SEO, as we all know, facilitates websites to become effective for web surfers by enhancing the site’s relevant visibility on search engines. It sustains the mutual-beneficial relationship with web visitors via search activities. As a subset of SEM, we can imply that SEO counterparts the primary idea of Public Relations.
On the other hand, content is said to be multimedia if it blends two or more content forms. These content forms range from photos, text, videos, to graphics, animation, audio, and interactivity. Thus, a photo or text published on websites is treated as multimedia content because websites invite the mood of interactivity.
Hence, the marriage SEO to multimedia contents drills our mind on how we can make SEO principles work with multimedia contents. Here’s how.
Still Images (pictures, graphics)
Start optimizing still images through its filename. How?—set the chosen keywords as the name of the file. Opt for webdesign.jpg instead of image1.jpg. Next, use alt tags when embedding images into the site. HTML alt attribute (<img src=”webdesign.jpg” alt=”Web Design Service”> ) serves as the image’s supporting text if in case the picture or graphic can’t be displayed. Once the image has been embedded, supply a caption that will perfectly label the image. This text aids search engines to recognize the image context.
Additionally, if you are a code buff and social media savvy you can try indexing procedures by indicating the images in XML sitemap and submitting these in content and bookmarking sites such as Flickr or Pinterest.
Moving Images (videos, podcasts, animations)
Content within moving images itself can’t be crawled by search engines. That’s a fact. What you can do is to surround these materials with text that defines what it is inside the videos, podcasts or animations. First, have video metadata (title, description, keywords). Another good suggestion is complementing these multimedia materials with a transcript so that search engines may easily identify the idea.
However, don’t forget what you put on for still images optimization. Start optimizing moving images via its filenames, include these in the XML sitemap then market via social media sites.
Audio
Optimizing an audio material is a mixture of still and moving images optimization techniques. Fill the audio filename with descriptive words or phrases. Utilize ID3 metadata to augment the file’s information. This tag allows you to include title, artist, and audio description. Afterwards, put also a caption and text transcript. Doing this, search engines will be happy enough to know what your audio file is all about.
Multimedia SEO is basically placing a descriptive text that will surround the material. Now, do you really need SEO for multimedia contents?
Google’s universal search, internet as an “all-access” database of all forms of contents, and the rise of multimedia content!
These are just few reasons why you should optimize multimedia materials. SEO for multimedia can be your long overdue answer to Google’s Universal Search, which is the search system of listing all relevant results regardless of content type (photos, videos, graphic, animation, flipbooks, and animation). Also, I can’t imagine these days that internet stores only the text-based content. That is unthinkable because multimedia delivered via internet or embedded on websites is gaining and will continue to gain attention.
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