Seo Tactics: Image And Video Optimisation

When it comes to SEO most people are so concerned with having the right keywords in perfect place and with finding good quality backlinks that one area is often overlooked: making your images and video content search engine friendly.

Depending on what your website offers, you're going to have image and possibly video content and it is essential to make sure these are optimised correctly so that when a search engine spider crawls your page it can accurately identify what the image or video is about. This becomes even more essential if the end user is searching in particular for an image or video file through Google image search for example.

It is worth mentioning that Google has specialised image bot spiders that just as in the same way regular spiders scan page characters, the image bot does the same for images, making it even more important to correctly optimise your images for Google image search.

The first step to perform when adding an image into your page is to attribute a title that is relevant as to what the image represents. There is little point in keyword stuffing in relation to this but simply by giving it an adequate title it will allow the image bot spider to correctly identify its contents. The same goes for video - it is essential you make sure you have rich keywords in the filename of your video and any other relevant tags.

One important thing to be aware of is hotlinking, whereby other websites link to your images which in turn cost you bandwidth and can be considered as a theft of your content.

If you do allow your images to be indexed this can occur unless you specify in the robots.txt to disallow bots from crawling your images, which in turn will mean a loss in rankings in search engine image queries. It is recommended to allow image bots to crawl your images and if you do notice a spike in bandwidth check to see if your images are being scraped and if they are then block image bots through the robots.txt.

None of this advice is of any use if you do not have interesting content to upload as in order for videos and images to spread they need to at least be either informative or inspiring to end users.

The more interesting the video/image is then the more chance that users will link back to your content and share it online. It is also vital that you allow your video/image to be publicised as much as possible - so be sure to upload your content onto multiple relevant websites.