Digital assets can be anything of value in electronic formats, such as images, videos, and PDFs. When optimized, digital assets can help marketers boost their business site’s SEO performance. As a result, the website may stand out from the competition and generate quality leads.
Unfortunately, many people still struggle to leverage their digital assets to boost their SEO performance.
With this in mind, let’s dive into digital asset optimization to improve your website’s search engine ranking.
What Is Digital Asset Optimization?
When building a website, optimizing digital assets shouldn’t be overlooked.
Digital asset optimization (DAO) is about making electronic files searchable not only for users but also for search engines. Hence, improving a website’s rankings on the results page.
DAO encourages marketers to optimize any type of file, from images and logos to internal links, web pages, and HTML tags.
Knowing user search intent is among the key strategies to successful digital asset optimization. It allows marketers to use relevant keywords to optimize their digital files.
For that, conduct keyword research to find out what users type into the search bar when looking for a specific asset. Some of the best keyword research tools include Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and Google Keyword Planner.
How to Optimize Digital Assets for SEO
Let’s look at the six tips for conducting an excellent digital asset optimization strategy for SEO.
1. Pick Digital Assets to Leverage
This process is about choosing digital assets for improving SEO performance. Here are some of the most popular digital assets to optimize:
- Images. These include infographics, product photos, and gifs. If you’re looking into improving your site’s engagement, optimizing images should be on your list.
- Videos. The future of video marketing is promising. Therefore, every marketer should start preparing.
- Written content pieces. Many content marketers optimize their articles by using keywords, internal links, and compelling titles.
- Web pages. Product, checkout, and review pages are among the best ones to optimize. This can improve conversion rates.
2. Optimize Your Images
Optimized images can keep visitors engaged and help a site rank higher on the search engine results page. On the other hand, unoptimized images can wreak havoc on a website’s performance.
For example, heavy media files may take up too much space on a server’s storage. Consequently, they can harm a website’s page speed and deter it from getting to a search engine’s first page. The recommended image file size for a web page is 2 MB at maximum. Thus, be sure to check your image size and resolution before uploading.
A lossless compression tool enables users to compress their images without losing quality. Alternatively, take advantage of stock photos as those images have already been optimized for web use.
Furthermore, don’t forget to add image alt texts. They are HTML tags informing users what’s in the photos in case they don’t render properly.
3. Add Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions summarize a site’s content. These elements will appear on the page’s snippet on the search engine result pages (SERPs) so that users can understand what the page is about.
Optimizing meta descriptions is crucial as they help boost a page’s click-through rate.
Meta descriptions should be concise and compelling. Make sure not to include more than 160 characters in a meta description. To encourage users to click on a web page’s link, provide an answer to the article’s search intent.
Using relevant keywords on a meta description is also a great strategy. They help trigger search engine crawlers to rate the web page as relevant to the search query.
4. Provide an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap provides detailed information regarding a website’s essential pages, including media files. Typically, website owners create a sitemap to get Google to index their sites quickly. Site indexing is crucial as it determines whether a website is eligible for appearing in the search results.
Google XML Sitemap enables users to create an XML sitemap automatically. With such a tool, users only need to register an account and wait for the verification. Once authorized, turn on the XML Sitemap option on the SEO page, and you’re good to go.
In addition, creating a separate image sitemap may help marketers optimize their .jpeg or .png files for image search. For this, they need to link to the XML image sitemap in the robots.txt file.
5. Practice Internal Linking
An excellent internal linking strategy is also necessary for a smooth indexing process.
The process is about including hyperlinks that point to another page of the same domain. Practicing this strategy is a great way to keep visitors on a website and guide them through the marketing funnel.
To the users’ advantage, internal linking helps them get exhaustive information about the problems they’re trying to solve.
Here are some tips for an excellent internal linking strategy:
- Utilize keyword-rich anchor texts. They help users and search engines better understand what the URL destination is about. Avoid using generic anchor texts, such as “here,” “this link,” and “click here.”
- Link from high-quality content. Some content may perform better than others. Linking from well-performing articles helps pass their authority down to other web pages.
- Don’t overwhelm readers. Be sure that you don’t put too many internal links in an article.
6. Track and Measure Digital Asset Performance
Digital asset management often utilizes a central location to help marketers control their valuable electronic files. Thus, all changes in their digital assets are accessible to track.
Some of the most crucial DAO metrics to observe include searches without results, popular downloads, and most-shared digital assets.
By understanding how their efforts perform, marketers can make more informed decisions for future digital asset optimization strategies.
Conclusion
To recap, here are the six tips for using digital assets to boost SEO performance:
- Picking digital assets to leverage helps you focus and plan the perfect DAO strategy.
- Optimizing all images maintains an excellent page loading time.
- Adding meta descriptions may boost a page’s click-through rate.
- Providing an XML sitemap helps search engine crawlers gather all vital information.
- Practicing internal linking passes a little bit of authority to other web pages.
- Tracking and measuring digital asset performance determines which strategies yield the best results and which ones need some work.
By implementing all the above tips, a website will be in pretty good shape to rank higher on the SERPs. Thus, wait no more. This is your sign to start optimizing your digital assets. Good luck!
