Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use Hello, hello. Welcome back.

Meredith: 1:01

Yes. Welcome back.

Meredith's Husband: 1:03

Been on our summer vacay. I guess I don't know. Yeah. been calling it.

Meredith: 1:07

Yeah, I think that's a that's a good name.

Meredith's Husband: 1:12

We have a question today. Yeah, we do. And it's something that we've talked about before, I think on at least one may have probably mentioned it a few times. But it's a good question. So I want to go over it again. Because I'm kind of surprised. I'm surprised at what I keep hearing out there. In terms of the advice I keep seeing and hearing certain bits of advice. And there, I'm really surprised that this kind of persistent myth is still going. So

Meredith: 1:36

they need to listen to the podcast, obviously.

Meredith's Husband: 1:40

But let's first let's go over the question. What is

Meredith: 1:43

the question? Yes, the question. Drumroll, please. Dremo. Is our tags to be effective, should be written for accessibility, which is their original purpose as the primary goal. And from what I know, Google looks favorably on Google looks favorably on this not just loading up all tags with keywords.

Meredith's Husband: 2:13

And this was sent to us as like, Please confirm this. This was a not a statement of fact sent to us. But then somebody was like, Is this true? Do I have this? Right? Correct. Correct. And, and that is true. That is a very, I don't think I probably could have said it that much better. Like that's exactly right. But the thing that I keep seeing and I keep hearing people say is be sure to tag your images, either directly or implied in that statement is tag your images with your keywords. Yes. Put your put your keywords in your image tags. Yeah. So that's, that's at best. That's very outdated that Yes. From years ago? Yeah. More likely. It's kind of dangerous. Oh, yeah. Because yes, if if you do that, you are essentially you're stuffing keywords into your website where they really should

Meredith: 3:03

have a burrito you can't even eat because it's too big. You can eat you can eat

Meredith's Husband: 3:07

any burrito. Burrito? Yes. Yeah, keyword stuffing is bad because that. And I think we've gone over this concept in the past before, a lot of SEO is just not raising any red flags with the Google to make it look like you're trying too hard to optimize your website. So interesting. Remember, the I know I've mentioned this before the team of the team at Google, there's a team of people, it's a big huge team has lots of people doing this, but the team that's in charge of determining rankings, which websites are at the top, which are at the bottom, which don't get ranked the name of that team is the spam team. And their job is to eliminate the spam, it's to get rid of sites that are trying to spam their system. So if you are stuffing keywords into your image tags, you're raising your hand and you're saying, hey, Google, I'm spamming. Please look at me. I'm spamming you. Like,

Meredith: 4:05

almost like you're trying too hard. Yes, it's not natural. And they really do want things to be, which is fantastic.

Meredith's Husband: 4:14

Yeah, well, they don't get I mean, they don't want to send their users to websites, where some SEO is just trying to up to stuff keywords in every corner. In order to get good rankings. They want to send their users to websites that are really good. And well run and have the users interest at at heart. Yeah, though, the way I think about this conceptually and tell me if this helps, but have you I mean, I'm sure you've been to a place to buy something, whether it's a clothing store, I don't know if you've ever been in one of those. No. car lot, no matter what things. Imagine, you know, the sales person who is like just too pushy. Yeah, they're just trying way too hard. Yes. They're trying hard to the point where like, you kind of don't trust anything they're selling because they're trying so hard.

Meredith: 4:59

Yeah. Or it seems desperate. Yes. Forced.

Meredith's Husband: 5:03

That's what you're doing when you stuff keywords like you are. You're the pushy salesman, trying to get Google to rank your

Meredith: 5:10

person. Let's just use salesperson. What did I say? Salesman.

Meredith's Husband: 5:15

You know what? I practiced that beforehand? Myself, don't say salesman. Yeah, don't say sales woman, say salesperson. And I still have.

Meredith: 5:26

It's okay. We're only human. And Google likes that.

Meredith's Husband: 5:31

I know. That's true. That's true. And so a couple other thoughts along these lines, as people will say, Well, you know, some, some people have asked me, they haven't said, but they've asked me, Well, does that help you get your images ranked? When you do an image search? Or you do a search and you see images in Google search results? Yeah. Do the image tags. That's what's helped you get ranked there, right? No, not really. No, that's actually a little more contextual. So what you put in? Yeah, what you put in your image tags doesn't really matter so much as it is what what that image is in context, like, what else is on that webpage? Is that is that image right? And beneath a heading that says sex? Yeah, well, you're not gonna rank for sex. But let's just say, you know, you have you have a picture of an apple, and it's right beneath a big heading that says juggling monkey. Right. Well, you might find your picture of an apple when you do a search for juggling monkey. Yeah. So it's much more contextual. And I have, I have huge, huge clients who, who have asked me about you, obviously, who do that who say, Oh, we need to tag your images. So they show up? And I'm like, well, that's, I mean, it might help a tiny bit. I'm not gonna say don't do that. But it's not the determining factor.

