Multimedia, such as images and videos, on your posts and pages matters more than ever. Think about your own experience browsing the web. Do you prefer sites with a variety of images, videos, gifs, and more? Or do you prefer blocks and blocks of text? No judgment if you pick the latter, but most readers, including Google’s algorithm, prefer the former. There’s no doubt that images and video are an important part of any website strategy.
The problem for any site owner, though, is that you can’t just throw any photo or video onto your site and expect that it’ll line up with Google’s standards for multimedia. There are a few important tasks you need to keep top of mind for optimizing images and video. Additional resources are available at the end of this lesson to help explain how to accomplish these suggestions.
Here are some tips for optimizing images on your site:
1. Include images on every post and page.
Google loves images. This means you should be incorporating some sort of visual element – whether a photo, illustration, video, or gif – on every post and page you publish.
Two more quick tips here:
- Original photos are generally better than stock.
- Make sure the images are contextual. Don’t just insert random things in random places for the sake of adding a visual element. Google is smart enough to know when an image relates to the text and when it doesn’t.
2. Give image files descriptive names.
Whether it’s an original image or a downloaded photo, make sure the name of the file describes its contents. Rather than “DSC4536.jpg,” re-title the image as “chocolate chip cookie.” Keep it to just a few words. This is the first thing Google “sees” when crawling your multimedia.
3. File size and type matters.
In the vast majority of cases, you want to use “jpg” or “jpeg” files (they’re the same, just FYI!) for your photos. Images in this format provide the best balance between clarity/quality and file size. If your image is too big, your page/post will load more slowly, which search engines will penalize. Speaking of file size, aim for under 1 MB, so if your photos are larger than that, you’ll want to consider resizing them. Other standard file formats are PNG, HEIC (for iPhone photos), WebP, and more.
Be sure you make any necessary changes to the file name, type, and size before uploading to your site.
4. Add “alt text” for accessibility.
When uploading a photo to WordPress.com, you’ll have the option to add “alt text” or “alternate text.” It’s imperative that you always include a descriptive phrase in this box. There’s a couple reasons for this:
- Google will use that description and keyword when crawling the page/post
- Accessibility software uses the “alt text” for folks who are visually impaired
Be sure to include your target keyword or key phrase in the alt text, as long as it makes sense contextually. In your chocolate cookie recipe, you don’t want the alt text of every photo to simply be “best chocolate chip cookie recipe.” You need to mix it up and actually describe the photo: “chocolate chip cookie dough in a stand mixer,” “chocolate chip cookie dough balls on a baking sheet,” “best chocolate chip cookies on a plate.”
Again, as we’ve repeated throughout these lessons, good SEO means writing and optimizing for both people and Google.
5. Add captions for context and description.
The final step to optimizing your photos is to add captions for further context and description, when appropriate (header/featured images, for instance, don’t need captions). Add 1-2 sentences about what’s happening in the photo or visual. If the keyword/phrase naturally fits in, go ahead and include it, but definitely don’t force it. In captions, Google is mainly scanning for the fact that you’ve added some description that makes the image more meaningful to the reader and whatever information they’re searching for.
When video content is added to a page or post on your site, search engines will not only give an SEO rank to the page/post, but it will also rate the video itself. Here are some tips to help make both the page and the video optimized:
1. Give your video an engaging thumbnail.
When search engines have indexed your video, the thumbnail image will be displayed prominently on SERPs, along with other information about the video (e.g. title, description, etc). Since humans are visual creatures, our eyes are more quickly drawn to these thumbnails, so they play a significant role in whether people decide to click and view. We know there’s a saying about how not to judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to video thumbnails, we all do it. To get more views, and improve the SEO rating, try to make your video thumbnail relevant, compelling, and engaging.
2. Give video files descriptive names and descriptions.
In the same way that file names and descriptions/captions are important for images, they also benefit when applied to videos.
3. Only embed a video on a single page.
If you put the same content in different places online, you’re essentially competing against yourself, and reducing the SEO rating for each of the pages you add your video to.
4. Insert a video transcript.
Not only does a transcript improve the accessibility of your video, as it allows more people to view and understand it, but they also make it easier for search engines to crawl your page, read through the spoken content of the video, and better classify your page/post.
We touched on a number of technical things you can do to help optimize media on your site. Here are some additional resources that can help you accomplish these tasks:
- Renaming files – Here are tutorials based on your computer’s operating system: Windows↗︎ | Mac↗︎
- Resizing images – There are free compression solutions available, such as tinyjpg.com↗︎ or imagecompressor.com↗︎. You can also add a plugin to your WordPress site to reduce image sizes, with EWWW Image Optimizer↗︎ and Optimole↗︎ being popular ones.
- Converting to jpg – Here are tutorials based on your computer’s operating system: Windows↗︎ | Mac↗︎
- Add “alt text” to images: WordPress.com accessibility
- Add captions to images: WordPress.com documentation
- Choose a video thumbnail: VideoPress documentation
- Add a video transcript: VideoPress documentation
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