Simple Image SEO Tactics to Boost Your Podcast Website Rankings

Dave Jackson:
Today, I've got some minor tweaks, super low hanging fruit that you can do to your image to boost your SEO.

Meg the AI Voice:
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

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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.

Dave Jackson:
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 service. Here's a quick promo. Are you ready to take your podcast to the next level? Yes.

Dave Jackson:
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Dave Jackson:
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Meg the AI Voice:
Find this show and all of Dave's other projects at power of podcasting.com.