Multimedia files such as images and videos are the heaviest files present on any website. To make sure that the website performs better in terms of technical SEO, these files have to be optimized. Further, the alt text associated with the files help in discovery of the pages that contain them.
In this article, we will explore the impact of multimedia files on technical, on-page and off-page SEO. At the end of the article, we have provided a link to Google Image SEO best practices.
Table of Contents
Impact on Technical SEO
Technical SEO basically deals with the speed, appearance, rendering and indexing of pages on a website. A website which has a lot of images and videos in raw format will be heavier and therefore will take time to load. In such case, Google or any other search engine will prefer to rank any other website which loads faster.
This will happen even if the heavier website has the best content available on the internet.
Optimizing Multimedia Files for Technical SEO
You can do the following to make sure that images and videos present in your website are fully optimized for technical SEO.
- Make sure all the images and videos have alt texts. This is necessary for them to get discovered on image based search engines. Alt texts should contain the long-tail version of core keyword used in the post/page.
- It is recommended that images be kept as light as possible but without impacting their quality. If you are using WordPress, you can use the Performance Lab plugin which automatically converts images into WebP format for easier optimization.
- Videos are best optimized when they are uploaded on the YouTube and the links is embedded into the page or post where they are needed
Impact on Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO deals with the activities that are done on social media or other websites to boost your visibility. These include link building, sharing infographics, publishing ads, etc.
Attracts Traffic: Multimedia files that are used in a webpage as infographics are often shared through the social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Quora, Medium, etc. Well-designed images and videos help divert traffic to your website from these platforms.
Gets Backlinks: Further, information rich files like infographics such as the one shown below, help get backlinks which are absolutely necessary for ranking on Google. All search engines including Google, view these backlinks as “votes of confidence”.
Optimizing Multimedia Files for Off-Page SEO
- Make sure that the images and videos are information rich.
- These files should address the search query for which they wish to rank for.
Impact on On-Page SEO
In on-page SEO, multimedia files and their alt texts play another role. They display what the image contains when these images fail to load due to any reason. Further, these images and videos often act as summaries for the text present in the page/post.
Optimizing Multimedia Files for On-Page SEO
It is very easy to do the on-page optimization of multimedia files.
- Make sure that the alt text correctly resembles the image or video. They often also include a keyword in its long-tail format.
- Make sure the images are responsive and change size according to the device they are being viewed on. If you are using WordPress, you can preview them for mobile, tablet or desktop before publishing.
- Google Search supports images in the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG. In my experience, WebP images are the lightest and do not compromise on quality.
- If you add structured data, Google can view your images in rich results which are prominently featured at the top of search results.
Conclusion
Multimedia files are the second most important part of a web page after “text”. Optimizing them increased the speed of your website which boosts your SEO score. Further, a well designed multimedia file captures the attention of the reader and helps in much greater user-retention.
As promised, here is the Google Image SEO Guideline.
