Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Image & Video Optimization
Log in to post

Category: Image & Video Optimization

Explore how to optimize your website's images and videos for search.

  • JABacchetta


    We recently published a slideshow on SlideShare.net and it ended up doing pretty well. It was featured on their homepage for 3 days, and we got quite a few embeds. Unfortunately, a few days later, our rankings in Google tumbled. I'm wondering if this killed our link velocity, which I suppose would have potentially got us a temporary, automated penalty? If you look at slide #4 and beyond, you'll notice that the logo links back to our homepage, and there's also a "View Quote" button that navigates to that specific quote, so users can find out more information, share it, or view any associated pictures. So, in total, there are quite a few backlinks in that slideshow (88 to be exact). Is this what likely caused our drop in rankings? Or is it more likely to be a coincidence? We haven't done anything else in the past couple of months, other than publish an infographic and a press release. And if this is a problem, how would we fix it? I can edit the slideshare and remove some of the links... but it seems sort of silly considering we haven't done anything blackhat. And, it would actually devalue our slideshow, because users would no longer be able to click through to the quotes. Thoughts?

    | JABacchetta
    0
  • digitalundivided


    Greetings, we have an image heavy site (it's a fashion blog that is over 11 years old) and for some reason our images aren't being indexed by google. We've looked at the robot.txt, CDN (we're using cloudfont via Amazon), etc as well as searched google webmaster. We still can't figure it out. None of the images on our pages are being indexed. Any help you could provide would be GREATLY appreciated Site: http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com Sitemap: http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com/sitemap_index.xml Image sitemap: http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com/sitemap-image.xml

    | digitalundivided
    0
  • TMI.com


    My website has several videos, mostly product reviews and tutorials. I'd like for these videos to show in the SERPs with rich snippets, but I am hosting them through Youtube. What is your experience with Youtube hosted videos? Do they generate rich snippets? Or will Google always rank the Youtube video over your web page?

    | TMI.com
    1
  • tourtravel


    Any kind of SEO instructions/suggestion to how optimize youtube video? IM talking about titles and descrpition/tags.

    | tourtravel
    0
  • edwardfrebow


    Hello I built out a blog for a client and used Yoast Local SEO plugin for WordPress. Here is one of the pages generated for a physical location for the business. http://water-notes.generalplumbingsupply.com/?wpseo_locations=sonora-ca My client who manages a website for the same business built out a locations page and insists that their pages rank better for local search. I think the pages are spammy. Individual location page for the website managed by my client: http://www.generalplumbingsupply.com/American-Canyon-CA-v1.HTML Multiple locations page: http://www.generalplumbingsupply.com/Locations.HTML What page should we be using? Thank you for your help.

    | edwardfrebow
    0
  • govi


    My website pages appear for several local keywords like "granite countertops St.Louis" (About 480 impressions) and my site appears as the top most in SERPs. But the CTR is 1 to 2%. It is mentioned that the top positions may get as many as 35% clicks. What are the reasons? I need help with detailed solutions. archcitygranite.com

    | govi
    0
  • CalicoKitty2000


    Hi!  I have been attempting to make my business website good for quite some time (5+ years).  I was doing my own SEO and do have 1st page ranks... but toward the bottom.  I pay a lot for Google Adwords and would like better organic ranking.  I hired an SEO and haven't seen much improvement.  I think I need to take it back over.  I am very overwhelmed.  Can anyone point me to where to start?  I don't have a large budget, so hiring an expensive SEO is out of the question.  Plus, I am scared to use someone that may do more harm than good in attempt to use sleezy techniques to get good short-term rankings. I'd like to add that I have read Google's webmaster guide and have done every.single.thing recommended.  I have a facebook page, blog, google+ page, twitter, pinterest, instagram, and linkedin account. I use sprout social to post to all of these at once.  I have competitors that don't pay attention to SEO and have never hired one that outrank me.  I have keyword focused pages, and I have looked at keywords as a percentage of over all text.  I have all my headers setup according to moz.  Its been 6 months and I have actually lost a little rank.. not gained.

