6 replies to this topic

[snidely]

Hi All,

Someone asked this question and I was curious as I didn't know the answer....

When you name an image like thisisanimage.gif, is there a convention one should follow?

Is there a difference between coffee-cup.gif, coffeecup.gif and coffee_cup.gif in terms of the search engines? Is one better than the other, worse?

This question applied to Google but I would be curious to know if it is different for the other major engines.

Thanks

Snidely

:stash:

[qwerty]

I'd say an image's alt text is probably more important to Google than the file name of the image itself, unless we're talking about the image search function. However, I figure it can't hurt to give images descriptive names. And I would separate words with hyphens in such a case, so that G sees the words as separate from each other.

[electricfan]

Hey there...
Wasn't sure if I should throw this on as a reply or a new topic but it seems to fit here...
About naming images:
When I slice up my web page from Photoshop, if I name everything keyword-1.jpg , samekeyword-2.jpg, is this a bad thing since it looks like I'm overusing a keyword.

[projectphp]

hyphens are better for image search, and no, keyword named images aren't bad, but probably not the best idea ever. Descriptive names for i9mages are the best, e.g. "company-product-logo.gif" is better than "xj12345sdf.gif".

It is better for keeping track of as well. When FTPing images, it is easy to know what "company-product-logo.gif" is. JMHO course.

[pageoneresults]

I'll agree with projectphp, hyphens for image naming. I use hyphens for all file naming. Anyway, when it comes to Google's image search (or any other SEs image search) image names, image captions, image alt text, and text surrounding the image all have an influence. A caption under the image with the same file name does very well.

Now, if Google would update their image index, maybe we could see all of our attention to detail pay off.

[Mel]

I would go with hypens and keywords everytime, but it will do more good in image search than the main Google index.

[qwerty]

Now, if Google would update their image index, maybe we could see all of our attention to detail pay off.

When was the last time Google's image bot went a-crawling? I haven't seen it for months.