Digital Asset Optimization
Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) is the natural evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO concentrates on the text files of a website, relying on the keywords within that text and tags. The Internet is no longer a text-only environment, and search engines are adapting.
The growing success of and demand for multimedia web content is the driving force behind Digital Asset Optimization. Videos, music files, podcasts, images and other digital media are actively searched, and even expected, by Internet users. Webmasters hoping to tap into those searches are replacing SEO with DAO.
Search engines are constantly seeking to improve user satisfaction and provide more relevant results. Digital Asset Optimization ensures that all of website's digital assets (videos, images, etc.) are indexed. Video optimization is leading this push for DAO as companies try to hit the hot list for YouTube and the front page of Internet portals. Tap into this audience, and visitors to a website can double or even triple overnight.
As DAO replaces SEO, companies need to refocus optimization techniques to all available media. Anything that can be crawled and indexed can be optimized. Digital Asset Optimization can bring in traffic that may not even have been looking for your company services, but instead found your site because of the image of a computer keyboard used as a graphic.
So how do you optimize a graphic for a search engine that can't interpret it? This is where metatags come into play. Learning to appropriately tag videos, images, flash animations, and other non-text-based digital files is a large part of the Digital Asset Optimization revolution. Metatagging picks out the keywords and intent of the media file and tells the searcher which type of media it is. Unless you name your graphic “image_computer_keyboard_blue_lights_wireless.gif,” Google needs the metatags to match up your graphic with an image search result for “blue keyboard.”
Whether you are a large corporation or one-man show, Digital Asset Management and Digital Asset Optimization are integral parts of your web presence. Implementing DAO may mean changing the way you produce, store and upload digital media files. Just as SEO evolved to meet early search engine demands, the evolution of DAO ensures those search engines will continue to find and promote your business in results lists. Leave out Digital Asset Optimization and you could miss a whole new customer base.