As he explains to WebProNews, digital asset optimization is essentially the optimization of non-text content within web pages and the role it plays in search engine rankings. In other words, it pertains to content such as video, images, and even rich, Internet applications like Flash.

This type of content is becoming increasingly popular in certain verticals including retail and health care. For instance, “how-to” videos that explain a process or provide insight into a condition are continually growing in value for consumers.

“There are a lot of reasons that people may look to the Internet and do a type of search that lends itself better to a video result, or an image result, or even an interactive application,” says Boggs.

He goes on to say that the search engines have recently updated their landscape to allow more of this non-text content in the top pages of search results. Although people often view digital asset optimization as a way to get additional listings in search results, Boggs points out that there is a better way to utilize it.

By taking a holistic approach, he says users have the opportunity to have all their web pages gain rankings. Since it gives users a greater chance of ranking, it is very important that they have non-text content on their web pages. In many cases, Boggs says the non-text content is described as a web page in the search results.

Are you taking advantage of the opportunities of digital asset optimization?

Kennedy, who’s the founder and managing partner of Beyond Ink and the founding partner and director of marketing at Joblr.net, noted, “We’re a visual species.” She then continued, “People tend to respond better to visual information . . .” In fact, in a study, Microsoft recently measured a 28 percent better response to visual data than text data.

So pics and videos will show up more and more following standard searches. Thanks to the trend started by the iPhone, videos will become more common in the mobile environment, too.

As a result, Kennedy said, “As marketers, we need to pay close attention to how we can provide visual information, whether in videos or in images, and have those optimized.” Creating a YouTube channel is one option, since the cost of entry is so low.

Then there are just a couple of things to remember about producing videos that are actually good: attempt to make them both well-written and well-lit.

Correction: Google actually had 9 billion queries in August instead of the 9 million referenced in the above video.

Webmasters also have the opportunity to provide topic tags, which are keywords that a searcher might use in a query. As Pittman tells special guest WPN correspondent Eric Enge, the more information that the user provides for the image, the better Google can index and surface the image.

Google is even developing RDFa tag structure, which would allow it to work off of a new language vocabulary that users could embed into their Web pages. The html structure would provide a means for search engines to identify various features of the image and thus provide more accurate image results.

Despite all the additional exposure images could bring to websites, Google is not seeing images being utilized as well as they could be. Pittman encourages webmasters to embrace images since they improve understanding and, ultimately, click-through rate (CTR) once they are indexed by the search engines.

Are you embracing the use of images?