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.

The increasing use of mobile browsing has spurred the creation of applications and improvements for browsers that allow users to have a friendly and more customized search experience. There is one application that has taken a lot of notice this year and whose company has been recently bought by Apple. This Application is called Siri.

Siri allows you to have a “personal assistant” with you at all times. It learns from your requests and questions and provides real time services to fulfill requests. Siri performs searches to accomplish the tasks at hand and this is why it can be considered a very important part of SEO for the future. Even though it became available at the beginning of this year, it has shown great potential and was even named the most innovative company at BizSpark conference provided by Microsoft.

All that is required to set up this assistant is an email address and a password. You can customize the settings and get a friendly reply informing you of any changes made. Siri can also manage your Twitter account and as the application grows many other accounts might be available to add in the future.

Siri provides two main ways to communicate with it, by typing your request or simply by saying your request. It also gives you the option to save addresses and credit card information to be a more efficient assistant. Location based search allows this assistant to book restaurants, call a cab, find events and many other things available in your area, which can come in really handy.

The improvement of mobile devices has opened many doors to multiple applications that can help create or maintain a marketing strategy. There are numerous applications that can keep updating and sending information to a great amount of people by the press of a button. Some of the applications that can be used for a marketing campaign are TextMarks, Facebook, Twitter.

TextMarks is an application that lets you create marketing campaigns by sending mass test messages or receiving text messages from subscribers. The user sends a text message with a custom word to 41411. The application also allows you to update Facebook and Twitter, making the marketing campaign easier to handle and promote. TextMarks has different plans available starting with a free plan that sends the messages with ads in the footer of the message. Other plans range from $9.95 to over $900. The plan depends on the amount of SMS sent and if ads are being included or not.

This type of service can be very useful if sensitive information is being sent to a specific group of people. These types of messages can include updating an event’s time, location or other important information. The great thing about this service is that it gives you the option to update multiple social media accounts saving time in campaign management and providing a wider audience with the information being targeted.

From the point of view of SEO, we see that text messages will be considered in the future in Google and Bing Search results, thanks to the link provided to update social media accounts through TextMarks.