 content. Alright, so once again, hello everyone and welcome to today's workshop. Today's title is image SEO best practices to make your content discoverable. So we all want our content to be found by people on the internet. And one way our content is found is through images. So today, we're going to be talking about image search engine optimization to make sure our images are set up to collect or to gather as many people as possible to our websites. So I'm Ben. I was born in Australia, but I've lived in Japan since I was two years old. So I'm bilingual in both English and Japanese. And I actually host these online workshops in English and Japanese. I've been a WordPress user since 2014. So almost eight years now. And I just I love helping other people learn WordPress. I was a WordPress customer support agent for a couple of years. And recently, I've been contributing to the WordPress training team to teach people WordPress and also to enable other people who want to teach WordPress to help them be able to do that. So that's my passion at the moment. Just a few rules about online workshops, not rules, but just so you know, these are places where we learn together. So I don't necessarily know the answers. We can ask each other questions, and we can also answer each other's questions. You can ask a question at any time, you can unmute yourself and speak the question, or you can use a Zoom chat. So type your question there, and somebody will answer you. This session is being recorded and will be uploaded to WordPress.TV after the session. So other people can view this as well. And finally, online workshops are hosted by volunteers who enjoy giving back to the WordPress community. So if you're interested in hosting an online workshop like this, do let us know and we'll show you how you can get involved. Alright, so here's a question to start us off with. How familiar are you with image SEO? So there is general SEO, but today we're talking specifically about image SEO. So if you've never heard about image SEO, you're a one. If you're a pro with image SEO, like you do this at work all the time, then you're a 10. So from one to 10, where would you position yourself regarding image SEO? Alright, so my group given a seven, Sandra, three, Susan, probably a five, Sebastian, a five, Artur, three. Yeah, I'm going to put myself at around five. Well, studying for this presentation today, I learned a lot more about image SEO. So maybe a six or so now. But yeah, Kirsten, you're a four. Okay, so people have a basic understanding. You've heard of image SEO before, you may know a few things. And then hopefully within today's presentation, you'll be able to learn a lot more, which you can take back and apply to your website. Alright, so before we jump into this, were there any questions people wanted to cover or ask before we jump into the content? Doesn't look like it. Alright. So just in general, how do people find blogs or websites? There are two ways. First one is through search results. And the other one is through everything else. So that's sort of a very vague classification. But last week, I actually did a online workshop about general SEO. It's titled What is SEO? So you can get the link from the slides. But it does mean I have to share the slide to just a moment. I do have a shareable link here. Let's see. Today's slides. Okay, so I've just dropped a link into the Zoom chat here with today slides. So if you come to this slide, if you click on that, what is SEO, that will take you to the recording of last week's online workshop. And then there are also a number of other ways people come to your sites, not just through search engines. And so everything else is covered in this yellow bubble here. I also did a separate workshop. Ideas for getting more views on your blog. So if you're interested in that side of getting more people to your site, there's also recording for that workshop. So check that out as well. But when you look at search results, when you look at this green arrow here of people coming to your site through search results, we actually see this green arrow has even more classifications within it. So when you do a Google search, you have your general search results. But then you can also search for images or videos. And lately you even have maps or shopping and local search results pinpoint your location and give you search results specific to your location. So you may have noticed sometimes now when you do a Google search or any search with any engine, they'll ask you, can we use your current location? And that's because they want to show you local search results about shops right near you. So for example, if we go to Google.com and I type chocolate cookies. All right, so this is the general search page. So people might come to my site from this page. But if you look at the top, there's also a image search result page. So now people aren't looking at the title of your site or the content of your site. They're just looking at pictures you've put on your site and they may jump to your site from your picture. And so for example, if I'm looking for a chocolate cookie recipe, the picture people use to show their cookie is actually very important because I'm going to look for a cookie that I like the looks of and then click onto that site. So this is what people use images. This is what I mean when I say people use images to come to your site as well. And of course, if you look at Google, they have shopping, video, news, and the more they have maps and books. And so there are all these different categories. And when you dive into it, each of these has a specific SEO field. So today we're looking at image SEO. There's also video SEO. There's also map SEO. There's also local SEO. So today we're just focusing on the image part. I've split my workshop into four sections. And this is, this covers the process of choosing an image and putting it on your site. So first of all, what can we do when we're choosing an image to make sure it's good for SEO? The second point is once we've chosen the image, what can we do to prepare the image before we upload it to our site to make sure it's good for SEO? The third step is after it's uploaded, what should we do with the image before we add the image to our content? So it's in our media library, but not in our content yet. What should we do then? And finally, how should we add the image to our content? So there are four steps. It choosing an image, preparing an image, uploading an image and then adding it to our content. So yeah, this is what we'll be looking at today. So just quickly looking through this text here, Susan, you say the main thing I know about is out text is not negotiable. Yes, so out text is alternate alternative text is very important for image SEO and we will have a look at that today. And I'm going to