For several years, I have advised clients and colleagues to add audio and video to their web sites and blogs. From a user’s standpoint, audio and video personalize the experience and help establish a relationship between you, the publisher, and your visitor.
I also suspect that audio-visual content will serve to establish your site as an authority site for search engine purposes. While I obviously am not privy to Google’s search algorithm, I do find that on my own sites, the ones with audio or video tend to climb the search engines faster and go higher than the sites that are purely text.
Now, Google has begun implementation of something called “audio indexing.” According to Google Labs:
Google Audio Indexing is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken.
Right now, Google is only using audio indexing on political videos and election related videos. But I suspect that within the next few months, Google and the other search engines will add audio indexing features to all video and audio content.
If you would like more information about adding audio or video to your web site, please feel free to contact me.
