Introduction
Years ago, the average website was mostly text, generally
having only a very few images that served specific purposes, such as the site’s
logo, advertising banners, and small decorative graphics to call attention to
certain areas of the site. The main reason for this was to keep the size small
and fast loading since internet speeds were still quite slow.
However, as high-speed internet has come to most of the
world, websites are now full of images, videos, and other forms of media. In
fact, many people prefer to view other types of media rather than spend a lot
of time reading.
Never in the history of the internet has it been so
incredibly important to have various forms of content available on your site.
No longer is it profitable to focus solely on the written word. Even if you’re
depending on SEO to bring a significant portion of your traffic, it’s still
vital to include a wide variety of media types on your site. While Google still
loves written content, it also loves to see other forms of media such as
images, videos, and downloads on your site, and your visitors will, as well!
Here are some of the benefits of including other forms of
media on your website:
• Google
will show you more love
• Your
visitors will return more often
• Your
visitors will be more engaged and spend more time on your site
• You’ll
gain traffic from sources like Pinterest, which you can’t get with only written
content
If you’re finding it difficult to rank well and to get
traffic, it may be because your content strategy is outdated. It’s no longer
possible to rank well by writing hundreds (perhaps thousands) of simple
articles and getting a lot of high-quality backlinks. To do so would probably
take years of hard work—and who wants to wait that long for results? By then, things
may have changed again, and you could be starting over at ground zero.
These days, the two biggest factors in outranking your the competition quickly are to use multiple types of media (such as images, videos,
and downloads) instead of just text, and be sure you’re using the latest SEO
techniques on your content.
In this guide, you’re going to learn about some of the
different types of media you should include on your website, and how to make
sure you apply the latest SEO techniques to that content.
So let’s get started.
Images
Images are the most common form of media on the internet
aside from text. They are relatively small in file size, at least when compared
to videos, and they can make a very large impact in terms of both traffic and
user interest and engagement.
Images are useful in many ways. Not only do they make a
website more engaging and aesthetically pleasing, but they can be useful for
promotional purposes (such as pinning on Pinterest) and for drawing attention,
demonstrating steps in a process, and showing people examples.
Years ago, it was common to see images such as animated
bullets, graphical divider bars, and wild background images. These days, such
images are frowned on, as they make a web page look unprofessional and out of
date.
These days, it’s more common to see photographs
Don’t include photos just for the sake of including photos.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a blogger include a bunch of
photographs that don’t really pertain to the article they are writing just to
beef it up with images, and it’s frustrating.
For example, let’s say you’ve written an article about
email marketing. Images you might
want to include would be screenshots of the various services you’re talking
about, and images that show users how to perform some specific task that they
might not otherwise understand without the picture.
Images you would not
want to include would be generic pictures of mail or mailboxes, generic @
symbol graphics, and random pictures of email messages.
The only exception would be if you need a featured image
for your blog and you don’t have any specific images that would pertain to your
blog post. You could use one generic image in that case, but it should fit as
closely with your subject matter as possible.
Whenever you include images on your website or blog, you’ll
want to be sure they’re optimized for Pinterest, as this can be a major source
of traffic.
SEO for Images
Many people don’t realize SEO can be applied to images, but
images can actually bring in a significant amount of traffic if they are used
correctly. It’s important to apply good SEO techniques to all of your images to
get the most out of each one.
There are several places you can include SEO information in
images.
• The
filename
• Captions
• Alt
text
Image Filenames
Let’s say you have an image of a dog groomer you’d like to
add to your article about becoming a dog groomer. You’d want to name your image
something like dog-groomer.jpg. This helps search engine spiders “see” your
image, and it can also help you show up in a Google Images search, which can
potentially lead to more traffic. After all, that’s one more spot you could
take up in the Google search results.
Captions
Captions are the small bits of text that appear under some
images in books, magazines, and online. They’re great when they serve an actual
purpose, but because they are immediately visible to visitors, they should not
be used solely for the sake of inserting keywords.
