New Google search ad formats – more multimedia competition for organic search results

Google have recently blogged about their new search ad formats on their official blog. This comes as more ‘competition’ to the organic listings and serves as a reminder about the need to include multimedia in your website to engage users and increase your chances of getting a call to action in Google’s results.

As Search Engines start including images and videos in their search results (notably Google’s Universal Search results and no doubt others will be following suit shortly), webmasters have more reasons to consider the user first when optimising for search engines.

Traditionally when preparing for SEO, web authors have been encouraged to think primarily about how a website will look as plain text, as this is all that search engines can interpret, but increasingly there’s more incentive to include multimedia, as SERPs begin to include images and videos in their listings.

So for webmasters, it’s worth bearing in mind:

1) Include images and videos in your website or blog – they are engaging content for users and if they appear in a search results page, users will be more likely to click on them than a plain text listing
2) You can embed video from many different streaming hosts, but it’s worth thinking about where you’ll get most traffic from. YouTube in particular can provide a lot of traffic, so it’s worth uploading video to YouTube and writing a meaningful title and description, plus link to your website. Even if you decide to host the same video elsewhere and embed on your website from that location, the extra traffic is not to be sneezed at.
3) Remember to include descriptive alt attributes in all images and bear in mind you can embed regular html h tags and name parameters within flash object tags. With the advent of html 5, it’s rumoured there will be video tags with alt attributes.