Google Inside

As I was reflecting back on some SEO articles I wrote last year, I thought it would be a good idea to do a follow-up review to share what techniques I have used that have actually worked.

This follow-up SEO article is on my SEO Tips: Naming Images.

Naming Images - Round 2

Taking a look at the comparison of my traffic results, you can clearly see that a significant portion [of my current traffic] is coming image search results; Google primarily — duh. But lets take a look at what I actually did.

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.

As part of my technique for naming images, I went both ways of naming them with underscores and dashes to actually see which was being more effective. In the end, I decided to stick to using dashes, which is slightly different than my initial plan.

Google web search provided only a little over 1000 hits in that short time span which I measured these statistics for. Google Images Search, however, produced a drastically higher number of results for my site. Images search can produce plenty — if not more, such as in my case — traffic for your site and it’s definitely worth your while to invest in naming your images properly — from this point forward.

I say, “from this point forward”, because as a rule of thumb, you should always abide by these tips from W3. It is always cool to keep the same URI structure for your site — that includes images. It’s better to have old names, old URLs, and old files that people have been linking to, than to just rename your files on your site to make them “SEO compatible.” Being SEO is important, but it’s not the end-all of life in the search world.