At SEO Company we are continuously highlighting the importance of images and videos within websites. There is no mistaking that more complex content can benefit your SEO strategy, and the inclusion of images is not only more appealing to users, but can offer you more solutions in terms of search. With search engines such as Google offering users specific search tabs for video and image, it is fairly obvious why websites should be including them. There is another end to the spectrum though, and that is websites which are more image-based than they are text-based, and optimising this type of site for search engines is a little different.
Professional SEO consultants can help you with this and it is a good idea to seek expert advice, especially if you are finding your web pages are losing rank or not performing particularly well. Whilst images and video can be appealing, ultimately it is still text that search engine crawlers identify and pick up on, so not including any content which is text-based could have a devastating effect on your website’s ranking.
It is of course possible for sites of this nature to succeed. Think of YouTube or Flickr – both of these sites are based predominately around video and image content, yet are two of the most popular sites out there. Granted there is an element of brand awareness for these two sites and a lot of traffic to the sites is direct and not a recommendation or search result. However, you do see both these sites, and many more of a similar nature, being displayed high within the SERPs.
One of the most basic techniques is to ensure all images and videos have sufficient tags. Description tags should provide as much information about the image as possible and should also include a keyword. This makes it easier for search engines to identify what the image is, even though they can only use the tag to do this. If you are struggling with this then you can seek the advice of a copywriter or any SEO experts as they will know how to describe images and videos via text.
Search engines and human users digest information in a certain way and segments or chunks of content is easier for both to understand than one large lump of content. Try to separate different image or video subjects by including individual subject headers or placing them into categories, as this will make it easier to understand.
If your website is heavily image-based then try to use other channels to promote them, which can include more text. Social networking sites and blog pages are classic examples and are often used as places to post links to other forms of content. It can also be useful to get your content posted on other websites that are more text-based, as if the search engines pick up on them easier then users can then link through to your site. Having an image based website succeed in SEO is possible, it just take a little bit more creativity.
