Quick Tip: Image Filenames
Images, images, images! Your website is full of them. They help define the look of your website, giving the site a bit of character, and ultimately acting as a visual showcase on property pages. They also help supplement text-heavy pages, giving the reader’s eyes something else to focus on for a moment, instead while reading through the text. Now, you might think that the only benefit of having images on your website is aesthetic; however you may not realize that images can also help with search engine optimization! Curious to know how a simple edit to each of the images on your website can improve your search engine ranking? Then keep reading…
Filenames.
You’re probably going… “Huh?” Image filenames can help get my website ranked higher? Yes! Overlooked more frequently than you’d imagine, but in reality, a simple change to the filename can cause an image to develop its own presence under Image Searching, and ultimately can help draw extra viewers from those image searches to your website.
A good description helps not only Google, but all search engines understand the content being provided, and enables the search engines to more accurately find and return the desired content. Avoid nondescript filenames, such as 010101.jpeg. Instead think about the topic of the page – perhaps you’re creating a condo profile for Ice Phase 2. Well many people perform image searches to find out how the building will look, or for floor plans. If your images don’t have descriptive filenames that correlate to the building or search query, they’ll be useless unless someone is actually looking at the page. Make all of your website’s components work for you, not against!
Examples of Poor Descriptive Filenames:
Any numeric or ‘opaque’ filenames – unrelated and/or indecipherable filenames are useless for SEO! I.e. 010193.jpeg, dsc1089.jpeg, workparty.jpeg
Examples of Good Descriptive Filenames:
A good descriptive filename will tie in the image to a keyword or phrase that would be commonly used as a search term, i.e. Ice-Phase-2.jpeg, IcePhase2Condos.jpeg, IcePhase2FloorPlans.jpeg, IcePhase2CommonAreas.jpeg
From these filenames, you get a distinct description that helps all search engines better understand and classify the image. This will help return your image(s) in the search results for Ice Phase 2 condos. When someone clicks on a thumbnail of the image, it’ll take them to that page on your website. The image has done its job, and now it is up to your content to entice the viewer to contact you!
Authored By: Bryan Coughlin, Client Relations