share some specific guidelines with you about how to add out text. So I change it. All right. Okay, so the first point is choosing a good image. So before we start anything like any technical thing, we need to choose a good image if it's going to have good image SEO. And I think the most important thing I can say here is to have good image SEO, you have to have an image. You always add an image to your content. A lot of people now when they open a website will skim the page or the post before they actually read all the line of content. So they'll look at maybe just the heading. They'll even look at the image to see if there's an interesting image there that captures the attention. And if it's just all text and no images, no headings, no organisation, then they'll just go back to the search results and choose another site. So having an image is important to keep people on your site and to then lead them into reading your content. So images make content more appealing. If you use related images, they help explain your content. And sometimes images generate more conversation than the main content does. So how many times have you seen a famous person, for example, tweet, just an image, no text, just an image. And still people retweet that or they like that or they share that. An image can generate a lot of conversation. And sometimes when you want to generate an audience on your website, one of the key is just choosing a good image, an image that will get people talking. And then they'll share the image. And with the image, they'll share your website. And so more people come back to see what on earth is this image about. And that would generate a larger audience coming back to your website. So for example, in this slide, I tried to choose an image here that was I thought interesting. Somebody pointing at you. I've never actually seen an image with this angle and all that. But maybe it generates some conversation. So yeah, the first point about image SEO is always add an image to your content. The second point is use an original image when possible. So if you go online and search for images, there are tons of images. Some you have to pay for some you can use for free. Some actually say please don't use this image. So you can sift through that and find an image for your website. But for SEO purposes, search engines love original images. If you use an image from a free website, then other sites are using the same image as well. And so the impact lowers for search engine results. And but if you're using an original rigid image that you've taken or your print has taken, then that is best for SEO purposes. And your site will look more authentic. You can start to tell now when people are using free stock images. There's a I don't know there's sometimes a facial expression to clearly made up or the setting is just too perfect, and you know it's fake. But if you use your own photos, then you can show an authentic self. Nobody else will you be using your photos. So your site will be unique and stand out in search engines. And also, you don't need to worry about licensing. So depending on the website, you bring images from sometimes you have to attribute the photographer to use their photo or sometimes you have to pay them a royalty fee to use their photos. And so each time you're bringing photos from other sites, you have to look into their licensing to see what they omit. But if you're using your own photos, you don't have to worry about that. You can just use your own photos. So yeah, for image SEO purposes, using original images is always best whenever possible. I feel like I've been talking about does anybody have any questions so far? These are still some of the fundamental things. So I don't think it's too complicated. But if anybody has a question, feel free to drop that in the Zoom chat here at any time. All right, we'll continue to move on. So when you add an image, attribute the photos appropriately. So if you're using images just copied from anywhere on the internet, and you don't attribute it properly, then you can get into licensing trouble. The photographer can sue you or ask your site to be taken down. And this can cause a lot of technical problems for your site. So you attribute photos appropriately. After all, you said so far so good. Thanks. Okay, good to know. When you search on Google, just because you search free image doesn't mean the search result is going to be free images, as in you can use them freely. Let's see. Free chocolate chip cookies image. That could be free chocolate chips. Let's see. Free image chocolate chip cookies. Let's see if that helps. So sometimes these results might be free, as in really you don't have to pay anything, but sometimes you might have to pay something. So what I would do is each time I would open these search results, I then have to look for, let's see, I'd have to look for license to look at the license and see if these images are really free. For example, these pictures at the top here are not free. It says related images from I stock safe. Now, so if I would, if I say wanted this chocolate cookie further here, that's going to take me to I stock. And then I believe this is a site you have to pay to use their images. So I searched for free images and Google gave me a site that probably offers free images, but there are images on this site that aren't free either. So just keep in mind, just because you search for free image doesn't mean you always get free images. And sometimes the image might be free, as in you don't have to pay any money. But they ask you to attribute the photographer. So they say, when you use this photo, make sure you list photo taken by so and so. So always pay attention to the licensing, because if you get this wrong, you can get your, in most case, there is get your site closed down and then, you know, search engines aren't going to index your site anymore. The other thing I wanted to point out is even if you're using original images, if there are identifiable people shown in the image, make sure you have their permission before using it. For example, you might take a photo of a family gathering around Christmas. And you can see everybody's faces and you put that in your blog. Technically, you cannot do that unless you have permission from everyone in your family to publicly show their face on your blog and link it back to you. People who have been following your blog might be able to find out where about your family lives or how old they really are, and they can sort of guess some personal information. And so whenever you use photos where people are clearly identifiable, make sure you have their permission to use their image, to use their face on your blog. This is just something to keep in mind when using images with people in it. All right, so that's all being said, using your