With all the text and background SEO factors it’s pretty easy to forget about the way your site looks.
Graphics, photos, videos and other bits of media flood our posts and pages in an effort to make our sites a better overall experience, but that’s not all our media inserts are good for.
Every stitch of media can be optimized for better search results with Flash elements being the exception to the rule. Flash offers nothing in terms of SEO value.
Photo SEO: On Page Media Optimization
If your site is even remotely similar to existing websites then there’s a good chance you’ll use photos as your main source of media on web pages and posts. It’s hard to argue with their visual results. Pages look better on average when text is broken up by visual aids making the material easier to engage and read.
Aesthetics aren’t the only goal you can accomplish with a good pic. They can also be used to increase traffic and to improve your search results in engines like Google and Yahoo.
Once again we come back to the all powerful keyword. We’ve been telling you how important your keyword is from the start and your keyword selection matters even here.
Search engines parse through nearly everything on your website including your photos. If your keyword phrase was ‘black sunglasses’ and you posted a photo of a pair of black sunglasses that photo should be called ‘black sunglasses’, not ‘pic4573’.
Google bots can’t ‘see’ like you and I. They have no idea what is in an image, but they can ‘read’ text associated with a photo. If the file name of your photo carries your keyword and the alternate text for the seeing impaired has it as well you can be sure of some added SEO benefit on those search terms.
Besides making your pages pretty photos can create real gains in terms of media SEO .
Video SEO: On Page Streaming
Next to photos, videos are the most widely used media element that beautifies a website. They can engage your audience and make your site more interactive with a minimum amount of work.
Similar to photos, videos can carry some level of media SEO with them to increase your site’s profile in Google searches. Whether you are linking to, embedding or installing video directly onto your website the file name is a determining factor. The closer the filename is to your keyword, or containing your keyword, the better.
Additional SEO benefits can be gained from turning the speech in the video into text. Videos today can have their dialogue converted to text which is attached to the background of the video where search engine bots can find it. If the dialogue contains your keyword you’ll add just that much more weight to your video seo.
The SEO Impotence of Flash Content
One thing is for sure, flash elements can make your site dynamic and beautiful but they don’t help much in terms of optimization. At present there simply isn’t any information, textual or otherwise, that can be added to a flash file that allows Google’s search engine bots to scan it.
If it’s SEO benefits you are after flash content is not for you.
Taking the time to maximize the SEO benefits from all of your online media can help you win the battles between competing websites for visitors and traffic. Use all the SEO weapons on hand and start coming out on top in Google searches.
