they can see and start reading. And then the other stuff is downloaded in the background as it's needed. So the page can load instantly or really, really fast. That's called lazy loading. Now, that's kind of a simplified explanation. But but basically the bottom line is for you, your page now loads really fast without taking off any of the graphics that you want to have on there.

[00:24:16] All right. So that's called lazy loading nexus called structured data. You can use structured data to tell Google that specific things about your product or your video or a recipe. Again, it's beyond the scope of this podcast, but it's basically a machine easily machine readable markup language to your content to give more information about your pages to the search engines. And there's different types like you might have a recipe on your site. Well, there's a recipe structured data or there's product structure data and there's news structure data. So, again, this is for a competent webmaster or like I said, will help you with it if you're in our our program. So that's structured data that just makes it way easier for Google to see what you're about and any time you can make it easy on Google. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you raise in the rankings, say, all right. The next thing is called AMP Pages, a MPLX that stands for accelerated mobile pages. See, Google got together with Twitter and they designed a kind of a stripped down form of the HTML code for mobile so that your pages or load way faster. So that's called AMP pages. And, you know, if you got a lot of mobile people out there, it's worthwhile getting a geek to help you with that. So that's AMP pages. Now, the next thing is responsive images. You may need to change images or do what's called image switching to a different image to be displayed on mobile.

[00:26:08] Let's say you have a really wide one that covers your whole page on a desktop header. Well, that's not going to look the same on a narrow cell phone. So you may have a different image. You know, like it'll do it'll squish it all down into the focus of the the header will be a little tiny then, you know, just to force the whole thing in in a in a skinny cell phone, say, compared to a big old monitor. So you may have to do a different image. So that's one reason you check your images on all your different devices before you say, OK, that's the final. So let's call response of images again. Probably need a Web person to handle that for you. And last is robots, text file, robots, not text. Now, this is for any kind of content, but it's a it's a file that you put at the top of a Web page. If you do not want Google or other search engines to index that page or crawl that page. Now, it's not 100 percent effective, but you may have some stuff that you just want on what we call hidden pages where nobody knows about them except whoever you want to know about them. They're not technically locked like behind a membership site. But this robot text file will keep does tell the search engines go away. Nothing here for you to see, you know, kind of, oh, I was going to make a political reference viper keep my mouth shut.

[00:27:40] So. So anyway, if you do even a portion of what we talked about here, you're going to give yourself a great boost in Google image search and be found by way more people. I mean, just by name in your photos that were it makes sense and moving them around a little bit to make sure they're relevant and those kinds of things and make sure they load fast, make sure the right size those things can. I mean, literally for most of you over your career, could be millions and millions more people come to your site just from that free method. So. So check it out. All right. That's it for this next episode is for 22. We got Anatoly Specter. I mean, this guy faced obstacle after obstacle and he just wouldn't quit. And now he lives a few months and different every few months. He moves to a different country all over the world and he has this total portable lifestyle business. So that's, of course, I've been preaching that for 27 years. All right, folks, that's it. So this was episode 421. If you want to go back and listen to this, make your Web person listen to it, get in our mentor program, then we'll help you with all this stuff. And I can't wait to see how great your images look when you implement.

[00:29:08] All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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