own images is best, but sometimes you just don't have images you can use. And so you want free images that you can use fairly easily without worrying about licensing. And so I've gone and collected one, two, three, four, five, six sites here that give you permission to use these photos with no attribution on your website. So each of these, if you click into each of these, they'll give you different photos. And something I found while looking into this, somebody introduced the Instant Images plug-in to me. So I've never actually used this myself, but apparently, using this plug-in, you can download Unsplash, Pixabay, and Peckles images directly into your media library. So you don't even have to go to those sites to find the image. The plug-in has a search bar and you type the word and then it searches these websites for you so you can look for free photos that don't need attribution right here in your WordPress dashboard. So if you're always looking for free images, this is a plug-in you might be interested in. All right. So that's what I wanted to cover about choosing a good image, choose an original image, make sure you have people's permission, your attribute image correctly. And just because you search for free on the search engine doesn't mean the image you'll find is free. So always double check the licensing. Any questions about all that? No, so far it looks pretty good. Okay. So this is where things get a bit technical. So you've chosen an image and say you've downloaded it to your computer. You've downloaded it from a website somewhere or you've taken a photo with your phone and the pictures in your computer. Now what do you do with that image before you upload it to your WordPress site? So there are a question just came in. So just a moment. So a question came when you use a photo from Pixar Bay, for example, does the attribution have to be done on the page where the picture is on? Or can you write down all attributions on a separate attributions page? That is a good question. And for example, you're asking about Pixar Bay. So in Pixar Bay, I'm pretty sure you don't have to attribute. It's always nice to attribute who the photographer is, but you don't have to attribute. So in this case, either is fine. You can attribute on the page or you can make a separate attribution page and attribute there. The reason why either is fine is because Pixar Bay says you can use their photos without attribution. So I'm just looking at the Pixar Bay license here. It's all content on Pixar Bay can be used for free or commercial and non-commercial use. Attribution is not required. Okay. But if you choose a picture from a site that does require attribution, then the license page will usually tell you how they want you to attribute. For example, they might say you must attribute on the page or they might say you must attribute right under the picture, like in the caption or they might say attribute the website somewhere on your website, like attribute us somewhere on your website and then you can use our photos as many times as you want. So for these sites specifically in answer to the question, you can attribute on the page or in the separate page either is fine. But as a general answer, check the licensing page of the site you're using pictures from and that will probably give you an idea of how best to attribute. All right. Okay. So you've chosen an image. You're ready to upload it. Before you upload it, there are four things you need to do for best image SEO purposes. Number one, choose a good file format. Number two, scale the image dimensions. Number three, reduce the image file size. And number four, rename the image file. Okay. So first of all, choosing a good file format. There are tons of image formats out there. And there is no right answer specifically. Depending on your use case, you might choose a different image format for a different image type. But there are some image formats that are pretty good. And the reason is sometimes if you choose a really unique file format, then some browsers might not be compatible with that image format. So if you choose a really odd format, for example, iPhones at the moment, sometimes they save photos as H-E-I-C, I think is the format name. But there are programs out there that just can't read H-E-I-C format or browsers that can't read H-E-I-C format. And so using that format on your website could work for you, but might not work for everybody else. And so what I've listed here, JPEG, PNG, and SVG are good as in probably everybody will be able to see the image. So JPEGs is a pretty old image format. It's good for images. But the only thing about JPEGs is it doesn't show transparent backgrounds. So if you have an image with a transparent background, then PNG is probably a better format. It's slightly larger than JPEG, but to get that transparency data in PNG is probably good. And then for like your site logo or icons, SVG is the preferred format. And the reason is you can enlarge and shrink SVG format icons and not lose quality. So JPEG and PNG, when you like zoom into the photo, you're going to see pixelation. But with SVG, you can zoom in and you won't see pixelation. So for your site logo, you might have different size site logos all over your site or icons for these SVG is the preferred format. Now, recently, there's been a new file format called WebP. And what's good about WebPs is they work with transparent backgrounds, and they usually make the file a lot smaller than JPEG or PNG. The only thing is WebPs is a fairly newer file format. And so if people are using older browsers, some older browsers aren't compatible with it. So people using modern browsers probably won't have an issue. But if you know your audience might have older operating systems or older browsers and they don't update their system regularly, then WebP might not work yet. So this will probably become a new standard in the future. I'm just guessing here, I'm not an expert, but this will probably replace JPEG and PNG in the future. And we're sort of in that transition stage right now, where many people would be fine, but not everybody. And while looking into this, I found a website called Squoosh, which is an open source website, like WordPress is. And what you can do is you can drop an image here and it can change the file format. And you can do basic image editing with it. So for example, let me upload, let's see. So I just upload a day image from my computer. And you can see here, you can compress the image to different formats here. So JPEG, PNG, down here you have WebP. So for example, if I choose WebP, let's see, that says it's going to reduce the file format by 83%. And I probably don't, you can sort of compare the different file quality here. I really don't see any change. So I can probably shrink this file by 83% using Squoosh. So it