    | CalicoKitty2000
    0
  • donaldsze


    Hi all, I work for enterprise app development & mobile consultancy, Mubaloo. We tend to rank fairly well on Google for our targeted keywords in the Bristol area but not as well in London. Obviously there is more competition in London but that aside, we still don't rank brilliantly. We use our London address as our main address on our website, same for our London telephone number. Both of our offices are submitted to Google Maps and we include blog content with London and Bristol in the headers. Our main HQ is in Bristol but the London office is growing. What are the ways we can improve our rankings from a London-based Google search? Thank you in advance!

    | donaldsze
    0
  • itrogers


    I am just wondering if there are any SEO considerations when uploading a video to either YouTube or Vimeo? Should i choose one over the other or is it okay to upload to both? Haven't stepped into the video part of SEO waters before 🙂

    | itrogers
    0
  • netviper


    I am working on some landing pages and trying to do well in Local areas. Is it better to have my landing pages set as mysite.com/keyword+location or mysite.com/Location+keyword.  or does it even matter anymore? So for a plumber selling water heater services.  is it better to be: site/hot-water-heaters-jacksonville-fl or site/jacksonville-fl-hot-water-heaters? I normally do keyword+city.

    | netviper
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    Hi everyone, Does anyone have any suggestions on whiteboard animation? I really like the way this tool is used to explain topics, and we'd like to start using it. However, if we do it, we'd want to do it continuously kind of how Moz does it, but based on whatever legal questions our audience wants explained. Does anyone have any software suggestions for doing this? Do any come with free trials? Is whiteboard animation pretty complicated to learn or is it like toondoo/bitstrips? Any insights would be appreciated. I'm aware these are some fairly broad questions, but we're just getting started. So, we don't really know enough to be more specific. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • TheHecksler


    Hi folks, I have a project which is ranking well for specific product-keywords. The problem is, that the ranking pages are PDF files of those products (datasheets). But i do have a normal (html) pages for each product as well. Each of these pages has grade a for the specific keyword and is well crawled, etc. How can I urge Google to "switch" from these PDF files to the specific html pages. I was trying this by testing it robots.txt to disallow to index the PDF file (I tested it with one for first). I would add rel=nofollow to the link to the PDF on the specifi product html page (?) ... Any ideas? Seb

    | TheHecksler
    0
  • TheCraig


    Hi all! We noticed some issues with our sitemap and so we went through and optimized it to re-submit it.  At the same time, it seemed prudent to optimize our video sitemap, however we probably should have thought through that more as  we are seeing the numbers of indexed videos going down. Why and what we changed: We recently moved from flash/flv video to Html5 videos with webm and mp4.  So it seemed prudent to change our sitemap which was using the old flv videos. At the same time updating our videos with more SEO friendly titles seemed prudent. So far our indexed videos from the video sitemap have gone from 70,000 to 28,000, so: A.  How much does a video sitemap depend on the URL of the web page versus the title and the video itself? I am assuming that Google sees a new file extension and title and assumes that it is a completely new video and that might be why they are de-indexing the old ones? I suppose we could go back and put the old sitemap to the old flv videos back up, but maybe we should just tough out the change and wait for the new videos to be indexed. Thanks!! Craig

    | TheCraig
    0
  • TeamacPaints


    I understand they are informative pieces or artwork however, Im really puzzled where they get used? on the website, facebook, etc?

    | TeamacPaints
    0
  • huisjames


    I recently came across Yext. Seems like a convenient service to get listed on local directories. Why I thought this would be useful are the backlinks, not necessary local searches. Are link juice good enough to justify spending the time to get listed? And what about getting listed on BBB.org?

    | huisjames
    0
  • Digirank


    Does anyone know of a free video sitemap generator? Thanks

    | Digirank
    1
  • JonathanLinda91


    Hello everybody, I have a question regarding Alt-text. Is it important, regarding SEO, that I add alt-text to all my images, or only on my contextual images? Hope someone can help me.

