SEO Tips: Image Naming – Round 3

Posted by jonathan at 10:40am EST on 10/14/2009

This is a follow-up post from SEO Image Naming and SEO Image Naming Round 2. The previous two articles were written two years ago. This article is proof that the methods work.

Comparing traffic from two years ago, image traffic has grown quite a bit. I have done a few things to keep the traffic growing on a daily basis.

The first rule I have used is to try to re-use images as much as possible. If I have an image for a specific post, like an image of the Flickr logo, I try to re-use it as much as possible. Why would I want to re-use the same image again and again? The same rule applies to images as it does for pages in the index. The more links pointing to a specific image with similar or same anchor text, the more Google will recognize this image for what it is. So the more times you point to the same image, instead of creating another version of the same file, the more likely Google will be to rank that image higher in the index.

The second rule I have kept consistent is how I name images. This is probably the stronger point of how I rank so high for image search. After searching Google Images for all the images on ginside.com, I see a total of 622 right now. That’s not a lot of images, but I got over 15,000 search referrals last month from Google Images alone. Naming images closely in line with what the content surrounding the image is very important as it helps provide context for the search engines.

Something that I have done differently though, compared to the first two articles about Image Naming, is that I use dashes instead of underscores in the image names. While Google doesn’t give high priority over the difference of dashes or underscores, Matt Cutts has already come out and blatantly stated that dashes are better than underscores. So if Google does like one over the other, why not use the one they like better? Makes sense to me.