How To Create Effective Image Filename For Search Engine Optimization

Image filename should be created in such a way that it will be useful to search engines for better ranking.  Doing so will help pages rank up on search engine results, as image files can’t be “seen” by search engines.  Tags and filenames assigned on images will help search engines find these images. 

To make the most of this innate characteristic if search engine ‘bots’, file names of images need to be seriously taken into account.

An image filename needs to be carefully thought of for search engine optimization purposes.  A search engine friendly image filename will have the important keywords included in the file’s name itself.  It still follows that when you optimize the file name of an image, you have to make sure that you’re not overdoing it to the extent of committing a mortal sin of keyword stuffing.

Many online marketers would want to know if an image filename would affect regular Google search ranking and not Google images.  There are those who would not like their own images to be indexed on Google’s Image Search, as getting indexed this way also places images in the situation of being easily prone to copyright infringement instead of getting users click on the products or services being offered by websites.

Why Optimize Image Filename For Search Engines

Optimizing your images is a necessary evil to make them visible to search engines.  There are specific things that can be done to help increase your image ranking on the web too.  There are common techniques used in optimizing images for search engines.

Poorly optimized images will never yield ideal performance in terms of search engine results.  If images are not tagged properly to be search engine-friendly, they can’t be found by search engines as there is nothing in the image itself that indicates what the picture is for, thus can’t be crawled by “bots” or “spiders”.

Image “Alt Text” would refer to the “alternative” attribute that is used as image tag, with the purpose of providing some alternate text that describes the image in cases when a browser’s image loading would be disabled.  It can also be useful if the user can’t see the image due to limiting reasons like the need to use assistive technology when browsing, poor eyesight or color blindness.

Many users who can’t do “normal” things when surfing the web also need to have great user experience when using the internet.  This means that the limitations of having the help of assistive technology, generally in using the pc, can be minimized if designers and webmasters make websites universally user- friendly.  This is where alternative image attributed for images will be helpful for universal accessibility.

How To Organize Images And Image Filename For Better Search Engine Visibility

Image “title” text can be recognized by most common browsers, and can be seen by human users when a mouse is hovered over the image, also called “tooltip”.   An image filename is very important in search engine optimization too.  Having a very descriptive filename for images can be very useful for spiders to be able to crawl to these pictures.

The image folder name also plays an important role in ranking an image especially with html pages.  You typically create a subdirectory on your main htdocs folder that is called “/images” where you can store all your images in.  In the event that your site contains several images that you would like to optimize, you better organize these.  For example, if you have 15 images for “Image Filename” topic, you can create a folder path for these images as “/images/image_filename/” where you can store all of the 15 images with descriptive file names which can be crawled by search engine spiders and bots.