has a few different other settings you can do. You can resize images as well. But if you're looking for a free resource to change your file format, Squoosh is a site I recommend. It's free. It's open source just like WordPress is. And so you'll be able to use it for free forever. Susan, you say you love Squoosh. Oh, good. So you know it works well. And Vagelist there has shared the link to the Squoosh app in the Zoom channel. OK, so first of all, choose a good file format. Next, scale the image dimensions. And I'll just let you know the step after this is reducing the file size. So the file size and the image dimensions are two separate things. OK, so first of all, you want to scale the image dimensions. And this is the like the the actual size of the picture when you show it on your screen is this big or is it this big? You can change those dimension. Now, there's a site that shows us the most used monitors in the world. So let me open that here. This calculates different steps for different technical things all over the world. And if you look at this, it says nine. So this particular page is showing what the most used screen sizes when people look at the website. I mean, you see here nine point three seven is the the biggest number. And that's one thousand nine hundred and twenty pixels by one thousand and eighty pixels. And then each of these are smaller screen sizes. But so this is the largest screen size a lot of people use. And so. If your image is, say, for example, four thousand times three thousand pixel, that is way larger than even the largest screens people use to view websites. So if you upload a four thousand times three thousand pixel image up to your website and put it on your page, it's definitely going to get resized when it shows up on people's browsers. And so any like resizing that happens makes the loading speed of your website slower. And so what you want to do here is check the dimensions of your image. And if it's ridiculously large, shrink it before you upload it to your website. When you upload images to WordPress, WordPress automatically does make a few different size variations of your images to store in different like to show fairly quickly on your content. But you're still using up space on your server every time you upload a large image. So if it's ridiculously large, shrink it first before uploading it to your website. And I added a second comment here if you're like a a photographer and you sell high resolution pictures, then you will want to upload your high resolution pictures to your website and sell them there. But when you do that, on the general say product page, make sure people only see a low resolution. If it's full of high resolution photos, it's going to take ages to load. Whereas if you just show low resolution photos on the product page, and then they have to click on a button or something to get the high resolution, then that makes sure that your site still loads quickly, and only people who want the high resolution photo can download that. So scaling the image dimensions. And again, Squish can do that for you. So when you upload your image to Squish, see what the dimensions are there and you can shrink it down if you need right there. Once you've shrunk the dimension, next you want to check the image file size. So the image file size is how much space it takes up on your computer or once you upload it on your server. So you can have a really small dimension image, but if there's lots of excess information hidden in that image, then that can still be a very large file size. So you want to check the dimensions and you also want to check the file size. One piece of information that takes up space is the EXIF data. I'm not sure. Do people say EXIF data? Okay. So EXIF data is, for example, some cameras, when you take a photo, it records what model camera you use, what lens you use, what settings you use. And so later when people download your image, they can also figure out what camera you use, what lens you use, what setting to use. Some cameras like mobile phones, when you take an image, sometimes they store like the GPS location of where the photo was taken. So when people download your image, they can also figure out where you were when you took that photo. And so this is all hidden in the background of the file. It's not the image you see. It's all hidden in the background. And sometimes you just don't want people to know that. So there's a site called Image Optim and also Squish as well. These can remove the exit data from your image and which will also help reduce the file size and protect your personal information. So that's another thing to look at when reducing image size. All right. And then the fourth point was rename the image file before uploading it. Now, once you use Squish and these other services to edit your file, you'll have to download the edited file back to your computer. And what these services usually do is they add stuff to the name of the file name. They might add compressed or edited or modified. You don't need that piece of information on your file name. Like people don't need to know you've edited the photo. Search engines also look at the name of images on your website. So search engines they're getting smarter looking at the actual image to figure out what it's about. But sometimes it just doesn't work like. And so search engines look at all the other information around the image as well to figure out what the images about. And one piece of information search engines look at is the file name. So when you upload your image, make sure the file name is a neat description of what the image is about. So if we come back to Google here and we look at images, you used to be able to see the file name here. Not sure if you can see the file name anymore. Google may have Google may have removed that. But at one stage you could actually see the file name shown here in Google search results. And so that is something search engines are looking at. And in my session last week it was asked, is it better to hyphenate words or use underbuts or underscores when you when you make a image file name? So for example, plate of chocolate cookies, should it have hyphens between words or should it have underscores between words? And there's no correct answer here. But in general, you should use hyphens, not underscores. And the reason is I'm going to, for example, say I want to change chocolate cookies into vanilla cookies, so a plate of vanilla cookies. What I can do is if I double click chocolate, I can rename that to vanilla. But if I'm using underscores, if I double click chocolate, it selects the entire word here. So the selection goes through underscores, whereas if I'm using hyphens, it stops at the hyphens. So when you want to edit file names, it's easier. Usually they come back and edit file