 how to increase traffic to your site using image optimization. Now you may be spending a lot of time and effort and maybe even money picking the best pictures for your site, but are they helping you or are they hurting you? You have to set up your images properly so that search engines can contextualize what the images are and bring more traffic. In this video, I'm gonna show you exactly how to do this. And these little tweaks, these could really increase the amount of traffic to your site. So you're gonna wanna watch to the very end. These are things that most people don't even know about. Check it out. Don't forget also subscribe. If you're new here, keep it true here. Hit that subscribe button there. Turn it from red to gray and then ring the bell. A bell's gonna pop up next to that subscribe button. You need to turn on all notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I do a video like this and I upload it. All right, let's get started. Okay, so first I wanna talk to you about how search engines work. They have these things called spiders and these spiders actually go into your site and they start looking at pages. They look at the site map of your page and they will actually spider out and look to each individual page. That's how they learn your site. That's how they learn how to rank your site based on the spider that goes out. Now, you're thinking about images and you say, well, they see these images and then they put the images out and is that how they're doing it? Not at all. As a matter of fact, they don't even see images at all. The only thing they can do is read text. That's why it's super important for you to understand when you upload an image. If you don't put the right text in there, the images won't get crawled. So in this video, I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that. So let's take a look at what the search engines see and what we see. Now, when we go to a site, we're gonna see something that looks akin to this. That's a pretty nice-looking site right there. But this is what the search engines actually see. That's what they actually see. Disabling the images reveals that while we see information-packed page, the spiders actually have little to crawl and analyze within the one-page content. Fortunately, there's an easy way to translate your images into the type of content Google can read, HTML text. You'll use an image alt attribute to briefly describe the image for Google, giving them content to work with. Now, an image HTML will look something like this. You said the line of code right there. To update the alt text manually, you add alt equals x directly after your image link and replace the x with your image description. However, virtually all web builders and e-commerce platforms offer a much easier way to click on the image and update its alt text within the dashboard. Using this method, you should never have to touch the code at all. Now, just like when you do an SEO on your pages and you're having your title tags and your description and all that, you need to do the same type of stuff with images. Once you do that, you can see a considerable increase in traffic to your website. Okay, let's check out a website that has done this properly. Okay, this is what the website looks like right here. You can see all these images in here. And this is how they have actually set it up so that you see all these alt images here. Alt on ear, alt wireless, Bluetooth, all this stuff here. Notice that when the images were not being displayed, all of the brand logos in the shop headphones by brand category disappears. Adding alt text to the image file preserves their presence on the page. Now, there's certainly other ways that you can increase the SEO on your page. Some of these ways are really, really simple and you're gonna probably kick yourself as you haven't done this in the past, but let's check out some of the ways you can do that. The first thing you can do is compress your images. Compress each image prior to upload to reduce its file size, which reduces the speed with which the image can be served. Speed's really important. Websites that are weighed down by bulky images can't load quickly. And a website that can't load quickly will have much harder time of ranking. Now, next thing you can do is you can use a search-friendly image URL structure. In addition to the alt text, Google also uses the image's URL path and file name to understand your images. Use keywords in your file name for an additional opportunity to contextualize your images. Next up, add structured data. Structured data helps Google serve rich results that provide users with additional information about their site directly within the search. While structured data isn't a ranking factor in itself, it does help your website stand out in the search results and drive more relevant traffic to your site. Last up, see it for yourself. It's a good idea to use a browser extension like Web Developer Toolbar so you can quickly disable JavaScript and CSS leaving only the HTML content on your webpage. Tools like this one don't actually impact your code or change what the visitor would see. This will let you see your page the way a search engine would helping you determine whether all of the right content is being displayed. Now I wanna kinda talk about accessibility right now. The beginning of this video, I was talking about how by doing all this alt text, you're really gonna help out the search engines, you're gonna get more traffic and all that. But the more important thing is the real reason alt tags actually exist is to help the visually impaired. So it's important that you do this, whether you wanna get more traffic or not because there's people out there that would love to browse your site and if you don't have the alt tags in there, a visually impaired person can't enjoy your site. I want everybody to be able to enjoy my site, get worthwhile information from my site and I wanna provide a good site for people who are disabled. I think it's highly unfair to put websites out there and ignore those people. And I know you may say, well that's a very small percentage of the population, JR. Yeah, but it's a percentage of the population and since it's a percentage of the population, I wanna serve them too. I wanna serve everybody. I want them to get good content and I think those people that you do that for really appreciated a whole lot more than those people that just end up with your site because you got more traffic. I think those people are gonna become a lot more loyal to the sites that make it easier for them to use it. Isn't that what you wanna do? I mean, that is what you wanna do, right? You wanna make it easy for people to use your site and you wanna provide good content for everybody looking at your site. Now like I said in the beginning, you've spent a lot of time finding these images or taking pictures or buying images and it's just a shame to put all these images on your site and you not get the benefit of having those images there. We want everybody to enjoy the site. We want everybody to get good content from our site but if you don't do this, then you're just missing out, you really are. Now I know you may be thinking JR, I've got thousands or hundreds or 20 or 40 images. However big the number is, you may say, that's gonna take me forever. You don't have to do it all at once, okay? You could pick one image a day or two image a day or you could hire a freelancer off some site to work on these images for you but I do say to you, if you're gonna have the image on the site and you don't have the alt tags there, you're probably wasting your time. You might as well not even have an image there if it's not optimized. So make sure they're optimized. Either do it yourself or hire a freelancer to do it for you but get it done. Don't be afraid because there's so many images. I think that's the one thing that scares people off more than anything else is they go, it's too much work, it's too much work. Well, it may be a lot of work but it's worthwhile and you need to do it. Please, please, please take this video today, go back, work on your images, come back and put a comment below because I know what's gonna happen. You're gonna get a lot more traffic, you're gonna get a lot more sales and I want you to attribute it to this video because this video told you how to do it. It's not that hard. Thank you so much for watching this video. As a gift to you, I wanna provide you with a free course. It's a course you're gonna love, it's below in the description, it's only $97. You can grab it today absolutely free, no credit card required. If you haven't done so so far, you need to subscribe. Now there's a subscribe button down there and if that button is red, that's a warning that you haven't subscribed. You need to click it, turn it gray and then a bell's gonna pop up, it's gonna look something like this. Well, it won't say that, but there's gonna be a bell. You need to ring the bell, you need to turn on all notifications. There's a drop down there, select the one that says all notification. That way you're notified every time I do a live video or I upload a video like this one here. Thanks so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. 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