The Do’s and Dont's when Handling Multimedia
Let’s face it, chances are your site features a truck-load of multimedia which makes for a vibrant and diverse user experience. Think about the amount of images, videos, brochures and interactive elements that are on your site… The list goes on. Ever stopped to ponder over whether its all been implemented in a way that’s helping to maximise your online visibility? If you have a hunch that things may not be up to scratch and you’re looking to improve your SEO, then you’re in luck – hopefully this article will be an asset to you. Video Content Site speed is a major factor determining search engine rankings and the way that videos are handled on your site can greatly impact the speed at which your site loads. This is just one of the reasons why its nearly always best to embed your videos as opposed to hosting them directly on-site – the burdens of streaming are handled by the provider, whether it be YouTube or one of the many others, which will speed up your site and allow for a better user experience. Here’s a bonus tip too: a video transcript can be the perfect foundation for a blog article. Blogging is a great way to add fresh content to your site and what easier way to create a useful article than to provide highlights or analysis of a recent video that you have created. Make your content work harder for you! PDF Content Now we’re not here to condemn PDF files and their use on websites. Quite the opposite, PDF files can be quite worthwhile. However, this is only if the PDF document has been crafted correctly. Long story short, make sure that your PDF originates from a text based program like Microsoft Word which means that you will avoid the PDF file being created as an image. Any text that is featured in the file will then be able to be indexed and followed by search engines (that includes links too!) Image Files Say you take a hi-res photo of a person using a good quality camera. Chances are, the image dimensions are going to be pretty big and the file size is going to be weighty too. You could go straight ahead, upload this file to your site and then resize using HTML to shrink it down for use on your page. Problem is, the file size is still going to be the same. Bigger file size = slower page loading time. Here’s a little practical demonstration for you to try. If you see an image on a site, quickly do the following: