Online Marketing Blog

Optimize Your Images for Better Digital Asset Optimization

From Marketing to PR, digital assets are an essential part of the content used to tell stories and communicate brand messages.  For publishers and public relations professionals, optimizing the images used in news stories and press releases can have an important impact on visibility in search engines.  Images not only add flavor to news content, but they are also an opportunity to extend the reach of your message through image specific search.

Images are essential for both search and social media marketing with growing popularity as a social media asset. Long time image hosting and social network Flickr hosts well over 50 billion images and social media image sharing services like Instagram and Pintrest have exploded in popularity:

SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated.

The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources than their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include sources such as images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and shopping.

While many SEOs were responding to the changed landscape of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and optimizing for other file types, many others were already optimizing holistically under the premise of, “What can be searched on can be optimized“.

As with many bloggers, we’ve been using royalty free images for many years.  Many bloggers make use of images from Flickr and we have too but you can’t always find the right image there. I’ve even made a point to take more photos of people, places and things while traveling for later use in blog posts like the one to the right.

The stock photo site we’ve been using for several years recently decided to essentially double their prices (no matter how they spin it, that’s what they did) and it prompted me to ask the excellent people I’m connected with on Twitter for their suggestions on royalty free photography and image web sites. Here is a collection of 9 such sites that were suggested via Twitter or researched by TopRank.  Which leads us to our poll for the most “blogger friendly” royalty free stock photo site:

Don’t ignore digital assets in your optimization efforts

Don’t fight it: Blended search results, and hence digital asset optimization, are here (at least for now).

Text content may be your SEO poster child, but with images, video and audio content often appearing in standard search results, digital assets can no longer be treated as the ugly stepsister in the online marketing family. Many companies produce a variety of content and media that never make it to the public web.

To this point, the majority of marketers have either overlooked or ignored optimization of non-text digital assets. In fact, a recent Forrester study found:

• Less than 20% of marketers insert keywords into the filenames of videos on their sites
• Even fewer marketers write keyword-rich captions or create online video libraries

If you’re attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it’s no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing basic video SEO principles.

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.

1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:

• File name
• Title
• Tags
• URL
• Link text

“Master Story Teller”, that’s how I would describe Greg Jarboe, someone I’ve known in the internet marketing and PR world for several years. Now he’s pioneered yet another essential digital marketing channel: online video. In YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, Greg has assembled a priceless collection of insights, examples and practical tips for companies that want, that need, to understand how to use video marketing to grow their business. You cannot afford to miss this story.”

That’s the endorsement I gave Greg’s new book based on the preview copy a few months ago. He gave me a copy of the final book at SES and I thought it very timely to provide a more in-depth review.

It’s likely you’ve heard plenty about search engine optimization but what about “Digital Asset Optimization”?

Many companies that have applied basic SEO principles to standard web site content see substantial benefits. Adding new content and attracting links help maintain search marketing performance but is that all you can do to be competitive with SEO? No.

A natural progression of SEO is a holistic approach that considers all of a company’s searchable assets that can be keyword optimized and promoted online. Standard optimization of content in the form of web page SEO is a starting point that can be extended to various media types that are increasingly prominent in both standard search as well as media specific search such as images, video (see below for 5 video DAO tips) and audio. Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) can be applied to various document/file formats such as RSS, MS Office, Flash, PDF, etc as well.

Search engine optimization can be challenging enough, especially for large, enterprise organizations rich with digital assets.  They’re also rich with policies, procedures and often times a labrynth of  content approval and publishing processes.

An effort to optimize and promote those assets to search engine bots can be even more challenging than standard SEO. And yet it can also be far more rewarding. The notion of Digital Asset Optimization came out of TopRank’s efforts in early in 2007 to describe for internet marketing clients what new opportunities there were to enable prospects and customers to pull themselves via search to company content.

Universal search has been touted as the biggest change to happen to search in recent years. Certainly universal and personal search have altered the search landscape to an extent, however to what extent is up for debate. In Universal & Personal Search: This Changes Everything, panelists moderated by Jake Baillie brought differing perspectives to the adjustments SEOs should make in light of universal search.

Brian Combs of Apogee Search began the session with an overview of Universal search. The biggest change, according to Combs, is that search is no longer just about text. Now images, videos, and local results can all rank, and rank highly, for any given keyword term.

The sheer quantity of different information sources online has resulted in a media circus. The various blogs, tweets and mainstream media outlets are like different acts vying for user attention. Online reputation management amid all the chaos can be difficult. It seems only appropriate that a circus insider, Jessica Berlin of Cirque du Soleil, weighed in with some tried and true advice in Reputation Monitoring and Management.

Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant with Marketing Pilgrim and Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and primary author of this blog, also contributed their advice for keeping the positive spotlight on your brand in this session moderated by Todd Friesen.

Why Monitor Online?

Thank you to Jonathan Dingman, who writes the Google News, Inside blog, for attending the DPAC II conference in New York this week and blogging the session, “SEO: Is Finding Your Inner DAO the Answer?” which included: Ron Belanger, Vice President, Agency Development at Yahoo!, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner at Beyond Ink, Jolina Pettice, Senior Account Manager at TopRank Online Marketing and Noah Elkin, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Steak as moderator.

Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) is something that any publisher, of any kind, ought to be doing on a regular basis. Alright, so if you should be doing it, what exactly is DAO?

DAO is, essentially, optimizing what you own as an asset, digitally. It’s pretty straight forward. Whether it’s a video, an image, presentation, or a podcast, as a few examples, those are your digital assets. A video is an asset which should be optimized for maximum exposure.

Earlier today, I attended the session “The Next Wave For Online Video,” which covered some high level insights into video advertising and online video trends. This session focused more on practical tips to get videos ranking in both video search engine and universal search results. Joseph Morin of Boost Search Marketing monitored this session in which five online video optimization experts shared their inside tips and tricks for launching your video to the masses. Each expert had a wealth of knowledge to share, so what follows are some highlights from each speakers’ presentation.