Multimedia Mastery

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Multimedia Mastery
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .................................................................................................. 3

Introduction ............................................................................................................ 4

Images ................................................................................................................... 6

SEO for Images ................................................................................................. 7

Image Filenames ............................................................................................ 7

Captions ......................................................................................................... 8
Alt Text & Title Text ........................................................................................ 9
Image File Size .............................................................................................. 9
Videos ................................................................................................................. 11

SEO for Videos ................................................................................................ 11

Producing vs. Embedding ................................................................................ 12

Downloads ........................................................................................................... 14

SEO for Downloads ......................................................................................... 14

Text ..................................................................................................................... 16

SEO for Text .................................................................................................... 16

Length .......................................................................................................... 16
Updates ........................................................................................................ 17
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 18

Resources ........................................................................................................... 19

Multimedia Mastery
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 site
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 to including other forms of media on

your website:

 Google will show you more love

 Your visitors will return more often

Multimedia Mastery
  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 competition

quickly is to use multiple types of media (such as images, videos, and
downloads) instead of just text, and being 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.

Multimedia Mastery
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.

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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 image 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

Multimedia Mastery
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, 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.”

(Note: I made up those statistics.)

As you can see, it includes information someone reading the article

might find important, and it includes the “dog groomers” keyword first.

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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 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.
Multimedia Mastery
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 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.

Multimedia Mastery
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 their algorithms that makes
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:

Multimedia Mastery
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 post important keyword first.

Producing vs. Embedding

One of the primary reasons video content is so useful for SEO purposes
is 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.)

Here is an excellent story on this subject here:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-video-seo/

In the article, you’ll read about Dollar Shave Club, who 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.

Multimedia Mastery
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 for the purpose
of attracting viral traffic through Facebook and other sites. However, it
will be much easier if you have your own content.

Multimedia Mastery
Downloads
Downloads are another form of media that can boost your search
engine traffic, especially if you are offering content that is relevant 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 the 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.

Multimedia Mastery
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”.

Multimedia Mastery
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

Multimedia Mastery
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 in order to update it. This can give you a significant
boost to your original content’s rankings.

Multimedia Mastery
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 shareble 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!

Multimedia Mastery
Resources
>> https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-video-seo/

>> https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-video-seo

>> https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/video-seo/

Multimedia Mastery