SEO Recap – Image Naming

Don’t name this “image1”. Use your words – your keywords, that is!

Images in your website should be appropriately named and tagged. Many webmasters are careless when it comes to this important task, which shows how careless people are regarding website design basics. Ignoring the potential of images for SEO fails to tap the an important way of enhancing your SEO efforts. It is not difficult to spot images that are named as image1, image2, etc, and we see this constantly in companies whose SEO firm ignored the potential available. Although you will not be penalized for naming your images in the above fashion, to do so is to ignore the industry’s best practices.

It is so much better to name your images in a descriptive way. When you want to work with those images again in future, either to tweak results or to find and replace them completely, you can easily track those images. Proper naming of images helps your SEO in the following way: i Images give you yet another chance to include your keyword in a strategic position of the website! In many cases, the header of the page is an image and the leftmost corner shows the logo of the company. Having keywords in such strategic places  can improve your page’s relevancy to searches being made. So, this is one very good reason to incorporate your keywords in the image names.

In many websites, the header of the page will be the same across all the pages so you will be naming the same image in each page. In such cases, the keyword you have used in one page may not suit the other page., showing a clear mismatch. You can of course save the image under multiple names and use the correctly named   image on each page; in this case, the online user will see the same image but for the search engines, the keyword will keep changing with each page in a way that matches with the content of the page. If you have limited hosting space, however, you may not be able to follow this practice, and in that case should simply use a main keyword for your site, or even your brand/company name.

For large websites or many images on each page,it is best to create sub-folders within the images folder and categorize images according to the nature of each image. When you are creating subfolders, use your keywords for folder names as well. If your keywords made of more than one word (if they are key phrases instead of keywords) then you can use hyphens or underscores to separate words (be consistent!)

Optimize the image names in a systematic way. You should be able to handle your images with ease anytime you want to make any changes to your website. Your SEO firm should be in synch with your web designer, with optimization suggestions passed on to the web design team to set up your website for the best possible search engine performance.

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