    | JonathanLinda91
    0
  • DigitalMarketingInstitute


    ...

    | DigitalMarketingInstitute
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    What is the best way to go about doing local seo for two offices? Everything I can research on local seo provides awesome information...if you have one office, but we have two: one is in downtown Tampa and the other in a northern suburb. Anyone have experience with this that they'd like to share? I'd appreciate it. Happy Friday! Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    1
  • MasonInteractive


    Hi, I have client who is a psychology college that has multiple locations across the United States. We currently have a Google places setup for their main location which is in Chicago. They also have multiple locations in California and Washington d.c. My question is what is the best strategy for setting up Google places for each one of their locations? can it all be done from the Chicago Google places account or do I have to build out individual Google places accounts for each location. Thanks!

    | MasonInteractive
    0
  • WSIDW


    I have a video that is number 1 in the video search terms that is very well optimised and quality backlinked. Yet it does not rank in the organic results. Anyone any idea why, or what to do to achieve this? Many thanks in advance

    | WSIDW
    0
  • khi5


    I am familiar with tools to reduce jpeg images file size etc before uploading to website. After jpeg images are uploaded to a website, what can be done to enhance load speed of these images? Any software to compress images on a website already?

    | khi5
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    What is a good "image" strategy? All I really know is to make sure to use images that you create yourself and/or images that are approved for free commercial use and add alt tags. Right now, just making sure all our pages have images and updating some of the lower quality ones would surely help us, but I'm hoping someone can add a little detail into how best to use images for seo, conversions and how to avoid slowing our site way down by adding more (we do have the smushit plugin which helps some). Thanks, Ruben Our site is www.kempruge.com

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    1
  • Cobalt


    I added a video on one of my client pages via html5, added the video schema to the URL, and submitted a video sitemap and the video still isn't showing up a week later in the SERPs. The keyword I'm typing in is a keyword that DOES trigger video results, so I'm wondering if I screwed something up and would like a second opinion. Search Query that should trigger the video: https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+township+silverado+1500&oq=clinton+township+silverado+1500&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.3798j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 Actual page URL: (html5 video at bottom) http://www.moranchevrolet.com/models/chevrolet-silverado1500 Video Sitemap URL: http://www.moranchevrolet.com/video_sitemap.xml I've added videos in the past via the Wistia automatic schema/sitemap generators and it worked, but via the html5 setup its a little different (like no embed). However, the video appears to check out just fine via the Google schema validator tool. Please let me know if you see anything that doesn't look right. Thanks

    | Cobalt
    0
  • jonnyholt


    In my research I have found multiple citations that were both lowercase and uppercase.  Does this inconsistency effect ranking?

    | jonnyholt
    0
  • jonnyholt


    So my clients business name is "Photojennette Photography" and while researching citations to correct I have found a completely random issue.  There's an actress named Jennette McCardy that apparently has a ton of photos on the internet and with that are page titles like "Brand New Photo : Jennette McCardy" and "Look at this Photo Jennette McCardy" My question is, would Google be sending my listing down because of this?  It's completely random and has nothing to do with the business.  Thanks in advance.

    | jonnyholt
    0
  • MikeRoberts


    For a while now we've had an outside SEO consultant as well as having me in-house doing a variety of work. One of the things our consultant would do was writing up optimized alt & title tags for the image galleries on our ecommerce sites. Recently what came up was what to do when a image appears in multiple galleries (e.g. an image of a bedroom could appear in both the bedrooms gallery & the accent wall gallery). We're not sure whether it would be best practices to use the same exact alt & title tags for an image in all the galleries it appears in or whether that would be too much duplication and each gallery should have different tags despite being the same image. None of it is being done in a deceptive manner, we're just been tailoring how we explain the image based on the specific gallery, landing page, etc. Our consultant is saying that an image should always have the same tags across the entirety of the site but I'm more of the mind that varying them by specific page would help images more readily rank for multiple relevant terms. Any advice?

