In the past we have discussed the considerations needed to make Flash and Silverlight based applications search friendly, but we purposely left out two big elements of rich design: videos and images. We left those out so that we could open a separate discussion on the best practices for both videos and images.
Without further ado, here are the things you need to know in order to make your videos and images count toward your search-friendliness, improve your search rank and ultimately improve website conversion.
Optimizing Video Content for Search
Google specifically takes a vested interest in video-based content because it owns YouTube, and displays videos often above the fold. This is part of an approach called universal search and is an effort to zero-in on users' needs more quickly. Additionally, because there is significantly less video content competing for high rank (especially videos that are well optimized and tagged) there is huge room for growth in this arena.
The first thing that you need to decide is where you are hosting it, and this largely depends on your goal for the video.
Maximize Views - If this is your goal, it is better to host the video on a sharing site like You-Tube that will leverage the built-in traffic of the third-party-site
Bringing Customers to your site - Embed on your site in order to increase the volume of your site's search referrals. Embed inside your site; keep them on your site
The next step in your video optimization magic is to create an optimized title and description and URL, which shouldn't be altogether too different from your web pages. Be sure to include the keyword or search term that you believe will best describe and trigger the video. Avoid tags and links within the title and description, as people are less likely to understand the subject of the material.
Length is an issue that can often deter people from actually watching a video. It's best to think about video length in terms of microwaving, yes microwaving. Think about how difficult it is to wait 5 minutes for your food to be ready. IT SEEMS LIKE FOREVER. Because microwaving has the implied 'speed' element to it, time becomes relative. This is the same principle when it comes to most content online, videos in particular. If it takes 5 minutes or longer to deliver key messages, you are probably about to lose someone. So what if your video is 10 minutes+? Breaking it up into smaller sections will likely be the best bet.
Now down to more technical elements. If you have multiple videos on your website, it is a good idea for you to create a video site map, to give the search engines better descriptions to index. Best practices dictate that including the video file, an image, a title and a description will provide the best results.
Last but not least, make your video known. Promotion is often the key to success, and videos are no different. Make it easy for people to find your video by posting it on your company's social media (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) accounts.
Optimizing Images for Search
Google also ranks images in its Universal Search feature, so well-optimized images can be another entry point for your website. Not only do images assist with the visual interest of your content, people will be more likely to read your blog or article if the text is artfully broken up. As far as the search optimization portion, there are a few key things you can do.
One of the first steps is to have descriptive and keyword rich file names; this gives the search engine bots more text to crawl. Captioning is one of the best ways to attach keyword rich text to your images. Not only does it better describe your image and its source to people reading your content, but it also gives the spiders text to associate with the images, improving your SERP (search engine results page) rank.
Because there are so many different ways to access content (different browsers, devices, etc.) Alt tags can be an excellent contingency plan. What an Alt (alternate) tag does is fill in for an image if the device or browser is unable to render the image. It fills the space in with the text that you provide in order to inform the reader and give the search engines additional pieces of text to crawl.
The overall thesis of these articles we have written is: don't let your rich media count against your conversion optimization and search visibility goals. Part of this is having a trusted technology partner like Amadeus Consulting, who can not only assist you in the creating of rich Internet application development, but can also optimize your content for your bottom line goals.
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