Image & Video SEO for clear crawl and page intent.

The page it sits on and the text describing it. Filename, alt text, caption, surrounding copy and page relevance all contribute, alongside image quality and dimensions. An excellent image on a page that never mentions its subject has almost nothing for a search system to work with.

Describe what the image shows, for someone who cannot see it. That is the accessibility requirement and it happens to be what search systems want too. Keyword-stuffed alt text fails both. Purely decorative images should have an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them rather than announcing a filename.

They make the content readable by search systems, usable by people who cannot or will not play audio, and available as text for AI systems to extract. For anything explanatory, a transcript is usually the single highest-value addition — it converts an opaque media file into indexable content.

WebP or AVIF for photographs, with appropriate fallbacks, and SVG for logos, icons and diagrams. The larger win is usually serving correctly sized images rather than the format: a 3000px image scaled down in the browser wastes most of the bytes it cost to deliver.

No. ImageObject and VideoObject markup clarify what the media is and how it relates to the page, which helps interpretation. Whether any visual result is shown remains the search engine's decision, and markup that describes media the page does not actually contain breaches the structured data policies.

They are the most common LCP element, so priority and sizing matter directly. They are also a frequent source of layout shift when width and height are not declared. Lazy loading helps below the fold and hurts above it, because it delays the element the metric is measuring.

YouTube provides its own discovery surface, handles delivery and adaptive streaming, and costs nothing, at the price of branding and its embed's performance weight. Self-hosting gives control and a cleaner page, but you own bandwidth, encoding and player accessibility. Many sites use YouTube for reach and a lighter embed on-page.

Worth doing the fundamentals, not worth restructuring around. Descriptive filenames, real alt text, captions, transcripts and clean surrounding context serve accessibility and conventional search regardless of what happens to visual search, so the work is not speculative even where the payoff is uncertain.