    | MikeRoberts
    0
  • Sirmontegu


    One of my new clients recently built a site that has a great potential for ranking product pages with video rich snippets. Each product page has a single video, but they are currently hosted on youtube and embedded using Youtube iframes. Overall the videos aren't a great fit for Youtube, and we have decided to move the product videos to Wistia. (Much thanks to Phil Nottingham for his answers in this post, and his overall insights on video SEO in general). So what is the best way to make sure we get original credit for the video? I'm planning to take down all the product videos from the Youtube account as soon as we switch the embeds on the site. Is that enough?

    | Sirmontegu
    1
  • jmurphy7


    I'm trying to find out if the text to html % is really that important ? We run an e-commerce site & I'm trying to push for a redesign of a responsive website, with more images and make it more appealing to the customer, but another member of the company doesn't like the idea of more attractive website and just wants to flood the website with text and keeps saying about the text to html ratio. Is this a really important factor or would a more appealing 'lookwise' website be better ? Cheers

    | jmurphy7
    0
  • jasef


    Hi all, we have product videos that we are putting on our (new) site. The video thumbnail for a product is displayed along with image thumbnails on the product details page i.e. see here: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv48ac/ Click on the video thumbnail and a lightbox pop up window displays the movie. We would like to markup the videos with rich snippet markup. Is this possible with the videos setup in this way (i.e. video displayed in Lightbox) or would we need to embed the video in the product description text on this page (rather than thumbnail with Lightbox popup as it is at the moment) so that we stood a chance of getting a rich snippet on Google SERPs for our product detail pages? Thanks for any help.

    | jasef
    0
  • CandymanKen


    Hi all- i have a video that talks about a particular type of product and have it set up on every page in that category. I am in the process of updating our video sitemap and want to know if I should list all the occurrences in the sitemap or just one? I had asked a similar question earlier about placement, but here I am specifically interested in the sitemap. Thanks! Ken

    | CandymanKen
    0
  • sanar


    Recently, an SEO told me about a problem with my site architecture. Before I take any action, I would like some advice on this. May be this is basic for may people who read this. My e-commerce site has over 400 pages - all of which are regularly updated. I sell 4 products and all 400 pages have an image (which says "subscribe now") clicking on which gets the user to the subscription/payment page. Many pages have 3 images on the same page (mostly because these pages are huge with more than 2000 words on each page and they require a lot of scrolling down, so we placed the "subscribe now" button at the top, middle and end of page). Now effectively this means that there are over 1000+ images pointing to the subscription/ payment page. (1) I have been told that I should either remove these or put a "nofollow" on these images/subscribe now buttons. Should I do either? Similarly, I have a legal disclaimer at the end of each page with a link to a detailed disclaimer page (this appears once under each page) followed by a standard boilerplate language (which I think will be about 15% of the total page content). (2) Should I use image for the language instead? Does it count as duplicity of content? Note: All redirects and pages are on the same/ my own domain.

    | sanar
    0
  • PixelKicks


    We used a CDN to host all of the images on our site, and the paths are such:
    http://cdn.onedirection.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/harry-styles-tongue5.jpg Frequently we get a lot of other websites using our images, which we're fine with, but I would like to know if we get any SEO value from these image links? Interestingly they do appear in the "Just Discovered" section of OSE. Cheers, Chris.

    | PixelKicks
    0
  • WebRiverGroup


    Our company recently started making videos and posting them on our YouTube channel. Should we include the YouTube videos to our sitemap for our main domain? Thanks,

    | WebRiverGroup
    0
  • Ant71


    Hi,
    Im about to start helping a small business who has a facebook account but no website. Has anyone got any experience of getting a business ranking locally without a website? Just wandering if NAP details from a facebook / Google+ account helps with local citation building? Or whether a basic website is required? Antony

    | Ant71
    0
  • kirstyseo


    Hi, This is a quick question for those of you that record your own videos. Currently we record videos using a pretty middle of the road sony HD camcorder. We have some good lighting equipment and mic's etc but I always think that it could be a lot better. I would love to know what kind of recording equipment other use. Someone had said to me to use a DSLR camera with lapel mic which is great and obviously the camera can be used for still photos as well. I am just interested to know if others use that configuration or if people just use your average HD camcorder with good mics etc. Thanks

