Naming Conventions for Image Files in a Website

1. Naming Conventions for Image Presented by Payoda Technologies

2. Introduction Images present a very unique problem with web crawlers. A search engine WebCrawler doesn’t have the ability to view an image on the web and inherently know what that image is depicting. In other words, unless we (the webmasters and SEO’s) help them out, they are blind as a bat!

3. Ways to Optimize Your Images 1. Ensure that every image has a Keyword-Rich Alt Attribute 2. Ensure that you adhere to good file-naming conventions when creating images 3. Keep image size low to increase load speed 4.URL Structure (Folder Naming)

4. Ensure that every image has a Keyword-Rich Alt Attribute The Alt attribute is a great way to give search engines descriptions of your site’s images, thus helping them get a better understanding of what your site and its images are about. In case you don’t know what an Alt attribute looks like, try hovering over an image on your site. If it has an Alt attribute with keywords in it, then a little description with the text used in the Alt attribute should pop up over the image. For example, let’s say we have a picture of a bouquet of roses. Your alt attribute should look something like this. <imgsrc=”../images/roses.jpg” width=”100″ height=”100″ alt=”Bouquet of Red Roses” />

5. Rules to follow when determining Alt text for your images: Don’t use the Alt tag as a platform to stuff in your target keywords. Only use Alt text that is a fairly accurate representation of what the image is depicting. prefer to keep Alt text short and Simple

6. Ensure that you adhere to good file-naming conventions when creating images Adhering to solid file-naming conventions is also a good way to help web crawlers understand a little bit more about what your site’s images are. What do I mean? Basically, when you’re creating your images and saving them, you should consider how you name them. For example, let’s say you’ve made a picture of a “green apple”. This would be a bad way to name it: http://www.yoursite.com/images/ooo1AB.jpg Unless someone is searching for “0001AB” you’re up a creek with that name. However, if you use keywords when naming files then you could gain some value. For example: http://www.yoursite.com/images/green-apple.jpg Now they will know the picture is of a “green apple” and not “0001AB”

7. Guidelines to follow when naming your image files: Use relevant keywords. Keep it short and sweet. This is not a place to spam keywords. Separate keywords with a dash (-) as your 1st option, and underscore as your 2nd (_). If you don’t separate your keywords, a search engine won’t know that “greenapple” is really two words. DON’T leave spaces when naming your files, as they will show up looking like this green%20%apple.jpg in your URL. That’s not very pretty, and not very SEO-friendly.

8. Keep image size low to increase load speed A webpage that has a lot of big images slowing it down simply will lot load very quickly, which may lead to a high bounce rate before a visitor even hits your site. Try to keep your sites images at or below a 30k file size if possible. Remember, images that load quickly = happy users! URL Structure (Folder Naming) The URL structuring should stay fairly consistent. Use 2 or 3 levels of categories before the specific page, or specific image. Here are some examples: www.basketballwebsite.com/basketball-players/kobe-bryant OR www.basketballwebsite.com/basketball-teams/los-angeles-lakers URL’s need dashes to represent spaces just like our image naming.

9. THANK YOU Submitted By Sudha SEO Expert http://www.payoda.com