Simple Image SEO Tactics to Boost Your Podcast Website Rankings

Today, I've got some minor tweaks, super low hanging fruit that you can

do to your image to boost your SEO. Welcome to your

podcast website, the ultimate guide for podcasters looking to

level up their online presence. Whether you're a seasoned

podcaster or just starting out, this show is your go to

resource for mastering the art of building and optimizing your

podcast website. From website basics to advanced

SEO strategies, we cover it all. No tech jargon,

no confusion, just practical tips and

actionable advice you can implement right away. Here

is your host, Dave

Jackson. SEO images often get overlooked

when it comes to SEO. And the beautiful thing is

most of the stuff we're gonna talk about today, it's low

hanging fruit. And if you're thinking, well, wait.

What? I'll give you a classic example. I just got done doing

an interview with a guy named Matt

Cundill from the SoundOff Podcast, And I

forgot to ask him for a headshot, so I went to Google Images, search

for Matt Cundill. And this is also a great way if you're doing

research for a guest. If you're gonna be interviewing

somebody, you can search for them in Google

Images and find other interviews of this person. So

people do search. And even if you're just doing your traditional

search, those images show up in your search results.

And so having good images can boost you in

actual search results. So that's the first thing.

One of the things you can do that doesn't take really any effort

is use descriptive file names. Now don't go

crazy with this, making it war and peace dot JPEG,

but something that isn'timgx27dot

jpeg.png. Yeah. You want actual words in there.

So if it was something like goldendashretrieverdash

playing dash in dash park. Now this is from an

article from Ahrefs, which is a really huge

SEO tool and just service.

So I'm gonna take that as gospel. And they also say, and this is

one I didn't realize, I've always recommended to use

hyphens or underscore because you want

some sort of space between the words so that it looks like words

as opposed to everything just running it together dot JPEG. And

according to Ahrefs, it is better to

have dashes or better known as hyphens.

Right? So if it was something like reddashguitardashgibson.jpeg,

that would be better than, again, just having random numbers

and words, or it would be better than somebody

going red_gibson_guitar.jpeg.

Alt text, sometimes called alternate

description, that's how it's shown in Podpage. It's really

great for SEO and also for accessibility.

So if you are somebody who cannot see, your screen reader reads though.

So that's great. But also it helps search engines understand the

context of the image. So you wanna make sure your

alt text is descriptive and includes relevant keywords,

but be careful. Don't avoid keyword stuffing.

For example, if we go back to, the Ahrefs article here, they

mentioned a golden retriever playing fetch in a sunny park is good alt

text for the image mentioned earlier. But if you just started, like,

a golden retriever playing fetch in a sunny park with a

golden retriever that likes a you know what I mean? I think keyword

stuffing is one of those things that's hard to somewhat

describe, but we all know it when we see it. And

while you can add the alt text if you add images in

PodPage, if you're like, wait a bit. What about the episodic artwork that

automatically gets pulled over? Yep. Automatic alt tags

are added. The next

one is resizing your image. And this is

one that a lot of people get wrong because, let's say, you're gonna

upload your episodic artwork, and you've made it

3,000 by 3,002. Make it as big as it can be.

And so you upload the image, and it's ginormous. It takes

up a huge amount of space on your website. So you go, oh, that's

alright. And you click on it, and you grab maybe a corner, and you

just drag it to where it's maybe 300 by 300.

And let's say that file is, whatever, 10

megabytes. And it should be something like 500

kilobytes. And so it's way bigger. What happens

is it slows down your website. Because even though it's only going to

display, you know, 300 by 300,

Behind the scenes, for that to display, it still has to

download the entire file. It's just shrinking

it down. It's not shrinking the actual amount of bandwidth

if we get our nerd on here. It's actually gonna take it longer.

So this is where you can use something. This is a free tool

called Swoosh. It's from our friends at Google. And what

I like about this is you can actually resize the image. You could say, look.

Don't give me 3,000 by 3,000. Make that 300 by 300.

And then there's a little slider where you can adjust it

to kinda maximize its look, make sure it

doesn't lose anything. It doesn't denigrate. And there's a little slider there. You

can see kind of a little before and after. So you can use

that to resize as you compress. And then there are other

tools, like, if you've already resized it, there is tiny

PNG. I believe there's a tiny jpay I can never say

that. Tinyjpg

dotcom. So there are many sites like this. And if you are a WordPress

user, stay tuned because I've got a WordPress plugins that does a lot of the

stuff that we're talking about.

Now you might hear the nerdy phrase,

optimize your Open Graph meta tag. And

Open Graph meta tags control how your images appear

when they're shared on social media platforms, which is why

in PodPage, they're called social preview

image. That is so much easier to understand than open graph

meta tags. But you wanna be able to optimize

these again. So the typical size for these

are 1200 by 630. And what this does is

by having that image, you it knows you have the

right size. And most things that share, Facebook, Twitter, things like that,

they will not completely hork your image because you kinda have the right

image. And, again, you've compressed it. You've made it

that exact size. You didn't make it, whatever, 24100 by 12

third. No. Make it that size. Compress it. And that

way, by having that image, you are maximizing

your image. You're ready for it to be shared. It's not gonna take up a

a ton of space. And you are kinda dictating, hey, when

you share this particular episode, use this image. So if you've

ever done that, you're like you share it, and you're like, hey. Why is it

pulling the image from the advertiser? I wanted to use

this. That's where you can specify the

social image for sharing, better known as the Open Graph

metadata.