    | kirstyseo
    0
  • kirstyseo


    Hi, I hope someone might be able to help me out with this. I am somewhat confused. Basically I have a site that has 2 operating bases in 2 neighboring counties. Say Hampshire and West Sussex. Now I understand the need for schema markup. However, where exactly to put this markup I cant see a definitive answer. even on the official googleblog they seem to shy away from answering this. For the moment I have placed it on the contact us page and obviously there are 2 sets of schema markups for the 2 addresses. Now, the bit I am confused about is that I was reading the Koozai Local SEO white paper and they mention to have the addresses in the footer. This is fine and I can do that, especially as there are a lot of sub pages on the site for different products which we would like to try and rank for. Now, this is the bit I am slightly confused on, should the addresses in the footer be the schema markups? I suspect not but I would like to be sure. Many Thanks

    | kirstyseo
    0
  • brianspatterson


    For a franchised business with ~50 locations spread across the US, should the city be included in the business name when building citations? Fictional example:  We have a staffing franchise called 'Hamilton Staffing'.  They have 50 locations in the US.  They are all called 'Hamilton Staffing'. We need to finalize the correct NAP information so we are consistent in building citations.  For the name, should we just use 'Hamilton Staffing' for all of them?  Or should we use 'Hamilton Staffing - Chicago' and the like for other locations? It looks like InfoUSA and Axciom are just using 'Hamilton Staffing', whereas Google is using 'Hamilton Staffing Chicago' and the like. Thoughts on this?

    | brianspatterson
    0
  • Scratch_MM


    I have a client that operates in multiple states. I am trying to find a way to best optimize their website, but all of the best practices for "local SEO" seem to be for things such as restaurants, small businesses, etc. I am looking for a way to optimize for the industry keywords as well as location. Any best practices/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | Scratch_MM
    0
  • jonnyholt


    So it's been a few months since my most favorite thread "Local Really?" (http://moz.com/community/q/local-really) and I have worked tirelessly deleting duplicate citations, fixing incorrect NAP, and adding new citations for the two different locations my client works from.  I have added a second Google Plus Local page and verified it as well and linked it back to the page for that location on my site.  I have added Schema.org markup on each of the pages relating to the locations with the full address and correct NAP.  I research with whitespark.ca to find new possibilities and compare with listings ranking highly. I feel like I have worked non-stop at this but unfortunately I have still seen 0 results from my examining everything.  The Google listing is still on page 14 / 20 and seems to be stuck there.  Is this fairly normal?  I'm just at a lost as I have honestly tried to adhere to all the comments and advice given by everyone here (again while seeing the competition doing none of those things.)  I think I'm just looking for that little "things look right just give it time and continue" or even "no!  you're doing it wrong still" Thanks in advance!

    | jonnyholt
    0
  • naymark.biz


    A client of ours is a vacation rental company with over 50 properties (each property is only marketed through this company). They recently asked if they could add each rental property as a listing in Google Places, Bing, Yahoo, etc. I've been doing research on whether this is advisable or can hurt them in some way. If anyone has had a similar situation, any advice would be highly appreciated. Thanks.

    | naymark.biz
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Is the https://www.youtube.com/keyword_tool the best solution for researching keywords to help with your YT descriptions and tags etc ? I'm finding that huge numbers of the keyword ideas suggested by this tool are being listed as 'Not Enough Data' Should you ignore them, or because they are being suggested they are being used but just not much ? Any other resources for kw research for YT ? cheers dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • photoseo1


