Making sites search engine friendly
Applying standards facilitates metadata sharing
Digital assets are essential for driving marketing and communications messages, and used effectively can be powerful resources for generating increased search engine ranking, resulting in increased online traffic and also making the content spreadable to a wider audience.
Pictures and rich media are prime candidates for disambiguity and returning completely unrelated visual information that can also be detrimental to the viewing experience especially in the case of a picture buying audience. There are potentially other side effects to avoid, like keyword relevancy to content pages not being perceived by Google as spam through keyword stuffing.
To increase findability of assets by search engines, and reduce any risk of keyword stuffing we have devised a cataloguing method utilising an implementation of our DAM for performing essential tasks of media management.
To maximise spreadability whilst ensuring consistency and quality in SEO creation we have adopted these set of best practice guidelines:
- Ensure the selection of well chosen page titles for pages and the resource
- Ensure tags, synonyms and taxonomies are placed in close proximity to the image thereby allowing Google to analyse and determine the 'aboutness' and relevance of images or clips to return in searches
- Include useful meta tags to facilitate search engine crawlers without stuffing to avoid Google penalisation
- Provide detailed and meaningful page descriptions
- Provide well-formed, syntactically correct HTML and valid CSS that are easily adjustable via the CMS
- Include carefully chosen headers employing keywords and search terms without stuffing to avoid Google penalisation
- Include well written content with supporting keywords and search terms
- Provide descriptive ‘alt’ texts for images
- Where feasible foster reciprocal links with appropriate organisations
- Encourage linking to other sites within the content of your site
- Submit pages to search engines for crawling and indexing
Working to increase SEO
We are exploring ways to use tags with SEO in ecommerce applications to enable optimised landing pages to be created based on visitor search activities on a site. Part of the process involves exposing certain aspects of the CMS to allow association of visual metadata and combination of the information with friendly URLs and easily adjustable meta-content of site pages associated to the asset on a per-page basis.
End user interaction is also incorporated to enable user submission of folksonomy tags (although moderation is still recommended) to be indexed by the search engines.