Are Your Assets Optimized?

When properly optimized, images, videos, and other digital assets can help enhance your organic search rankings.  Images and videos have earned their respective spaces in the organic search results, simply including an image or video on your page is not enough to rank well. 

When you upload an image or video to your server, are you adding titles, descriptions, and tags that are keyword-rich?  Could the average consumer look at your image (along with the title, description, and tags that you include) and determine what the image is all about or what its purpose is when taken out of context of your website?

If you answered no to these questions, chances are your digital assets are not fully optimized.  While it is important for website visitors to see descriptive text that correspond to your images and videos, it is equally if not more important that search engines can do the same.  A lot of image optimization involves basic search optimization factors. 

In addition to taking over more real estate on a search results page, listings with thumbnail images are more eye-catching and can help differentiate you from the sea of competing web pages.  The screen shot below displays search results for “surfing lessons”.  Note the separate space dedicated for image results and below for video results. 

Having your assets optimized is a prerequisite for strong rankings in these universal search results.  Here are a 3 key points to keep in mind:

1. Store your images in a separate file (directory) that is accessible to the search engines.
2. Optimizing your assets with keyword-rich text will help build / reinforce the keyword relevancy for the page(s) where they are incorporated. 
3. When you link to an image, use keyword-rich text instead of a generic phrase.