names if you're using hyphens and not underscores. So. Usually I think in programming people. Like to use hyphens and use underscores for very specific use cases. So if you're wondering which is better, probably just stick with hyphens. They'll just make things easier in the future. All right. So before I upload the images, we want to. Choose a good file format. We want to scale the image dimensions. We want to reduce the image file size and we want to rename the image file. Any questions about all that? Well, Sandra, thank you for the thumbs up. OK. If you have questions, keep them coming in the zoom chat. So we've chosen an image. We've edited the image so it's all optimized. And now we go to upload the image. So we upload it to a media library in WordPress. What do you do after you've uploaded the image to your media library? So in WordPress, when you open your media like or when you click on an image in your media library, you'll see a screen like this. This is one big image here and you'll see all these different settings in the right. And how many people? Oh, I'll pause this. Susan, you say, can I talk? They'll be easier than writing. Sure thing. You can unmute yourself and ask your question. Thanks, Ben. OK, I've been trying to write it down and it's like quite convoluted. So I think it might be easier. Please excuse the hardy doors birds outside, making a big noise. No problem. So Ma is actually my daughter-in-law and she asked me and, you know, daughters-in-law like tricky things to deal with when it comes to doing their website. And she's a material designer, so she's extremely perfectionist and she's got like two thousand more than two thousand five hundred images on her website. A lot of them were loaded at full. Like three and like huge. And yeah. It's, you know what? And so I have been trying to work on a site, but it's just been I did the smashes on there, so it's kind of optimised a bit. I used Squish to like try and sort out a homepage, but she's got a portfolio page with thousands of images and she's used essential grid. To upload those images through WP Bakery. And it's not very complicated and for me, because I'm quite a beginner. And I'm trying to like figure out an easy way. I mean, I don't mind doing the hard work, but it's just going to cost a lot of money and time to both for each one manually, which I did on the homepage. But with Smash, you can see there isn't an option to check on the page whether the image is the correct optimisation. You know, there's that. There isn't things that keeps telling me that this image is not the right size and what have you. But yeah, so I just wanted to know. Yeah, like how to handle. I think I don't know. Maybe I can send you afterwards the web sites to have a look at and see if there's anything that you can suggest. I don't know if there's anything. I mean, maybe it will help people that are on this call as well. Yeah, yep. Yeah, yeah, it's just. This site is huge. Yeah. Just to clarify, does this site itself load quickly or slowly? Well, the home page is looking a lot better because it's just a few images there that are. But thank you for the information about compress because I know when you go on to her picture on the main hero image, it says that are compressed. So I'm just taking it out. But her portfolio page is quite slow. It's because of. Yeah, all the all the photos listed there, I mentioned. Yeah. So regarding the portfolio page, a quick answer is can you try and categorize the portfolio and create? That's what I wanted to do. Yeah, sub pages. So you're not loading all the images, all that one. That's exactly what I wanted to offer. I suggest to her. But she's like, no, this is how I've done it. And this is how I want it. The other thing is I didn't speak to someone and they suggest suggested lazy loading, which I tried. But when I did lazy loading, nothing came up. Like, yeah, yeah. Really? It didn't. So for those listening to the question, you mentioned Smush, which I think is this plug-in. Is this the one you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So this is a plugin that optimizes images for you. So if you've like used really large images, the plug-in is supposed to come and shrink the images down to optimize your site loading for you. Yeah, I personally haven't used the plug-in before, but just so people know what we're talking about. The other thing you mentioned was lazy load and lazy load is a technology that only loads pictures showing on the screen and all the pictures like off the screen will only load when people scroll up is the technology. The problem is some things conflict with that. So you said when you turned that on. Yeah, you said when you turn that on images in load. So lazy load is a good option for a lot of things, but it sounds like there might be a conflict there. OK. Yeah. Which is a pain because that's what the answer is. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Why don't you share me the site link and I can have a look at it later as well. On the very last slide, I'll have my Slack and Twitter links so you can use either of those to connect with me. The other thing you might want to do is try talking to your daughter-in-law and about that portfolio page. So it takes time to load. It might look aesthetically nice, but search engines lately have been demoting pages that take too long and not showing them in search results. So a train of thought you might be able to share with her is it might look really nice. But if search engines are recommending the page, then people aren't going to come and see it. And so it's better to have a page that loads quicker so search engines can recommend it. Do you get people to see yourself rather than keeping with everything on the same page? I'm not sure if that will work, but that's something you can try with her. Yeah, I was thinking because to me it's just that it's just everything she's done. But there's no segmentation. Yeah, you don't want to undo everything she's done. This is the thing that she's SEO is her main thing. And that is why she doesn't want to even change her theme or anything because she's so scared of losing all her SEO. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's connect later about that a bit more. