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Does anyone know if there is merit in naming images on a website with a related keyword name?  For example, if I sell personalized mini footballs, name the image personalized-mini-footballs.jpg rather than FB6.jpg.

Aarron Walter, in his book Building Findable Websites, recommends that you try to include the terms you want to optimise for anywhere you can. He mentions using your company name as your JavaScript filename and stylesheet name, and also including keywords in your image filenames.

I’ve never seen any empirical research on the subject, though.

I think that naming images responsibly is definitely a great thing to do as it not only helps people viewing the site who are blind (screen-readers) but also helps you too when you are creating the site as it’s much easier to remember the image as you have it named above as opposed to aaUDY2873656_test_re_render_2324988.jpg 😉

The only thing you should watch out for is don’t make the name too long and start doing what some people do which is stuffing terms and tags or meta-data into the image name or the alt tags as you could find that would get you penalised in the search engines.

Other than that I personally believe it is a good thing.

Best wishes,

Mark

Google Image search basically depends on it.

Google Image search basically depends on it.

Depends on what? Tag stuffing or well-named images?

The latter, obviously 😜

If you build a site for accessibility you are guaranteeing that search engines are going to like it - they are after all blind users of your site and when you think of a site this way it’s a lot easier to realise where to put the emphasis on your underlying site construction. I use Web Developer Toolbar on Firefox and often use it to disable the css to see what a search engine sees on a site - very useful.

Image names are certainly part of this and you don’t need to load them with keywords because your images should be in context with your content anyway - so just give them descriptive names which is going to help you as well.

Which leads me to one of my favourite subjects dashes or underscores. I seem to be very alone on this and think that underscores should be the correct way to name files and urls.

I seem to be very alone on this and think that underscores should be the correct way to name files and urls.

So do I 😊 Actually, I think it doesn’t matter in terms of SEO, but it’s easier to read so I use them extensively.