Did you know that KissMetrics concluded that captions under
images are read 300% more than the
body copy itself?
It might be difficult to believe, but captions can have a
huge impact. So not only can you use them for SEO purposes, but you can also use
them to make important points.
Let’s use the dog groomer image as an example. You could
include a caption such as:
“Dog groomers report 36% more job satisfaction than the
average profession, and make 28% more than those employed in similar fields.”
As you can see, it includes information someone reading the article might find important, and it includes the “dog groomers” keyword first.
Alt Text & Title Text
Alt-text is a piece of code that tells the browser what
text to display if an image cannot be loaded. This can happen if the image URL
is broken, or on some devices that don’t display images. It is also used by
people who are visually impaired so their screen reader can tell them what the
image is.
You’ll want to keep both purposes in mind when you add alt
text: both SEO and display for those who cannot see the image. Don’t just stuff
in a bunch of keywords. That won’t help users, and it could get you penalized
by Google. Instead,
The title text is displayed in Chrome when you hover over
an image, but it’s not taken into account with regards to SEO purposes, thus
it’s not really necessary to put the title attribute into your images. Instead,
just use your keywords in the alt text, and do so in a way that makes sense for
people who can’t see the image. Be sure to use your most important keyword
early in your alt text, because it will be given the most weight if it appears
first.
For example, keyword in bold:
“Dog groomer
clipping a dog’s fur.”
Image File Size
While the file size of an image doesn’t have a direct
effect on SEO the way something like adding the keyword to the filename or alt the text does, it does have the indirect effect of increasing the load time of a
web page. If the page loads slowly, it could receive a Google penalty of sorts
and won’t rank as well as it could.
For this reason, it’s important to ensure you resize all of
your images to a reasonable size in dimension and file size. Some people just
use the full-size image they download from the stock photo site and use HTML to
resize it on the screen, but the file size would be huge. Instead, resize the
image to whatever dimensions you really need it to be.
Also, you might want to try to reduce the file size if
possible without sacrificing image quality. If you’re using WordPress, you can
use a plugin to reduce the file size. There are a lot of free plugins that do a
good job of reducing images without losing image quality.
Videos
Video is quickly becoming the preferred format for online
content, although a lot of people still prefer text. (Thus it’s a very good
idea to have both text and video on your site for those who prefer their
content in text format.)
For a long time, many sites stubbornly clung to text
because it was difficult to perform SEO on videos, but these days it’s getting
a lot easier. Google has made some changes to its algorithms that make it a
lot easier to use videos on your site and still attract search engine traffic.
SEO for Videos
If you’re using WordPress, you may want to download the
Yoast Video SEO plugin to make it easy to SEO your videos even if you’re
embedding YouTube videos on your own site. Typically, embedded videos don’t
have the same power for SEO purposes that
You can get the plugin here:
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/video-seo/
There is also a free plugin here that works in a similar
fashion, but some people say it is buggy and may have security vulnerabilities:
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-video-seo
Because of the potential security vulnerabilities, use this
plugin at your own risk, but it may be a good option if you don’t want to pay
the rather hefty price for the Yoast plugin.
If you’re uploading your own videos to YouTube and other
video sites, be sure to include relevant keywords in the tags, video title, and
description, and be sure to put your most important keyword first.
Producing vs. Embedding
One of the primary reasons video content is so useful for
SEO purposes are because it has the potential to go viral and attract a large
number of links. Backlinks, especially organic links from authority sites, have
tremendous power for boosting your search engine visibility. Of course, they
can be tricky to get without paying for them (which Google can actually ban
your site if they catch you doing it.)
In the article, you’ll read about Dollar Shave The club, which managed to dramatically increase their backlinks by creating a viral video that got the internet buzzing.
