Indexing Pictures & Videos

There are many companies that depend highly on selling, distributing and showcasing images online. To these companies, having their images searchable are crucial to their business. An example of one of those companies is photobucket.com. “63% of all media links to sites like MySpace are served by Photobucket. Compare that to 8% for Flickr and 1.38% for YouTube” (Arrington, 2006, p. 2). Photo Bucket host online video and photography uploaded by its users and any public content is searched and indexed by search engines. A site like this doesn’t rely on its text to found in search engines, but it also relies on its images search ability.

Having images and video online using a provider such as YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa for example, can also help with future marketing of expired contents such as commercials or magazine ads. “Online assets continue to live on, years after the ad is off air” (Philalithes, 2008, p. 4).  An example of this would be a Pepsi commercial featuring Cindy Crawford, which aired in 1991 that still gets views today eighteen years later on YouTube and other video database websites.

It’s a fact that images and online video are starting to gain as much attention as text when it comes to what users are searching for and in what search engines are making available in their own databases. In order for online companies who use images and video as a selling point to continue to ensure that they remain high in the search ranks, they should not avoid making sure that their images and video are just as search engine optimized as their webpage.

Credits

Arrington, M. (2006). 2% of U.S. Internet Traffic goes through Photobucket. Retrieved December 18, 2009, from http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/19/2-of-us-internet-traffic-through-photobucket/

Philalithes, C. (2008). A Picture Speaks A Thousand Words. Retrieved December 18, 2009, from http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=86986&passFuseAction=PublicationsSearch.showSearchReslts&art_searched=a%20picture%20is%20worth%20a%20thousand%20words&page_number=0