Chapter 11 — Exercises

Work these in order; they climb from recall to real diagnosis and planning. You will need a live web browser and, ideally, a site whose images and (if any) videos you can inspect — your own, your employer's, or a client's. Every tool named here is free. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in Appendix — Answers to Selected Exercises; odd-numbered items are worked there too. Attempt every item before you look.

Keep the chapter's two threads in mind throughout: accessibility first (alt text and captions exist for people, and the SEO rides along), and describe what you actually have (there is no way to keyword-stuff a photograph).

A. Recall and vocabulary

Exercise 11.1 — List the signals Google uses to understand an image. Mark which ones you control and which one is Google's own capability that you cannot tune.

Exercise 11.2 — Define alt text in your own words. State its first purpose (not the SEO one), and finish this sentence: "For a linked image, the alt text also acts as the ______."

Exercise 11.3 — What is EXIF data? Name one thing it really contains and one thing it does not reliably do for SEO.

Exercise 11.4 † — Define VideoObject and video key moments in one sentence each. Name the two ways Google can populate key moments.

Exercise 11.5 — What is a thumbnail, and why is it described as one of YouTube's biggest levers? Tie your answer to a metric.

Exercise 11.6 — Distinguish visual search from ordinary search in one sentence, and name Google's tool for it.

Exercise 11.7 — What is an image sitemap, and what does it help with — discovery or ranking? State the situation in which it is genuinely useful and the situation in which it is usually unnecessary.

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 11.8 — Explain why the alt text for the same photograph should sometimes be different on two different pages. Give a concrete example.

Exercise 11.9 † — The chapter says accessibility and image SEO "point the same direction" for alt text. Explain why doing alt text well for a screen-reader user also serves Google Images — and why the reverse (optimizing for Google at accessibility's expense) fails at both.

Exercise 11.10 — Rank these image-understanding signals from most to least reliable for image search, and justify the top and bottom: descriptive alt text; EXIF geotag; descriptive filename; surrounding page text.

Exercise 11.11 — Why is "never lazy-load your LCP image" a rule? Explain what Largest Contentful Paint is at a high level and what deferring the hero image does to it. (Full treatment is Chapter 16 — a sentence is fine here.)

Exercise 11.12 — A business embeds every video from YouTube and hosts none on its own site. Give one SEO benefit and one SEO cost of that choice, drawing on §11.4–11.5.

Exercise 11.13 — Explain, in the book's honest style, what video VideoObject markup and key moments can do and what they cannot promise.

Exercise 11.14 — Why does the chapter call YouTube "a search engine, not just a video host"? Name three levers that are particular to ranking on YouTube rather than on the web.

C. Diagnose the problem

For each scenario, name the most likely cause and the first thing you would check or fix. Some have more than one defensible answer — say why.

Exercise 11.15 † — A site's product photos are beautiful and its pages are relevant, but the images never appear in Google Images. On inspection, every image is loaded as a CSS background via JavaScript, not as an <img> tag. What is the likely problem, and what two fixes from this chapter apply?

Exercise 11.16 † — A blog's hero images are gorgeous 3–4 MB JPEGs. PageSpeed flags the pages as slow and the layout "jumps" as it loads. Name the two distinct image problems and the fix for each.

Exercise 11.17 — A how-to video has been embedded on a crawlable page for two months but never shows a thumbnail or video result in Search. List three eligibility requirements from §11.4 you would verify first.

Exercise 11.18 — A screen-reader user reports that a page "reads a long string of keywords where the pictures are." Diagnose what the developer did, why it's harmful, and the correct fix.

Exercise 11.19 — A retailer's competitor keeps appearing in Google Lens results for photographed products while the retailer never does, even though both sell the same items. Give two plausible, chapter-based reasons and the checks you'd run.

Exercise 11.20 — A local business spent a weekend geotagging its entire photo library's EXIF data to "win local image search." Weeks later, nothing changed. Explain why, and where its local signals actually come from (name the chapter).