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Vagina said also dropped a comment here as a temporary solution. Jetpack's image CDN may help with speed. So CDN I personally don't like it. I don't like it. But other services offer a CDN as well. So actually later on in my present in my presentation, we will talk briefly about CDNs and what they are. So we'll come back to that a bit later. But yeah, I hear you. It sounds like you're in a tough position. And maybe you can share the recording of this session with your daughter and she can watch it and maybe that will help her understand the benefits of just changing her thinking slightly about some things will actually gain her more audience on her website. Yeah, thanks, Ben. All right. OK. So coming back to the slides here, we were looking at so after you upload the image, what should you do next to get the image optimized? So when you click on an image, you'll see all these settings on the right. What are these? So at the very top, we have alternative text. We see that here and somebody mentioned early in the Zoom this is the most important thing regarding image SEO. And yes, it is important. So alternative alternative text is text attached to an image that is shown when an image itself is not shown on the website for any particular reason. So, for example, if someone is on a very slow internet connection, the browsers have a setting that says don't load images and that can help speed up things. So if people have that sitting on, then they don't see your image. In that case, your website will show the alternative page instead of the image. Or people with assistive technologies, for example, screen readers, who use these technologies to look at your site, they might not be able to see your image. And so the screen reader will read out the alternative text to explain what the image is about. So alternative text is text added to an image and also search engines look at search engines still have a hard time figuring out what an image is about. And so they look at the alternative text to understand what the image is showing. And so there are lots of cases where alternative text is important. So as a rule of thumb, you want to add alternative text to pretty much every image on your website. But there are some exceptions. For example, if an image is just purely decorative, like it's a board on your website or maybe a fancy line between your widgets and your main content, then images like that don't need alternative text. And W3 W3 is like the leader in the world regarding web accessibility. They've given a decision tree or a guideline here as to when to add alternative text and when not to add alternative text. So it has a question here. Does this image contain text if it's a yes, then it'll give you some more information about what alternative text to add. If it says no, you come down to the next question. You read the question. If it said if you answer yes, then you look at here to see what alternative text you should add. If no, you come down to the next question, etc. So this decision tree here is very useful. Once you get into the hang of it, you won't have to come back to this all the time. You'll sort of get the rules in your mind so you'll be able to figure out when you need alternative text and when you don't. So if you're looking into having better image SEO, I recommend you take a moment to have a look at this. Use it to decide whether some of your images need alternative text or not. And yeah, use it as a guideline in determining alternative text. I know alternative text is talked about a lot regarding image SEO. Did anybody have any questions about this specifically before we move on? I just want to say this presentation is probably going to go long, maybe 10 minutes or so over time. So if you plan to just stay for 60 minutes, I understand if you have to step out, the session will be recorded and posted afterwards so you can catch up on the last few slides afterwards. But I just want to tell people up in advance. I think there's a lot of content here we're trying to get through. So it will probably go about 10 minutes or so later. Yeah. OK, Susan, you've got the question. I started watching an accessibility training yesterday and it mentioned that if you have a few images with the same alternative text, just add a number after it. Huh, I've never heard that. So is that so does the first image have alternative text and then a one and then the second and third and fourth just have a two and a three and a four? Ben, yeah, sorry. So yeah, it's just if you have, like, say, this exact same one that I'm talking about, she has got like a house and she's showing a few images from the library or something. So they're all the library. Yeah, I'm trying to get creative or I've been just putting the same thing. But then I thought like that must confuse SEO to have all of them saying the library just for what's the library. That's the library one, the library two. You can do that. Oh, I see. OK, so it changes it. It's not like, yeah, identical, which one. Yeah, yeah. OK, well, that makes sense because if people can't see the image and they'll say the library, then it's like, do you have the same library picture ten times or are they all different library pictures? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for sharing. Pleasure. Yeah, all right. So a comment about alternative text and this is specifically WordPress. For example, say you upload an image into your media library, you add the image to your page or post and then you go, I forgot to edit the alternative text. So you come back to your media library and edit the alternate text there. That updated alternative text will only appear when you add your image new on new content. So it doesn't go back and update the images you've already added to your content. So that's why I recommend adding alternative text as soon as you upload your image to your media library before you go adding it to your content. And because once you've added it to your content, what you'll have to do is then go through each piece of content and individually update the alternative text in the block settings on the right, which you can do if you want. But just to save some time at the alternative text first in the media library before adding your image to your content. All right. So there are other settings. There's the title setting, the caption setting and the description setting. To be particularly completely honest, these don't relate to image SEO that much. So the title setting here is used as a title when showing all your images in your media library. So it doesn't actually show on your main site in really. It will show if you have media attachment pages set up on your site. So this is a WordPress feature when you click on an image, you can set it so that the image, say, takes you to another page or you can set it so that the image itself opens up in a new tab or you can have it set so that the image takes you to the media attachment page for that image. If you've never heard of media attachment pages, then you probably don't need them. But if your site is set up to use media attachment pages, that's where this title is used. So if you ever figured out, do I need this title? Do I not need this title? Most people don't need the title. Captions, on the other hand, are shown on your pages. So if you set a caption in your media