by Claudia Bruemmer

As a wholesaler or retailer, you likely have a lot of images of general merchandise and all kinds of products on your site, and many of you also have videos. If you’re not optimizing these digital assets, you are leaving top rankings on the table for your competitors. By using SEO tactics to optimize your images and videos, you can attract more traffic and sell more products. Below are seven tips for optimizing the images and videos on your site.

1. Use Top Quality Images on Your Site
Quality images not only enhance the look of your website, they can also bring you a number of SEO benefits. If your site uses great images, visitors will stay longer, increasing the time spent on your site. “Time on site” is a ranking factor for all major search engines. It’s just one of the many algorithm ranking factors used to determine whether a site has authority. Another reason for using quality images is the fact that these images will draw more links to your site. This can earn a large number of quality backlinks, which give your site authority and improve your organic rankings.

2. Use Descriptive Keywords in Your Image File Names
It’s important to give your images file names with relevant keywords so you can find them quickly when needed and search bots find them when crawling the web. In addition, many users will submit images with UGC posted to your site. So, depending on your content and where the images reside, ensuring the use of relevant keywords in file names can improve your SEO benefit.

3. Optimize Your Image Alt Tags with Keywords
Besides naming your image files with relevant keywords, you also need to include industry-related keywords in your alt tags. All major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing, index the alt text for images in addition to the text content on your web pages. If your alt attributes for the images on your site are keyword rich, this can give your site a lot of SEO juice. Note that your keywords must be relevant to the image, and the alt text should be brief. If you deviate from relevance and brevity, it could work against you.

4. Optimize Your Videos with Keywords
Make your videos keyword-rich by using your most relevant keywords in naming the videos displayed on your site. Be aware that your video’s title, description and tags are also used by search spiders and can enhance the SEO value of your website.

5. Use Keywords in File Name, Title, Description and Meta Tags
It’s important to use relevant keywords and know the character limit when creating your site video’s File Name, Title, Description and Meta Tags. Consider keywords that people would use to find your videos. A title should have about 65 characters or five to nine words. The description allows you to use up to 1,000 characters. Consider starting it with your website address. Example: “From http://www.toptenwholesale.com, this video shows retailers basic buying strategies for sourcing wholesale products globally online.” Then continue to describe the information in your video. Search spiders will pick up the keywords when crawling the web for information. Using relevant keywords in all the right places will ensure your videos get indexed and well positioned in search results.

6. Create a Video Sitemap
It is important to create a video sitemap listing all the videos on your site. You can use the Sitemap protocol to provide search engines with information about your video content. Video content also includes the web page where you embed your video and the URLs to the player for your video. Each URL entry should contain the following: title, description, play page URL, thumbnail URL and raw video file location or the player URL. Search engine spiders will crawl through your video sitemap to index the videos. The video sitemap is important as it gives your site more authority to enhance your search engine rankings.

7. Submit Your Videos to Video Sharing Sites
It’s important to submit your videos so users will find them in search results. You can submit your videos directly to video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, and others. Another option is to use TubeMogul, a free service that uploads your videos to a number of video sharing websites and tracks results. These sites include: Google Video, Metacafe, MySpace Video, Revver, AOL Video and YouTube.

Conclusion. When you optimize your website’s images and videos, you go a long way toward improving your site’s search engine rankings. Using the tips above will help users find your images and videos while boosting your site’s visibility in the SERPs.