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SEO Tips: Image Naming

Posted by jonathan at 3:27pm EST on 10/30/2006

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.

Incoming search terms:

  • seo tips
  • image-naming
  • image-naming techniques
  • seo and blogs image naming
  • seo tips - image naming - round 1

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No Responses to “SEO Tips: Image Naming”

  1. Gundar

    Oct 30th, 2006

    Great point! People underestimate the traffic they can get through Google Image Search. Looking forward to more tips :)

  2. Jonathan Dingman

    Oct 30th, 2006

    I’m glad you found that tip useful. Keep your eyes open for tips that will come in the future. They won’t be that often since this is mainly a blog dedicated to Google news, but they definitely will appear.

  3. Rodolfo

    Nov 29th, 2006

    Is there any special techniques that can be used to optimize a wordpress blog on my server for SEO. One issue I see is no way to change the title tags on each page, where it seems to take the blog name for the home page.
    I have several hundred 600+ inbound links.
    I have pinged Technorati manually and used pingoat as well as pingomatic every time I add a new blog.
    There is plenty of content, about 30 articles.
    What else can I do? What else should I do to optimize my blog?

  4. Jonathan Dingman

    Nov 29th, 2006

    To be honest, I would just suggest you visit here: codex.wordpress.org for in-depth SEO techniques specific to WordPress.

    As far as content, 30 pages it not a lot. I have over 400 articles on this blog and it’s not at the level of traffic I would like it to be at.