library, when you add the image to a new piece of content, the caption will show under the image. Captions are usually something good to add. When I mentioned earlier, people skim through a piece of content before they actually read it. They look at the headings, they look at the images. When they look at the images, people say, research says people do read the captions under the image. And so if the image is particularly important to your content, then adding a relevant caption that is beneficial. If the image is just for fun or like decoration, then you don't need to add a caption to that. But if it's a meaningful image, then adding a caption is a good idea. And finally, the description setting, this is also shown on media attachment pages. So it doesn't usually appear on your site. It only shows on media attachment pages. So I'm looking at the chat here, Susan. Oh no, that's a problem. That is one of the things she has asked me to do, to go back to all the images without alternative text and fix that. So you're probably talking about this slide here. That's just the way WordPress works. So if you have to go back and add alternative text to all the images, I don't know that a quick way to solve that. Sandra, you say, is it a problem to insert the same text on alternative text and the caption? I don't think it's a problem specifically, but the two have slightly different purposes. The alternative text describes what is in the image specifically. So for example, the alternative text could say, a man standing on the top of a hill in front of a sunset. But then the caption gives meaning to the picture. So it could be me watching a sunset on my 30th birthday. So the alternative text describes what is seen in the picture and the caption describes the meaning behind the picture. So sometimes they could be the same, but I think in more cases, they might be different. Does that answer your question? Understand. Thanks. Okay. All right. So we've chosen a good image. We've processed the image before uploading it. We've uploaded the image and take the image out for success. Now we finally add the image to our content. So the first rule about image SEO, or not first rule, sorry, this rule about image SEO is place the image close to the relevant text. So as I mentioned before, when a search engine looks at an image, it looks at the information around the image to figure out what the image is about. So it looks at the alternative text. It looks at the caption. It looks at the image file name, but it will also look at the content written near the image to figure out what the image is about. So try and position your images so they're near the pieces of text that are relevant. So that's that rule. Another rule is always add a featured image to your posts, your WordPress posts. So WordPress posts and pages have a featured image setting in the right hand sidebar. Featured images are generally shown when you share the link to your content. So if you share your link on social media, a lot of social media now will show a preview of your content. And in that preview, they will usually take your featured image. And so once again, images, we're using images, image SEO is to use images to bring people to your site. And so you will generally want to add a featured image to every post so that when you or even other people share your content, an image pops up to get people's attention and bring them to your site. One thing to remember is that the featured image setting in WordPress doesn't have an alternative text setting. But if you've set the alternative text already in your media library, then when you set the featured image, the alternative text will be there. You can't see it, but it will be there in the background. So before you set your featured image, make sure alternative text is set in your media library so that when you set your featured image, the alternative text is there with it. Sangra, which size do you recommend for a featured image? That is a good question. It is a good question because some social media specify featured images must be a certain size or more. I don't have the number in my head. What size should WordPress featured images be? All right, so HubSpot is like a pretty good website. It's probably reliable. And they say 1,200 times 628. So, Sangra, that's about the best answer I can give you right now. I do know some social media, if you use a really small featured image, it won't show the image in previews. And I think if you use a really small image, WordPress will give you a warning as well, saying the image is too small. So 1,200 times 628 pixels at least is probably the answer here. All right, let's see. Okay, so these are all the points that contribute to better image SEO. So that's a lot to be honest. I think I've given you 15 tips so far. Don't feel overwhelmed. What I suggest is just trying from one point. For example, if you haven't been in the habit of adding alternative text, get into the habit of adding alternative text. Just focus on that. And then once you're getting used to that, the next you can think about your file sizes or your file name or maybe your image format. And so slowly build your image SEO skills. If you try to do all this all at once, I think you'll get tired and it won't succeed. So my recommendation is just try a different step one at a time and build on top of each other so that just thinking about image SEO becomes natural when building your website. And I did have three more fairly technical concepts I wanted to share regarding image SEO. For the average blogger like me, this isn't something I consider all the time. But if you're like operating a online store or you really want to dig into SEO to grow your audience, then these are some technical things you also want to keep in mind. So the first one is CDN and that came up before. Graduates, you recommended Jetpack CDN. Susan, you said you didn't really like Jetpack, but CDN stands for content delivery networks. What it is is when you take out a hosting plan, your host has the main servers somewhere in the world. So it could be say Tokyo, Japan, that's where the main servers are. So if people in Japan are looking at my website, Tokyo is fairly close, so that's okay. But say people in Europe or America or the exact opposite of Japan is Brazil. So people in Brazil are looking at my website and they have to get content all the way from the servers in Tokyo, then that has to cross so many oceans, so many countries before it finally reaches Brazil. And so the loading time on the website gets slower. So what a lot of hosting companies do is while the main server is in Tokyo, they'll set up CDN servers all over the world, which they store a copy of your website. So if somebody in Brazil wants to connect to my website, they just have to connect to the closest CDN server, which