It seems that everywhere you turn these days everyone is talking about social media, social bookmarking and rich media components such as video and audio.
Traditionally content has been shared across the Internet in the form of simple text - text based articles, blogs, newsfeeds, websiteas etc. With the emergence of Web 2.0, we’re seeing far wider range of alternative rich media forms used to share information, entertainment, instruction - anything at all. Online video for example has evolved beyond the short-form, user-generated content (UGC) and is now accepted as a viable business function for media companies of all sizes. Companies are increasingly making their professionally produced video content available online. New generation press releases in the form of Social Media Releases combine text, links, images, video, bookmarks, RSS, MRSS and tags are emerging as PR and article submissions.
Not only has the media technology evolved, but the ways in which information propagates throughout the Internet has evolved too. The popularity and proliferation of social media has created vast networks of, in effect, inter-related recommendations that serve to distribute the popularity of and traffic to interesting and visit worthy content as defined by web users themselves.
Allowing visitors to share, bookmark, rate and comment on your rich media enables them to experience content on a new level, and can have powerful SEO results. Social media lets your visitors become your very own viral marketing team, spreading the word about the great content on your website and driving traffic towards your site. Fans of your content do the work for you and spread your content across websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Facebook and MySpace.
Blogs also play a huge role in any digital marketing strategy and SEO themed blogs based on specific topics will not only generate additional traffic and brand awareness, but give a website more opportunities for deep backlinking. Outreaching and receiving optimised links from a relevant and high traffic blogs can help kick-start any SEO campaign or add impetus with additional link juice.
Social, rich media doesn’t just impact press releases in the form of SMRs (Social Media Releases) or conversations in the form of blogs comments, forums and Twitters. All this ‘off-page’ activity offers great new optimisation opportunities to website owners and SEO specialists. Those that are able to adopt new and innovative ‘off-page’ technology such as video, audio and widgets, along with being able to apply new optimisation techniques, will take the lead in fully exploiting the huge potential of Web 2.0 and reaping the high Internet profile/traffic/conversion rewards.
Most SEO best practices still apply, such as focused, well-written copy and considered keywords. Rich media SEO takes those best practices and combines them with some specific methods exclusive to audio and video. As rich media files (such as online videos, podcasts and widgets) become more common online, it will be increasingly necessary for new optimisation strategies to be applied in order to make them more search engine-friendly.
Links
Inbound and internal linking are SEO fundamentals - as fundamental as the fact that to generate high quality, relevant links you need to have good content. Exceptional content ideally. Having great content that inspires people to share, post and link, although critical, is only one part of a comprehensive three-part multi media SEO linking campaign consisting of inbound links, internal links and anchor text.
The most effective way for getting inbound links (other than through the content itself) is to encourage visitors to embed your videos into their websites, blogs, profiles and social networks. The main benefit, in addition to branding and traffic, is that providing an HTML wrapper enables you to utilize SEO-optimised anchor text that links back to your website. Link juice, traffic and profile all in one – winner. Contact websites and blogs that are relevant to your topic and work on developing a linking partnership.
Apply the same best practices to internal links as used for inbound links. Though internal links are not always as valuable when it comes to rankings, they help influence relevancy and search engine spiders crawl the content. Spiderable links like video and audio play lists, related links and ‘breadcrumbs’ not only help search bots to locate your site, but your human visitors too.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable part of a link, which search engines use to help determine relevance. Ideally, any inbound link will have optimised anchor text related to the content on the page it is linking to. Take the HTML wrapper for an embeddable video player for example; a great set of links would revolve around the top keywords being utilized on the destination page.
Future developments
The search engines still hunger for relevance - it’s just that now relevance needs to be determined from rich media data rather than just text. Making rich media SEO-friendly is the logical next step, especially for Internet marketing. As data transfer rates increase, so the amount of rich media being shared means that users will soon have to search within it to find relevant content. Here are a couple of examples of recent developments:
Until recently only a few small multimedia search companies had been able to index audio effectively, with video proving a particularly tough nut to crack. Google has now entered the arena releasing GAudi - Google Audio Indexing in Google Labs. It uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and uses the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user. “The returned videos are ranked based - among other things on the spoken content, the metadata, and the freshness of the video,” says Product Manager Arnaud Sahuguet. “As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by our system and made available in our index for users to search.” Using speech-to-text technology, it is possible to identify portions of the video where the relevant content is spoken.
New visual recognition video technologies are also being developed that even extend beyond the voice recognition, meta data, and surrounding content that many existing sites rely on, and instead tags each frame with more granular information. This includes things such as character names in popular shows and other triggers that are more contextually relevant and likely as search terms. Relevance is weighed on frequency of these keywords, click-throughs and a few other factors.
Flash – Both Google and Yahoo! are working together with Adobe to solve the issue of indexing Flash files for search engine indexing. Content that can now be indexed includes all of the text users can see as they interact with a Flash file, with the words that appear being used to match query terms in Google searches, and URLs in Flash files, which are fed into Google's 'crawling pipeline', just as it does with URLs on non-Flash web pages. If the Flash application contains links to pages inside the site, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of that site.
Flash files containing only pictures won't be indexed - only Flash video files that include text or links will be indexed.
At SEO Consult we watch the industry closely for new trends and developments, quickly applying those that offer greatest benefit to our clients. Our eye is constantly on the ball – as technology emerges and evolves, then so do our SEO solutions. For more information on how we can assist your Internet presence with social book-marking and audio and video SEO, contact SEO Consult now.
