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In a previous entry, we discussed the importance of SMO, and how SMO can be used to generate immense amount of traffic, as well as develop your organic search engine ranking. In order to take advantage of all the opportunities provided by SMO, however, you will need to learn how to actually do it. This entry will provide a brief guide to optimizing your media for the sake of SEO.

Start with the File Name

The name of the file itself, whether that’s an image file, a video file, or some other form of media, is an important part of SMO. In addition to directly impacting how the search engines view the media, having an appropriately keyword rich file name will help the media as it ranks organically. Images and videos, like pages, are better ranked if they have more links to them. If your file name contains appropriate keywords, a link to the image itself will automatically contain those keywords.

Captioning is King

While there aren’t any “caption tags” in HTML that allow you to “code” your caption, the search engines will view any text immediately before or after the media as indirect captions. After all, most people who are introducing an image or captioning it will put the relevant text in these locations. You should do likewise.

Use the Tags, Luke

There are two major HTML tags that are important to use with your media. The first is your alt tag, text that will appear if the image fails to load, and the second is your title tag, the text that will appear on the screen if a visitor hovers their cursor over the image. With an image, you will want to put these tags directly into the image’s HTML. With videos and other media, title and alt tags like these can be used in the HTML “object” that contains the media.

While you should use relevant keywords in your title and alt tags, be sure that you provide an accurate description of the picture that isn’t overly long. Excessively long or irrelevant information here can actually hurt your image’s ranking.