Meredith: 6:51

Yeah, if you're gonna put your energy in something that is not it. My question is juggling monkeys. Are you juggling? Monkeys? No. Monkeys are juggling. The monkeys

Meredith's Husband: 7:01

are juggling. Okay, just one. They don't seem like they would want to be juggled. No, like, no, that's clever. I asked. Yeah. Anyway, so this is, this is great advice, telling you all the things not to do. So I figured I would throw in maybe what you should do. Instead. Yeah. Good. I. So this, this is this is what I when I'm writing image, alt texts, and I don't do that, like every day, but when I do it, I try. I think of the sentence and I think I've I've mentioned this on the on an episode before too. How would you finish this sentence? This is a picture of and then fill in the blank. Juggling monkeys? Yeah, and that case,

Meredith: 7:42

perfect. Monkey, juggling apples.

Meredith's Husband: 7:47

There you go. Yeah, it's just a short phrase, there's no official length or rule of, you know, words to include or not to include, I wouldn't include stop words, because they're gonna take up too much room stop words or things like a have and the things like that. So just just include the important words. And the Short. Short, yeah, I mean, it's good. It's because you're going to be limited. Yeah, I would say for, you know, 234, or five words, somewhere in there. Because imagine, if anybody were to see this, it's going to be in a situation where images are not loading. And instead, this text is loading. So images, a lot of times are not that big. So you can't fit like a full sentence in. Right, it's got to be just a few a few words. And that's another way to do it. Like try to think if you were if this if you were creating an image tag for a page on your site, and that site was loading and live person didn't see the images for for whatever reason, they have images turned off, or they have, they're just slow to load or whatever reason, if that image didn't display, what would be the one or two or three or four or five words that you would want them to see to let them know, Hey, you're there's an image here, and this is what it is, but you're not seeing it. That's the purpose of an old tech.

Meredith: 9:03

I also think if you have a very small physical tag, and you only have a very small space to describe your image, or else you write it, whatever you write will not fit in the tag. They can fit in the tack.

Meredith's Husband: 9:18

Yeah, well, I'm better but you don't know. Yeah. If it's a small tag, yes. If it's a small image, if it's a tiny little image, yeah, you're not going to have much room. So just keep that in mind. Also, if it's a if it's a full width image that spans the, you know, the width of your browser window, then you could probably fit fit more words

Meredith: 9:36

on there. But what if they're looking on it on their phones, then there's a little tiny

Meredith's Husband: 9:40

space. It'll be smaller. Yes. Actually, just

Meredith: 9:45

a tiny, tiny physical tag that you can write and you have to write with a crown. So not much space.

Meredith's Husband: 9:52

Yeah. All right. That sounds good. Okay. So well, I want to go a little like one step further. And yeah. Can you ever put in keywords should you ever put in keywords what keywords should those be how to approach that because that you can put keywords in there if if they are appropriate, but they're not always appropriate. Which ones so for for example, you finish the sentence this is a picture of right. If if you have a picture on your on your on your website, Emeritus, zeners matters inner photography.com and you have a picture of a of a family. Or let's say it's a kid. Yeah. Picture of a kid. Yeah. Would you would you tag that children's photographer. No, no, you would not? If it were a picture of you taking a picture of a kid, then that could be children's photographer.

Meredith: 10:44

I think it might be adorable children's photographer.

Meredith's Husband: 10:48

Well, obviously, the page is adorable, right? So sometimes if it's appropriate, yes, if you're, if you're a children's photographer, and you have a picture of a family, you can throw in some related terminology that, you know, people might be using family portrait family, you know, a happy picture for a holiday card, or whatever it is, you can be a little

Meredith: 11:13

credit card picture, because we don't want that you're right. Good call.

Meredith's Husband: 11:17

So yes, thanks, thinking on your feet. Yeah, I've seen this like, and this is something that has been massively abused. I used to be a consultant on like, small business sites. And I was like, I got this a lot of times, like, let's, one that sticks out in memory was like a New York Attorney Lawyer. I'm pretty sure it was an injury attorney. And like, so he's got, I don't know, 2030 pages on his website and 100 photos and every single photo, had the image alt tag, New York City injury attorney, like, don't do that. That is like, that's, yeah, it's better to not have any alt text and to do that, to be honest.

Meredith: 11:58

Is it? Is it? Is it good to vary each description?

Meredith's Husband: 12:05

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Don't have pizza. Unless, unless you have the same image repeated over and over. Yeah, that's very. So

Meredith: 12:11

if you have a whole bunch of images, let's just say, one kit. You don't want to say portrait of portrait child? On each one? Would you want to take advantage and say, Kid picture?