D. On your own site (use a free tool)

Exercise 11.21 † — Run a free accessibility/alt-text audit on three important pages (use the WAVE tool, your browser's Lighthouse accessibility audit, or "View Page Source"). Record, per page: how many images have missing alt, how many are useless (IMG_1234 or stuffed), and how many genuinely describe the image. Write one sentence on the worst offender and how you'd fix it.

Exercise 11.22 — Open PageSpeed Insights (free) on your most image-heavy page. Find its Largest Contentful Paint element. Is it an image? Is that image a modern format (WebP/AVIF), correctly sized, and not lazy-loaded? Note one image change that would help. (Do not do the full Core Web Vitals work yet — that is Chapter 16.)

Exercise 11.23 — Research these keywords (video). On YouTube, type three questions your customers ask and record the autocomplete suggestions. Then search the best one and note the top three results' titles, thumbnails, durations, and whether they use chapters. Write a one-line brief for a video you could make to compete.

Exercise 11.24 — Pick one video you or your organization has published (on YouTube or on-site). Check its title, its first two description lines, its thumbnail, and whether it has chapters and accurate captions. Which single change would most improve its findability? Justify with §11.5.

E. Read the report / read the SERP

Exercise 11.25 † — Interpret this Search Console excerpt.

FIGURE E.1 — "A site's video indexing snapshot"              [constructed teaching example]
  Videos on submitted pages: 42
  Indexed as video: 11
  Not indexed as video: 31
    — "No video thumbnail": 18
    — "Video outside the viewport / not the main content": 9
    — "Unsupported video format": 4

Which line points to the biggest, most fixable problem, and what would you check first? What does the "not the main content" line imply about how Google decides to show a video thumbnail?

Exercise 11.26 — Sketch (in words or rough ASCII) the results for how to fix a running toilet. Mark where a video result and its key moments would appear, and explain what their presence tells you about the query's intent and the format you should build (connect to Chapter 10's "read the format off the SERP").

F. Myths, ethics, and judgment

Exercise 11.27 — Spot the myth. A popular thread claims: "The secret to Google Lens is embedding your target keywords in the image EXIF and adding a lens-optimize meta tag." Identify every false claim, and replace the whole thing with what actually helps images appear in visual search.

Exercise 11.28 † — Ethics/risk. Rivertown plans a "how to relight a furnace pilot light" video. Because this touches gas safety, list three things the video and its description should include to handle the topic responsibly, and explain how doing so also strengthens E-E-A-T (Chapter 5). Then say what the video should not do.

Exercise 11.29 — A marketer proposes auto-generating alt text for 5,000 images as "product name + 'best price' + city." Give the accessibility objection and the SEO objection, then propose a better automated approach that stays truthful.

G. The Strategy File (Rivertown Home Services)

Exercise 11.30 † — Extend Rivertown's image/alt-text plan. The water-heater guide (the page stuck at #11) currently has no images. Propose two specific images to add, write good alt text for each, give each a descriptive filename, and explain how each image helps three audiences at once (readers, Google Images, and Google Lens users).

Exercise 11.31 — Draft the full YouTube package for Rivertown's pilot-light video: a title, the first two description lines, four chapter labels with placeholder timestamps, and a one-line thumbnail concept. Justify each choice against §11.5.

Exercise 11.32 — Do Chapter 11's Strategy-File task on your own (or a client's) site: audit the images on your three most important pages against the chapter's alt-text standard, and identify one video you could realistically make to meet a real customer search. Produce a short written plan — an alt-text fix list plus a one-paragraph video brief. Solve the alt text; only plan the video.

Where these go next. Keep your answers to 11.21, 11.23, 11.30, 11.31, and 11.32 — the alt-text standard and the video brief are the media layer of your running Strategy File (Appendix C's worksheet). The performance findings from 11.16 and 11.22 feed directly into Chapter 16 (Core Web Vitals); the VideoObject plan feeds Chapter 18 (Structured Data).