Google Inside

Every so often I’m going to have an article with SEO tips straight me, Jonathan. This is the first of many tips. Today we will be going over something that is critically over-looked for webmasters. Image naming.

Image Naming

The blog you’re reading right now is still decently new — 4 months old. I’ve been writing on it everyday almost and I try to include images where I can. I normally take a screenshot, crop is and customize it as needed, then export it as a jpg out of photoshop. I’ve been very careful when naming my images.

I haven’t just named them whatever in hopes that it won’t matter, but I’ve been trying something new that I’ve noticed has been working. With the minimal amount of images I actually have on my site, I noticed it’s bringing a decent amount of traffic to my site.

I’ve been very careful to name my images with terms like…. google_search.jpg or google_clock.jpg, but maybe even something like mobile_blogging.jpg.

Even with this image, I named it “google_image_search.jpg” because that’s what this article is about and that’s what really describes the image. This image is a little bit of the traffic I’ve seen coming from Google Images, which is actually quite decent to speak of. Most sites I run won’t even show Google Images in the search queries because there’s nothing coming from that source.

In-depth

Users are constantly looking for images. I know that I use the Google Image Search at least 4 days a week. Google really has no idea what your is about unless you use alt text or by trying to determine it from the page it’s on. The best way to tell Google what the image is of, is to put it in the name of the file.