This is the kind of thing video can do for you, but only if
you produce your own. Otherwise, the links are mostly going to go to the
original producer of the video.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to gather a lot of
backlinks by posting other people’s videos. Some sites actually specialize in
gathering interesting videos and posting them on their own site to attract viral traffic through Facebook and other sites. However, it will
be much easier if you have your own content.
Downloads
Downloads are another form of media that can boost your
search engine traffic, especially if you are offering relevant content to your site.
For example, you could offer free downloadable PDF guides
(which should not be delivered by an autoresponder if you want to experience
SEO benefit) or downloadable software that you create.
Using the dog grooming example, you might provide a few
PDFs that explain different aspects of the dog grooming business, as well as a
simple scheduling program you have a developer create specifically for dog
groomers.
One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot just take
items from other websites and use them as free downloads on your own site, even
if those are free on someone else’s site. Most people who create free items
want them distributed only on their own site.
SEO for Downloads
If you’re offering PDFs for download, as long as you’re
creating standard PDFs with regular text rather than images, they are
inherently indexable. The text within them can be crawled, and the individual
PDF can appear in search engines.
For this reason, you’ll probably want to include some
keywords inside your PDF, as well as in the file name and title of the file.
If you’re offering software or other downloadable content
such as zip files of various files, you’ll need to create a download page for
each item, which you can SEO just as you would any other page on your site.
Be sure you include keywords that relate specifically to
the download, as well as generic download text such as “download” and
“free”.
Text
Even though this guide is meant to teach you how to expand
beyond just text content, it’s still important to understand that text will
always be a big part of internet content. It’s still going to be easier to rank
well with written content than other types of content (generally speaking) and
a lot of visitors still prefer to read rather than watching videos or
downloading items.
Even if you’re using images, videos, and downloads, you’ll
want to use text as a good portion of your content, and you’ll use text even on
the pages that use other forms of media to bolster your SEO.
SEO for Text
There have been some changes recently to the way Google
indexes and displays its results. You may already know that longer content is
ranking better than shorter content, in general. But did you know that updating
your old content is also now very important if you want to improve your
rankings?
It’s important to keep these changes in mind as you create
your content so you can be sure you’re giving Google exactly what it wants.
Let’s take a look at some of these important new changes.
Length
As you probably already know, Google now greatly prefers
longer content. A few years ago it was possible to rank well with 300-word
articles, but these days it’s much easier to rank with content that is a
minimum of 1,000 words. In fact, it seems that the longer the content, the
better.
Although you should never add unnecessary words just to
boost your word count, make sure you create content that is as long as possible
without risking readability.
Updates
A long time ago, if you had something new to say about a
particular topic, you’d create a brand new article on your blog or website. You
might link to it from the original article, but generally, you’d use it as an
opportunity to create a new piece of content that might rank in the search
engines.
This is no longer a good idea because Google now seems to
favor updated content more than new content, especially because updating old
content adds even more length to the content.
In fact, it’s a very good idea to take a look at some of
your most popular articles and see if anything has changed in recent times that
you might add to the original to update it. This can give you a
significant boost to your original content’s rankings.
Conclusion
If you’ve found it difficult to get traffic to your
website, it may be because your content strategy is outdated. If you’re
concentrating on mostly text and using older SEO methods, it’s not surprising
you’re struggling to get traffic.
Things are much different in SEO than they were just a year
or two ago. It’s no longer about including your keywords, generating as many
pages of content as possible, and getting as many backlinks as possible. Google
now looks at other factors, such as different types of media and how often
older content is updated.
If you include other types of media on your site, you’ll
not only attract more search engine traffic, but you’ll attract more visitors
from other sources, too. Photos and videos are much more sharable to the average user than text content, so you’ll receive more viral traffic from sites
like Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook if you include media other than just
text.
While you should never include other forms of media simply
for the sake of including them, judicious use of photos, videos, and downloads
can help boost your traffic and increase user satisfaction and engagement on
your website.
Best of luck!
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