How to Increase the Visibility of Optimize Multimedia Files with SEO
July 2008 eNewsletter
Well, not exactly. Yes, it is true that Google recently announced enhanced ability to understand Flash files, but they were referring ONLY to text embedded in the file itself to maximize website traffic. Google, and every other search engine, still cannot see images, hear sound nor otherwise understand a typical Flash movie, but there are other methods of SEO visibility for multimedia files.
So what can you do with your Flash files, images, videos, and other multimedia files to ensure they can contribute to your overall search engine rank and placement?
With the advent of Google Universal Search and other "blended" search services, images and other multimedia files will continue to increase in SEO visibility and search results. If you're not optimizing these files on your web site, you're missing out on capturing some of this increasingly valuable real-estate and not maximizing your website’s traffic.
So, what is this all about? Well, if you realize that while search engines are good at "seeing" text - they cannot "see" the contents of a multimedia file. They can't "see" images like photos, they can't "play" a flash file, and they can't "see or hear" a video when it plays. So, proper file optimization is basically a way to tell the search engines what they're missing – and guide the search engines on how to index and rank these files as part of your overall SEO visibility.
Not sure how to optimize multimedia files for search engines? Here are some quick tips for maximizing your website’s traffic.
1. Use keywords in file names. For instance, if your page is about Pomeranian dogs, then instead of naming the video clip of this year's Westminster winner "winner.wmv", name it "pomeranian-breed-winner.wmv".
2. Include keywords in the file ALT Tag. An alt tag is HTML code specifically used to clue the search engines into what a multimedia file is all about.
3. Limit the overall number of images per page, as too many will dilute your keyword mix.
4. Provide a keyword optimized summary or recap of the file as text on the same page – and put the text near the file it relates to on the page.
5. Submit your video files to YouTube and/or Google Video. As of now, Google is not crawling websites for video files to include in search results, so you can rely on these two to get SEO visibility for your video files. (This applies to video files ONLY, not to image files – which ARE crawled and indexed for the purpose of search engine ranking.)
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