Meredith's Husband: 12:29

Yes. If if are you thinking of something that's like an image gallery, like, let's say you have a shoot, and you put up a dozen photos on a single page and kind of a gallery format? Yes, you would want to do something along the lines of, you know, image, one of 12 kid playing in the park on a playground or whatever, and indicate to somebody, remember, you're trying to indicate somebody who can't see those photos, what it is that's on the screen. So try to indicate that it's an image gallery, and then what it is, then you could reuse the same term, like a kid playing with his sister, one of five or one of 10, something like that. I had a client who was sued for that reason. There was an image gallery, and he didn't tag the images he had in a gallery. So he had a gallery, there's like 60 images in the gallery. He didn't tag them, because it's a gallery, and he would just end up naming them all the same thing. So he didn't do anything. And he was sued by one of these kind of frivolous accessibility lawsuits. And when pressed, you know, we pressed very hard for them to explain why they were and they said, Well, this image gallery, my client can't determine what these images are.

Meredith: 13:41

So So you do want to put something?

Meredith's Husband: 13:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do want to put something, but you don't want to stuff it. But don't stuff it. Yeah, that is a great tagline. don't stuff it.

Meredith: 13:53

Don't stuff it. Let it breathe. Yeah, it's just like, if you have a stuffed animal, you don't want to overstuff it, because then it's gonna look really sick,

Meredith's Husband: 14:03

fat animal,

Meredith: 14:04

it's gonna look miserable. Yeah, it's gonna be miserable. But if it's stuffed, just right. It's adorable. Okay, thanks for that. Any time.

Meredith's Husband: 14:18

One other thing to mention, a lot of times on a on a on any website, you're gonna have some images that are design elements, some background image, it's a, it's like a vertical bar, it's whatever. You don't necessarily need to tag them as if they are design elements. If it's yeah, if it's I mean, because I don't know what you could tag them and say design element. Yeah, you know, vertical bar, horizontal bar, separator, whatever it is background image. You could do that.

Meredith: 14:48

Is it worth doing that?

Meredith's Husband: 14:51

If it's easy to do, I would probably do it. Like if something is a background image, you know, just say background image. You put something there. There are lawsuits going around like people do get sued for this stuff. It's typically in my experience, like independent professionals or are not. At least I haven't come across any of these people who have been sued. Yeah. The people or the companies that tend to get sued are the ones that can feasibly just write a check for 10 or$20,000. To just be like, go away, like I don't want to deal with it. Yeah, retail shops, event venues, stuff like that. And also, unfortunately, I know completely the same And companies get really targeted they get hit with these multiple times.

Meredith: 15:38

Oh, because they got away with it the first time they probably think like that,

Meredith's Husband: 15:41

kind of. And there's no, you know, unfortunately we were talking about accessibility lawsuits. There's no like official approval. You can't there's no board or anything that you can go and say, Is my site approved? Accessibility wise? There is no concrete answer of yes or no. Or what can you do to fix it? There's all this gray, there's all this gray area. Yeah. There's there's things that are crazy, like, oh, this text is a it's it's not distinct enough from the color of the backgrounds. So it's hard for colorblind people to see. And that's why you're being like, it's it's all sorts in like, what defines understand

Meredith: 16:18

that if you have to, yeah, but but making, you know, you're it seems like they are taking advantage,

Meredith's Husband: 16:26

because how do you how do you say no, this this text is a color that is distinct enough from the background? It is it's perfectly easy to read? And somebody says no, it's not? Well, there's no, there's no right or wrong there. Right. You know, so if the person says, Well, we're still suing you.

Meredith: 16:44

You know, I think people should choose kindness.

Meredith's Husband: 16:48

That's correct. I

Meredith: 16:49

think we should just if we all just chose kindness and consideration. It'd be a lot nicer. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 16:58

Okay, well, that was a nice kind of segue. That was that was a segue topic, or off topic now.

Meredith: 17:06

Yeah, I don't know. Because I that's all I think,

Meredith's Husband: 17:09

anyway, the point was to help people with their image, Tex, I hope that helps. I hope that clarifies it. Don't don't like when so when you hear that advice? Don't think, Oh, I have to do this. And also, what is kind of implied with that advice is you need to take your keywords, whatever your keywords are, and just spread them all over your site, like, every single page, that's something else you don't want to do. So that you see how that advice is just very lends itself to situation that's going to actually hurt your rankings, right?

Meredith: 17:37

When people think I'm doing the right thing. I'm putting all my eggs in this, but secretly, they're smothering and stuffing too much,

Meredith's Husband: 17:48

right? Yeah. When in doubt, don't try to like trick Google, like, just try to think how can I make this site really good for users? If you're making your site really good for users, you're not gonna get penalized for that. Like, I guarantee you, if you're doing something that makes your user experience better. Yeah, Google is not going to take away any rankings for that. Kind of worst worst case scenario is just won't do anything either way. Right. But that's that.

Meredith: 18:14

Thank you. You're well, I hope that answers your question. Yeah. And I hope you stay tuned.

Meredith's Husband: 18:22

Yeah, we'll be back soon. Since. Wonderful, luxurious vacation. That's more of a staycation. Yeah. Wait, yeah. Okay. So we'll see you soon.

Meredith: 18:34

Thank you. We missed you. Bye, bye.

Meredith's Husband: 18:43

I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO was not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like. Or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening.