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