    I have spent hours doing some local search clean up and have a list of all the URLs to index, about 75. Is there a place I can dump these to get them all indexed quickly or do I have to wait for the hand of Google to come down and bless me with indexing. I don't want to dump all these to Google +, Facebook, or Twitter; that would just be wrong. Any ideas for fast indexing. I want them to all get indexed before the business address changes in a couple years 🙂

    | photoseo1
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi mozzers, A potential future client(electrician) covers 40+ locations in one region(local SEO) but only has 1 address. He wants to rank for at least 5 to 7 main locations which he has PO boxes for. Can I use these as addresses on his website or will it be seen as violating the google guideline? If it is no good what should I do? Thanks

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • AllieMc


    My client has three offices and I have created three separate Google + local listings for them - I have listed the specific locations  page as the website address for each - Google specifies to add the coding to the homepage to link Google + however what do we do with the three different codes - does each one go on the home page or at the bottom of the specific landing page for that particular office?

    | AllieMc
    0
  • BruceMcG


    New Zealand does some good things, for example we grow hairy fruit called Kiwifruit, put other fruit into bottles and call it Sauvignon Blanc, but we can also be a bit, well...fruity. My problem is that when we Kiwis list out NAPs we do it like this: ABC Company, Level 1, 123 Example St. Now the fruity bit is we don't have Suite #s, there is never: ABC Company, Suite #400 Level 1, 123 Example St. We just expect you to go up to level 1 and bl@ody well find the office thanks very much (yea there are signs). It seems like a Local SEO shared office situation but it's the whole floor! I'm worried if I get an office in an office building then I will have my results merged with Extremely-Boring-Accountant and Angry-Lawyer who happen to be on the same level. What's a Local SEO aware guy to do?

    | BruceMcG
    0
  • TVFreak


    Hi, Simple question, I have a 3 XML sitemaps: One for for News One for Videos One for all Pages (this one will probably be splited because I have a lot of content) How do I present that to google? In webmaster tool and in the robots.txt?

    | TVFreak
    0
  • Kerry_Jones


    Hello, one of my clients has 2 Google Places listings, both UK addresses. However one of them has randomly changed to a US address in Texas, and it won't let me update the country unless I create a new listing.... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!q=the+43+club&data=!4m16!1m15!4m8!1m3!1d22152595!2d12.5088275!3d47.73855!3m2!1i1440!2i774!4f13.1!7i10!9m1!6e0!10b1!17b1!25b1!6m1!1e1&fid=1 As you can see the second listing is Texas, but it should be: Tall Trees Cottage, Winkfield Road, Ascot, Berkshire, SL5 7EX. 0208 144 0166 Any help would be great. Thanks

    | Kerry_Jones
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi Guys, Context: I am working with a plumbing companies that have a corporate side and a franchise side. We got 2 franchises on board. The corporate is not working with us though. Some of these franchises don't even have a website. Because they are local plumbers(franchises) covering generally at least 2 cities, local SEO will be the primary tactic to pursue. So before getting into that, I have to purchase domain names that are already not taken(different from corporate), therefore slightly different from corporate name but not completely to keep the advantage of the brand name. My first problem: should I include a geo kw rich URL or not? To me I personally believe that creating a domain name without geo can be better in the sense that I will be able to create different subfolders for all the different locations that each franchises covers. Also, I am not sure also if google likes those geo urls? If you guys would recommend Geo kw rich urls, wouldn't be a good idea to get multiple domains that would link at each other for each of the locations they cover or would it be a bad idea? in long term SEO Who wins the battle? www.example.com/cityname www.examplecityname.com Thanks Mozzers!

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • pugh


    We currently run an e-commerce store that is online only. We do have an office address that I could list for Google Places, but it is not open to visitors so I am not sure if this would contravene the TOS. At the moment we are in the process of trying to build reviews and Google's revamped 'Places for Businesses' looks like it would be a great tool for monitoring and responding to reviews. From what I can see, though, it is only available to those with a Google Places listing. I am also looking into independent review services, but typically these cost £100 per month minimum, whereas Places for Business would be free. Is there a way that we can use Google Places to build reviews, given that we do not have an actual shopfront? If not, does anyone have any advice on how an online only store can build reviews in the same manner using Google's own tools?

    | pugh
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.