Image File Names for Web Search Engines

[jmwscot]

I've read on various articles on the web that the file name should have words separated by dashes rather than underscores to enable search engines to scan more effectively. I observe that Lightroom creates filenames with underscores for web images, whereas Photoshop 'save for the web' creates dashes. Does it really matter either way for Search Engine Optimisation and has someone a definitive answer?

Regards, John

[feppe]

Searching "Central Park sunset" on Google, Bing and Yahoo brings up my image on the first page, and the filename has underscores. Not definitive, though, because they could be looking at captions, but I doubt their algorithms are so unsophisticated that they don't equate underscores with spaces in filenames.

[Vuurtoren]

I've read on various articles on the web that the file name should have words separated by dashes rather than underscores to enable search engines to scan more effectively. I observe that Lightroom creates filenames with underscores for web images, whereas Photoshop 'save for the web' creates dashes. Does it really matter either way for Search Engine Optimisation and has someone a definitive answer?

Regards, John

Best keep to the HYPHENS only, and most definately.  SEO sees one word otherwise.  Google parses out each hyphen as if it were one space/spacebar typing.  With Underscores google treats the word as an extra character, so if google sees kick_the_ball, it will read kicktheball, and this word has no rating in the keyword game.  There has been so much debate on this issue and many say it does not matter, but google people say this is the way to do it.  Also remember that google is not consistent due to different SEO techniques from different search engines.  The same word can deliver three very different results.  But if you stick with hyphens you are ok.  Better to get a thesaurus though and try to condense every file name to one word, then you are 100% spot on.  Hope this helps.  Chris.

[feppe]

Best keep to the HYPHENS only, and most definately.  SEO sees one word otherwise.  Google parses out each hyphen as if it were one space/spacebar typing.  With Underscores google treats the word as an extra character, so if google sees kick_the_ball, it will read kicktheball, and this word has no rating in the keyword game.  There has been so much debate on this issue and many say it does not matter, but google people say this is the way to do it.  Also remember that google is not consistent due to different SEO techniques from different search engines.  The same word can deliver three very different results.  But if you stick with hyphens you are ok.  Better to get a thesaurus though and try to condense every file name to one word, then you are 100% spot on.  Hope this helps.  Chris.

Google recommends using hyphens, but 2 years ago a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst (whatever that means) said it doesn't really matter (halfway down the page) and that your time is better spent generating original, compelling content rather than worrying about SEO minutiae.

If I were to start my website again I'd probably stick with underscores for the readability over hyphens.

Oh, and SEO forums are filled with vague, unsubstantiated, unfalsifiable and/or unreproducible claims - even more so than LL MFDB discussions I found by far the most useful real-world guide to be google's own, linked above. And it's free.

[sbunting108]

I use hyphens as I read somewhere it was best practice however I don't think it is that important 

[newguide]

Surprisingly(?) I was unable to find a reference that gave a specific answer to this when I was searching earlier on today. Maybe someone here has a reference they can point to...

The site I'm working on has many images. Many more are added every day by editors uploading and creating content. What would be a suitable file naming scheme for images that they upload?

Currently we're going with:
CODE
/some/path/to/image/YYYY/MM/DD/image_name.jpg
With the "image_name" replaced with a useful optimised name. Maybe something like "blue_whale.jpg" or "britney_spears.jpg" (depending on what the main content of the image is).

Subsequent images uploaded in the same day (requiring they share the same source directory) will have _N appended to the image name before the .jpg extension (so "blue_whale_2.jpg" etc). So it would be possible to have 3 images all with the same file name, but uploaded on different days (so stored in different directories).

Why do I care about this? The images need to be searchable via google image search, with the goal that people click-through to the main content based on finding an appropriate image initially. That's the expectation from the business people.

I know I get an SEO benefit from the page title, the page heading, the words "around" (in close proximity to) the image and the alt text in the image tag. I'm actively doing all this.

I'm guessing I can get a benefit from the path to the image and from the image file name as well. Does anyone have any evidence to back this up (or bust these two myths)?

[John.Murray]

The alt attribute of the <img> tag should accompany every image you publish, all search engines will preferentially use it

[milt]

John & others,

Hyphen vs. underscore is discussed by Google here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329


Newguide,

Are you aware of the difference between Google web search and Google Image search? There are different SEO rules between the two.

Google Web search indexes web pages. It finds its index terms from the text on the page, with emphasis on things like the page title, the meta description, the headers, frequently repeated words, etc. It computes page rank based on factors like number and importance of inbound links, page longevity, Etc. A Google discussion of web search SEO is here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Google Image search indexes images found on the web. It finds its index terms from the filename in the URL of the image, from the alt text of the <img> tag, from the anchor text of direct links, and from the text on the page around the image. Its rules for page rank are rather obscure. Start here to see what Google says about Image search:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=114016

Google Web search and Google Image search are separate, with different scanning spyders and even different dev teams inside Google. However, occasionally image search results are shown on the results page when a web search is done.

--Milt--