Adding Images and Videos

A website full of text can be overwhelming. Chances are the visitor will abandon the page without ever digging deeper into it. This is where images and videos play an integral part in the stickiness of your site. Images and videos are used to break up the monotony of a page full of words. They are used to draw the visitor’s eyes to where you want them to go and to keep them moving deeper into your site. Images and videos should be used strategically and properly to ensure they help and not hurt your web page.

There are a few keys to properly using videos and images. First, do not have your video automatically play when your site loads. Chances are your prospective customer is researching their options at work and having a video shout out the fact that they are doing so is a sure-fire way to get them off of your site in a hurry, never to return. Make your videos have a noticeable play button with a brief description that gives them an opportunity to turn their speakers down before outing them at the office. Next each of your videos and images needs to be optimized on the back end so that they show up in the Images search and Videos search of the search engines. Videos that are properly tagged with metadata and descriptions often have the ability to show up in the organic search results as a page of their own, giving you an additional opportunity to entice the visitor. Thirdly, consider using a video hosting company instead of running the videos directly from your website. There are many video hosting companies you can use to reduce the overhead on your own website. Remember all the talk about speed affecting your site performance? You do not want a great video to slow down your page load speed, so using a third party hosting company is a good idea if you have several videos, or if your video is long. Videos and images not only add visual aesthetics to your page, but they can increase the amount of time spent on your site and the number of opportunities for your site to get ranked in the search engines.