How To Kick-Start Your Rich Media SEO Plan

Posted on Sep 24th 2014 in Search Engine Marketing

Images and video have appeared in search results for some time now, but often, rich media of this type is very much an afterthought when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Although optimising text content is integral to any successful SEO strategy, paying attention to other forms of content – video and images – is key if you want to get your resort’s results served up for more search queries and seen and clicked-on by more of your guests.

Here are some tips for getting your rich media optimisation plan up and running today.

Image Optimisation

Here are some of the most important points for image optimization, taken from Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and best practices for images: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016 .

1. Image Description

There are two things you need to remember here. Firstly, your image should have a name – a few words describing it, including relevant keywords. Secondly, you need to include alt text to give some brief information about what the image is. This text will be displayed if your image cannot be rendered, and is also important for people who use screen-reading services due to a visual impairment, for example.

2. Image Size

An important part of image optimisation involves getting your sizing right. You need to be sure your images are not slowing down your page load times – this is particularly important for mobile users. Google’s PageSpeed tool offers some insights on speeding up slow load times (especially if your site contains larger images).

3. Image Sitemap

Creating image sitemaps will make it easier for Google’s search engine spider to find and understand your images when it crawls your site. To find out more, take a look at Google’s help files here - support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636 .

Video Optimisation

Adding videos to your website is one of the most effective ways to show off your property and get guests ready to make a booking. If you haven’t uploaded any videos to your site yet, you should!

Here are 3 tips video optimisation tips to work from.

1. Optimisation Best Practices

If you want to compete in Google’s standard Universal search results, as well as Google Video, you need to follow best practices such as avoiding complicated JavaScript and Flash. You should select interesting thumbnails for video images of at least 160 x 90 pixels to drive clicks. Just like images, you also need to be mindful of page load times anytime you add a video to a web page.

2. Video Sitemap

Help Google out by creating a video sitemap for your resort’s videos to make it easier for the search company to crawl this rich media content. You can get started here.

3. Length

Part of video optimisation requires thinking about length, with research suggesting that shorter is always better. Try keeping your videos under two minutes to keep viewers engaged and ready to find out more (and book!)

Images and video are important at every stage of your guests’ path to purchase, from the holiday research stage to accommodation comparison and booking. By following a few simple best practices, this type of rich media content can help you achieve maximum visibility in the SERPs, too.

Do you have any other image and video optimization tips? Let us know in the comments below!