could be in Brazil or it could be in Argentina or it could be even in North America is still closer than Japan. And so this speeds up the loading time on websites because information doesn't have to travel so far. Now there are services out there specifically for images. So website text is fairly quick to load, but images, especially if you have really good quality images, can take a lot of time to load. And so you can purchase image CDN services with different companies that should be able to speed up your image loading time. Now, one thing you want to be careful is if your web host already has CDN turned on and you try and make a second CDN with another service, then that can slow things down. So you just want one CDN service. So check with your web host, see if they have CDN turned on. If they don't, then look online for image CDN services and you can find different services that will help you load your images quicker. Susan, you say, I think Cloud Flare is quite good and I think comes with the free plan. So Cloud Flare, they offer a lot of CDN service, not just images, they offer video CDN and security and other services as well. So Cloud Flare is a good option. Let's see, Vagula says indeed, but Cloud Flare requires name server changes, which is okay, but more technical for some people. So name server changes domain settings. So I've done online workshops about domains too and we've talked about name server. So if you're interested in that, I can recommend that information. But yes, Cloud Flare is good, but it's with any service. You have to look at the pros and cons, like does Cloud Flare is good, but you might have to change a lot of other settings. This other place might be easier, but you might have to pay a small fee. So you'll have to weigh up all the options, but CDN is one thing you do want to turn on on your site to speed up loading times. And there are a few options that you can do that, which you'll want to look into. All right, another thing is data called structured data. And this is a particular type of data that tell information about the type of content you are showing. So this is a fairly new technology and it's adding more data behind the image. So you don't actually see anything. It's data on the backend, specifically for Search Engine. And at the moment, the structured data that relates to images is regarding products and recipes. So if your site is showing pictures of products or pictures of recipes, then do a Google search and figure out how you can incorporate structured data into your website. If your website is showing other images, then structured data is not that important at the moment. If you're showing products or recipes, you can look further into structured data. And there are some plugins that help you set up structured data on your site. So Yoast SEO schema and WP SEO structured data schema. These are just, oh, and so one more schema and structured data for WP and AMP. These four plugins are options to set up structured data on your site. I'm not gonna go into details, but if you have products or recipes, this is something else you can look into. And finally, Open Graph Tags. So Open Graph Tags tell popular social networks how to show your content on their services. So by default, the featured image should be the image that shows up on different networks when you share your link. But sometimes you might want to change it. So you have a special featured image on your site, but you want a separate image to show up on social networks when you share your content. In that case, what you want to edit is your Open Graph Tags. So again, this is getting pretty technical here. So I'm not gonna go into details, but there are plugins that can help you generate and edit Open Graph Tags. So if you're interested, Yoast SEO, only one WPSEO and Jetpack Social are some of these plugins and that can help you edit Open Graph Tags. Again, the default WordPress is pretty good with this. It's only if you want to start changing how your content appears on other social networks that you want to look into these. Phew. So that was a lot of content. Were there any final questions here before I moved into my final slides? I really appreciate everyone staying back 10, almost 50 minutes late now. Hopefully you've learned some new things that you can take back with him. Again, I've shared the slides in the Zoom chat here. I'll also share it later once the recording goes up. The recording page will have a link to the slides. So you'll be able to look at that again and share it with people. So I just have two more slides to share. The first one is, today we talked about image SEO specifically. Last week I did a session about general SEO but that was for a more America-oriented time zone. So if you want to learn about general SEO, I'm actually doing the session again on December 19th. The same time as today. So you can, this slide links to that workshop. You can bring your SEO questions and we'll see if I can answer them again. But yeah, if you're interested in general SEO, there's another online workshop coming up. And finally, thank you for attending. This slide has my Slack profile and also my Twitter profile. So if you want to reach out to me, you can reach me there. There are two surveys I wanted to just promote here. The first one is the 2022 WordPress Survey. So every year the WordPress organization does a survey to ask the community, how is your experience with WordPress? And this went live just today or yesterday, I think. I mean, it's open for the entirety of December and then they will collect the information and share that with the community next year. So if you haven't taken the survey yet, this is fresh off the press, please do enter the survey. I won't see the results but it will help decide the future of WordPress, especially for 2023. And the second survey I wanted to share was the Individual Learner Survey. And so this survey is run by the training team in the WordPress community, my team. And this survey, we're trying to find what content people want to learn about WordPress. So today we had 14 people in this online workshop. That is great. What topics do you want to learn in future online workshops? Or maybe this interactive video session isn't the best type of format for you. Well, what other formats would you like? So this Individual Learner Survey is to help us decide how we can better serve you in the new year, making new content. So two surveys there, again, none are compulsory but it will help the WordPress community. Okay, that's it, that's all. Thank you everyone for your time. Thank you for the great questions, everyone. Thank you, Susan, for turning your mic on and just stepping on and being brave and asking us questions. And yeah, I look forward to seeing you all in another online workshop in future. Bye, everyone.