Question:

Hi John,

There’s a couple of threads on Dentaltown that give advice on SEO for websites. One company says its videos will play an important role in search engine ranking. The other thread mentions that if you “over photoshop” your images it will hurt the SEO.

Can you let me know if these comments are true, or false?

Thanks,

R.G.

Answer:

Dear R.G.,

Thank you for your question.

Technically, images and video are media types - or elements which contribute to the design of your website, not to its textual content and SEO. On the other hand, the webmaster can add some alternate text to images in the HTML which will impact the site’s SEO to a minor extent. In the purest sense, neither media can improve ranking significantly.

However, Google has shown some preference for website pages that carry videos. This is likely in part due to an algorithm factor which rewards sites with better bounce rates. A bounceback occurs when a visitor immediately clicks back to the search results instead of staying on a page or venturing further into the website. A quality video can help retain visitor attention longer resulting in lowered bounce rates - thus contributing to better rankings in the search engines.

While a video itself isn’t going to influence on-page SEO, a video that ranks high for keywords in Google video, has potential for also ranking high in Google’s organic Web search results (for the same keywords). Those little thumbnails you see in the SERPs command a lot of attention (and clicks). If it’s your video and a visitor traces it back to your Youtube profile, then to your website, you can get some secondhand traffic out of it.

Keep in mind that you’ll want to ensure that any hosted videos and images will not slow down page load speeds too much - slow-loading pages can cause site visitors to leave prematurely - resulting in more bouncebacks, not to mention lost visitor conversions.

Site Speed Check
Here’s a free online resource that enables you to check website speeds. Simply enter the website’s URL for a page you’d like to check.

John

This entry posted Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 12:41 am - Filed under Ask The Expert, Video for Dentists. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.