Alright. If you're using WordPress, here are a couple other steps

you can do. And one is to use a content

delivery network. And what this does is it

distributes your images across multiple servers worldwide,

and that reduces the latency and basically speeds up

the delivery of your image. So by using a CDN,

you can ensure faster load times for your images. And the

one I use and what's great about this is it does have

a WordPress plugins is called Bunny, as

in, yep, that little wabbit. And it's super cheap. I gave it

$20 probably a year ago because

for Libsyn, they I mean, at this point, you have

to hand code if you're doing any podcasting 2.0 stuff. So I

needed some place to host the JSON file, some place to

hold these images for podcasting 2.0. And I gave it,

like, $20, like, a year ago. And I've still got, like,

$14. And you just it's an extra step. But

I implemented it on my website via their

plugins, and it automatically then host those

files for you. And with the WordPress

integration, it's amazing. It does a lot of this stuff

automatically. So on their website, they say without a CDN,

if a website loaded, let's say, 2.5 seconds to load

it with Bunny, that can actually bring your website load time

down to 0.7 seconds. It's pretty amazing,

and I was up and running in about, I don't know, 4 minutes.

Now something else you can do is to create

an image site map. And what this does

is it has a dedicated sitemap for your

images, and that can help you actually improve your

chances of appearing in search results. And

as soon as I hear sitemap, I think of Ranking Math.

In fact, I should mention my buddy, Mark, from Podcast,

and, also, he does the resourceful designer podcast. I'll put links

to those in the show notes with everything we're mentioning. But Mark's

been building websites forever, and he said, I just finished your episode about Ranking

Math and want to reach out. I switched to it a couple years ago

after using Yoast premium for a long time. Rank Math

is so much easier to use, and the features are much better. Its

customer support is also much more responsive than Yoast, which takes

forever to respond. It's all I recommend now. So,

if you wanna check out Mark, go over to podcastbranding.co. Thank

you for the feedback, Mark. I do appreciate it. And I know

that Rank Math makes a ton of different

website maps. Check that out. There is a free

trial. Links in the show notes and also in our resource section.

Alright. And, again, this is for WordPress users,

and it is alt text. It's a plugins. It's a

website. And so what I did was I uploaded

a graphic, and it is a picture of Matt

Cundell. And it's my logo, everything else,

and you basically upload it. I added some

keywords. So in this case, I put podcast lessons. And the alt

text is a person standing in front of a microphone with text that says school

of podcasting, plan, launch, grow Podcast lessons from 400

episodes and years of radio experience, Matt Cundell from the

Sound Off Podcast 934 because it was episode 934.

Now how this voodoo got

this from like, I don't understand how AI is now able to

read read a file which did not have

most of that in the file name. I I think it said,

Matt Cundold 934 wide, I I think was the name of the

file. And so if you're a person that's been using WordPress and

you're like, oh, great. So glad you let me know this now.

Where were you, you know, 7 years ago? This is a tool

that will automatically create your alt text

automatically. And so you upload the image, and,

of course, our good friend AI analyzes the image,

and you get alt text. And so this works with,

WordPress. If you're super nerdy, they have an API.

It's a browser extension, all sorts of interesting things.

And the pricing for this is $5 a

month for basically a 100 images. So

if you are just starting out, maybe you need to up your

credits to have it go back and do all your old episodes,

etcetera. But once you get going, if you're only doing 4 episodes a

month and you've only got a few, images, you could get by with

$5 a month. And also if you want to pay as you go,

you can do that and you can be as little as $3

for 50 images. So that is a way, if you're using

WordPress, that you can kind of automate this.

And, again, speaking of Rank Math, I looked over there.

They do have the ability to automate image captions. So if

that's something you're looking for, you can also find and replace.

So if you rebrand your show and you're like, oh, crap. All my alt text

says the Dave Jackson Power Hour, and I wanted to say your podcast

website, you can actually go into Rank Math. That's again a

plugins for WordPress and have it change automatically. The

other thing it does, again, we're speaking of Rank Math, is the fact

that it will actually automatically rename your images and add alt text

to images that do not have the tags present. So it'll

just automatically do that for you, hence why Mark

over at podcastbranding.co was like, yeah. This is why I recommend this.

That was last week's episode. So if you haven't heard that, check it

out. And, also, just to kinda show you the value of

Ranking Math, I was looking at, Bunny.

Again, they have a WordPress plugins. And for $10

a month, they will automatically compress your files so

that they load faster, which would eliminate that step. But then I looked

at, Rank Math, and again, it does it

already. And this is future Dave.

As I was getting ready to publish this, I was like, you know what, idiot?

Go over and look. And it turns out Ranking Math does not

make a site map for images. It does everything

else, but not that. So as

we start to wrap this up. So

remember, images appear in search results. Give your images

a descriptive file name. Google recommends separating

words with hyphens. Don't forget your alt text, your just you

know, the descriptive alt text. Resize your images. That's the one I

see. And by that, I don't mean once you upload them. Resize them

before you upload them. Compress the images of links to all those

tools out at your podcastwebsite.com/7.

Create an image website map if you can. And we'll get

into browser caching in a future

episode. And you can subscribe to the show. You can follow

it. It's free. Simply go to your podcast

website. I'm Dave

Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. I help

podcasters. It's what I do. In fact, I have a new

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Find this show and all of Dave's other projects at power of podcasting.com.