How to Optimize Media for Content Search
Humans are a visual species. We can’t help but be drawn into eye-catching imagery. But, Googlebot doesn’t have that same instinct, which makes ranking images in Google a little tricky.?
If you’re looking to optimize visual content for search, you need to rethink your approach.
Search engine robots don’t fully understand how to disseminate the content in videos and images. So, whether we like it or not, text is still the top currency for SEO. The search engines have a much easier time reading and understanding words on a page over images and video clips.?
?With this in mind, how do you optimize your videos, images, and infographics so that people can find them?
Transcribe Audio and Video
Anything with vocals, for example, videos, webinars, podcasts, should all be transcribed. Write out what is said in the clip and structure it the same way you would a blog post with headings, links, etc.?
This will also make your content much more accessible for broader audience.?
On YouTube, you can add the transcription to your description. This is highly effective for ranking in YouTube searches.
*Quick side note: you should always upload these content types to third-party sites, like YouTube or iTunes. This will ensure top quality and it opens you up to other avenues of discovery.
Write It Out
In the same breath as transcribing your audio, for your infographics write out the information. Create a nice blog post from all that great info you’ve included in the infographic. You’ve got a (hopefully) beautiful piece of visual content, now all you have to do is supplement that with a bit of additional written detail. This a great opportunity to provide some supporting evidence and target those long-tail keywords. Plus, you now have a great piece of content to share on the web.
File Naming and ALT Tags
These two get overlooked so often. This is some low hanging fruit as far as on-page optimization goes. You’re so eager to get those beautiful images on your site that you overlook the ugly name of that image file and neglect to put in a descriptive ALT. Both of these are key in ranking in image search, but they also provide context to the page they are on. Be sure to use keywords related to your brand and the specific page the image is on. Lastly, this will give those visitors using a screen reader added information about the page.
If you’re using WordPress, there’s a fantastic free plugin that will let you rename image files without having to upload them again: Media File Renamer.
Compress For Speed
Pagespeed is so important for SEO. On mobile devices, page speed is even more necessary. So much so that Google introduced its own HTML markup for mobile speed called Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP for short.? Every millisecond you can shave off of that load time will have a positive effect.
Here’s where designers and SEO’s tend to diverge. Should you include beautiful, high-quality images or have a faster page load time? One compromise that works is lossless compression. What this does is remove superfluous and redundant data from the image file. This way you save much of the quality of your image while saving you valuable loading time. A good rule of thumb for image file size is to keep header images between 150 to 200 kilobytes and everything else under 80 kilobytes.
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Stay Away From PDFs
A PDF is where content goes to die. Sure, PDF’s are indexable in Google, but when a user clicks on it they have nowhere to go after that – it’s a dead end? as the user has to click that back button to get out. If you have to use PDF for something, maybe an e-book or whitepaper, be sure to create a supplementary blog post to go with it. This way your visitors can continue exploring your site after they’ve read your post.
Visual content is an important piece of any content marketing strategy. It’s highly shareable, engaging, and it gives life to an otherwise dull page. But if you rely on search engines to bring traffic (and customers) to your website then you need to bend to their abilities. Text still remains the most effective way for the search engine robots to understand what a page is about.
Take care,
Jesse Ringer
Founder
SEO Tools To Help You Optimize Your Media
Squoosh - This app helps reduce image size without losing quality. You can choose a custom size or simply drag a drop to downsize.?The best part is how user friendly and easy to use it is.
TubeBuddy - This is an in browser app that gives you optimization suggestions when uploading YouTube videos.
Canva - An all-encompassing app that helps you design and create banners, images, videos and logos for all of your digital marketing needs.
Jesse Ringer
Fouder of Method & Metric
I’m very excited to be publishing our SEO Newsletter “SEO for Humans” through LinkedIn and sharing the latest in tech and SEO. Business today is being dramatically reinvented by digital transformation and our customer's ability to shop from anywhere. As a result, there is greater pressure to be easily discoverable online. Here is where we help companies uncover the formula that will generate more website traffic and, more importantly, more revenue.
I’m passionate about progression, creativity backed by data, and the democratization of tech have led me to build an agency focused on connecting data and people in an ethical and forward-thinking way.