Education specialists will tell you that some of us learn more readily from reading, some from hearing, some from video, and some from doing. It only makes sense that when you conduct an internet search, you avail yourself of all the options when it comes to the information out there on the subject you’re interested in. That’s one reason why multimedia searching is a good idea.

Another reason is that sometimes the best information is something other than a written web page. For example, if you were to find a web page describing a newly discovered piece of music by one of the great composers of the past, the description would no doubt be interesting, but you could really appreciate it better if someone had posted a recording of someone playing the composition.

Likewise with video. While it can be thrilling to read a news story about a very close speed skating finish at the Olympics, you can experience it better if you watch a video of it.

When it comes to using multimedia to improve your search engine rankings, there are a number of ways to do it. You can post your own video content, or you can embed relevant video onto your page.

However, if your site is updated daily with just another video and no unique content, you won’t benefit much, if at all. Google has ways of dealing with duplicate content that will keep you from boosting your search engine rankings by re-posting content from other sites. Some people refer to it as a “duplicate content penalty,” but this is somewhat of a misnomer.

What Google does NOT want you to do is create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with mostly the same content. They don’t want you to create affiliate sites with little to no original content on it. The content has to be the star. Duplicate content isn’t usually a grounds for action by Google unless it appears that the whole reason for the duplicate content is to manipulate search engine results. Google does not want its top 10 results to belong to a handful of domains or subdomains belonging to one entity. They want the top 10 to reflect a variety of information and not just be 10 URLs, all containing the same information. When Google encounters this, it chooses one URL to be the “representative” URL for the bunch.

OK, now that the lecture is over, here is what you do to use multimedia to help you rank higher. The term “multimedia” generally refers to video. If you can post original video that you created, that is best. If you can’t, then what you can do is go to a video site like YouTube and dig for video that is relevant to the content of your site. Once you find a good video that makes sense on your site, you can embed it using the instructions on YouTube.

But that’s not the end of the story.

You have to add original content around the video. For example, you may want to write a transcript and post that after the video for hearing-impaired visitors. Or you might want to write a review of the video. In other words, you have to add value to that video in order for it to help your site.

So even if you use multimedia content on your site, you can’t get away from the need to provide original, fresh content.

The same is true when you link to other content. You can’t just say “click here” and hope that the link adds value to your site. Any one link isn’t going to do much. To help you, links have to be relevant, and they have to appear as a part of a larger whole that is your site’s content. The ultimate goal is to rank highly not only for regular web content, but also for images and video.

In the screen shot, you can see the search results of the phrase “winter olympics snowboarding.” Notice that in addition to News and “regular” web content, there are image results and video results. If your site shows up in one of these, then you’re obviously doing something right with your multimedia SEO.

Another tactic that may be worth a try is using a service like Veeple that embeds searchable content inside videos. When you upload video to Veeple, the title and keywords you enter will be included in the embed code and in the URL link. That makes it far easier for search bots to find video by title and by keyword.
Multimedia content on your site can help your SEO efforts if done well. Aggregating information without adding original content won’t help, but practices like embedding original video or embedding video from a video site as well as adding original content will help. There is really no way around providing original, well-written content as the heart of your SEO efforts.

The web is much more of a multimedia experience than it was just a couple of years ago. Video content is almost as much a part of the typical website as images and links are. If you can leverage video content to help your search engine rankings, you’re working on a balanced approach to SEO, which in the long run is your best strategy. While video doesn’t necessarily have to be the staple of all your content, you shouldn’t ignore it either.

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