Search engines mainly rely on textual content to determine results and site rankings. This makes articles, page titles, and other on-page text extremely important for SEO. However, some websites focus more on rich media content like video, audio and images. How can they make their nontextual content work for them so that they rank well on search results?

 

Matt Cutts recommends the extraction of metadata from the nontextual content and adding these to the page. For instance, image metadata can describe its file size, time taken, resolution, camera used, exposure settings, and many more. Tags may also be added to describe the picture and anticipate relevant search terms. Flickr allows its user community to add tags to most of the images and this crowd-sourcing effort is an enormous help in increasing their search engine visibility. Individual owners can do the same on a smaller scale and get excellent results.

 

As for videos, owners may want to consider having them transcribed. The transcription can be added underneath the embedded clip on a blog post. YouTube also allows close captioning and the text can even be translated to several different languages automatically.