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What is the right mix of multimedia elements on a website?

The mere presence of multimedia on a website can enhance its standing with search engines. Can you imagine why this would be the case?

There are two main reasons. If a search engine sees that your website includes a mix of images, videos, slideshows, and/or audio, it will consider these elements a sign of quality, effort, and professionalism. If your site includes these elements, visitors are likely to linger and look at them, increasing your website's dwell time. Both of these events improve your rankings on the most popular search engines.

Too much multimedia on a page is just as bad as too little, however. Besides the clutter and unpleasant level of distraction created by too much happening on a page, the page's load time will increase dramatically and lead to higher bounce rates for your site.

There's another factor at work here, too. While search engines can recognize and even interpret text (due to recent advances in machine learning or artificial intelligence), they cannot watch a video, or look at an image, or listen to an audio track. For this reason, you need to make sure that you describe the multimedia elements on your website, using language that search engines understand—text.

Little to No Multimedia
a row of multimedia icons, with all but the first two icons at a faded opacity
Pros:
  • Faster load times
 Cons:
  • Lower user interest
  • Less professional appearance
  • Low "dwell time"

Moderate Multimedia Use
a row of multimedia icons, with half of the icons at a faded opacity

Including beneficial multimedia, but still limiting yourself within reason will strike a balance with decent loading times, increased interest (and therefore "dwell time"), a higher likelihood of people bookmarking your site, and a better chance of search engines rating your site well.

Lots of Multimedia
a row of multimedia icons, with all but the first two icons at a faded opacity
Pros:
  • More user interest
  • Increased "dwell time"
 Cons:
  • Long loading times
  • High "bounce rate"
  • May be too distracting

You can provide text descriptions or explanations of multimedia elements in several different ways. These are the ones most typically used.

Multimedia Element How to Describe It
Images Provide text in the HTML source code by assigning any image "alt attributes." The alt tag should describe what objects or actions appear in the image.
Plug-ins Elements that use Flash or Java plug-ins should include text that is visible on the webpage (to visitors as well as search engines), describing the content of the movie or interactive object.
Video and Audio Provide a transcript of the content, especially if the words and phrases in the script would be helpful for a search engine.