Over the last few years the way information is shared and displayed on the web has changed dramatically. Brands are no longer represented through text pages on one platform (their website/microsite.) Brands are now represented through combinations of various mediums (text, images, video and audio) shared and distributed through various channels (social outreach, blogs, PR and mebsites) which live on various channels (websites, social spaces, content hubs etc.)

Whilst this provides a richer web experience for potential consumers interacting with these touch points the need to optimise content to ensure maximium exposure has moved away from just optimising one form of content and on platform. Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) addresses this by providing optimisation techniques for all content type and platforms.

Digital Asset Optimization ensures that all of website’s digital assets (videos, images, etc.) are indexed within search engines ensuring all content can be found and consumed (the main reason it was produced!)

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.

A few companies now offer digital asset optimisation services, two of our favourites are:

www.maaximise.com and www.we-are-amplify.com