Ultimate Guide to Web Content Part 3: Images & Multimedia

Khrysti Nazzaro - January 11, 2016

Content Marketing is at the top of your online marketing strategy – but you’re not sure where to start or how to create a foundation for success. That’s where we come in! If you haven’t already, we suggest starting with Parts 1 and 2 of this series: Ultimate Guide to Web Content Part 1: Simplifying the Writing Process and UGtWC Part 2: Appeal to Your Audience. If you already have, then let’s get moving…

The best web content cohesively blends a variety of media formats that are optimized for users and search engines, such as:

A picture, or a video, is certainly worth 1,000 words in terms of really getting a point across – especially if you focus on implementing best practices for users and search engines. Following are some tips for better leveraging custom imagery and multimedia in an optimal way:

• Format-Topic Synergy: The topic and the media type should be compatible. For example, videos are great for product demos, “how tos,” and other explanatory content, but may be less effective at conveying location information and directions than a zip code lookup with interactive Google maps might be. So don’t just decide you want to increase the video and image content in your strategy, align those formats to the content topics and themes they fit best with.
• Keyword-Targeted Text: Search engines can’t “read” all the graphics and content in images and videos, so it’s important to provide some keyword-targeted textual content to describe your multimedia. That may include on-page video transcripts, blurbs, summaries, or other supporting text that is viewable and crawlable by the engines.
• Tags and Filenames: Alt image tags, URLs/filenames, and on-page meta data (as well as structured data, see Google’s Webmaster guide to video search) can also be made keyword-rich to enhance relevancy of the multimedia content for the themes it’s addressing.
• Follow Technical Guidelines: In addition to the Video Search link in the previous bullet, Google has a wide range of resources outlining their technical guidelines. Here are some image-related guidelines you may find useful:
  • Minimizing images for faster loading
  • Optimizing content efficiency

By optimizing your multimedia collateral you can make it more appealing and useful to people, as well as more findable and indexable by search engines. It doesn’t take much extra time or effort to follow these simple optimization steps, and the potential rewards of increased user engagement and traffic are definitely worth it.