Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Your Photo File Names Should Be Descriptive Keywords

Your Photo File Names Should Be Descriptive Keywords. You are asking why for this, right?


Welcome to LilacsNDreams everyone. Grab a coffee, or tea, or some form of drink to have a seat, and relax. My posts of lately have been about SEO, blogs, domains, and different things to help us all with our Online Sales, Crafting, or whatever it is we have chosen to do. I came up with a small issue that was interesting, and wanted to share with you all. Might be a reminder for some of you too. 


We have all been informed how our Item Titles should be descriptive to help with SEO, placements in the search engines, and etc. Something else to consider that is also helpful is a file name that we use with our pictures (photo.jpg) when we upload to our blogs, websites, venues, social networks, etc. This is helpful for when someone uses one of the search engines, and they choose to limit their searches to maybe photos only. So, if your photo has the file name that was assigned to it automatically reading something like 12345.jpg it probably won't show up with a specific search. But, if someone were to say call their photo ivory-pillar-candle.jpg it will have a great chance of showing up, and being seen on the first pages too! If you have more than 1 picture of the same item it is ok to use numbers as well. Like ivory-pillar-candle-1.jpg, and ivory-pillar-candle-2.jpg.


SIDE NOTE: Google reads spaces as "%20" So, if you uploaded a photo maybe named 
"my photo.jpg" (notice the space?) the actual URL for this photo would be something like http://www.mysite.com/my%20photo.jpg which can cause a lot of your links to be broken if they are not linked to properly. You should either use _ (underscore) or maybe a - (hyphen) for any file that will be used in the URL. Actually, the Hyphen is preferred because Google reads these as a keyword separator. Yes, the underscore does prevent a broken link, and is treated like another character. So, for instance "tealight_candle" is "tealightcandle" with just another character that is in between. Now, "tealight-candle" is going to be read as 2 separate words. 

Isn't this interesting? Who would have guessed, right? After reading something like this a while ago I had done changes to my pictures in my files before using them for my listings at different venues. Sometimes when a search is done using keywords you will find pictures from my listings showing in the groups they show right away on the 1st to 2nd pages in searches. Every little bit we can learn, and do helps us all in one way, or another. 

Hope this little tid bit with your photos was helpful to you, and all that you do everyone. Thanks so much for sharing your time with LilacsNDreams. Make sure you come back to visit again soon, and feel free to share with all of us here as well. 
 

4 comments:

  1. I never knew and this is great information, thanks for posting.

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  2. You are very Welcome Victoria:) I knew about this a long time ago, and starting implementing it then when I learned. It does help with your pictures being seen in searches too. I am happy to say that I have had different incidents where my images have shown in searches...it's a good feeling:)

    Enjoy, and have fun...work, work, work...never ending job:)

    Kim
    LilacsNDreams

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  3. I love your site, it's like a wedding invitation. well, you were right. label the files with the right keywords so that you won't get lost on your own files.


    Google Search Philippines

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  4. Thanks for visiting Mary, and for your kind words too!:) The little things, takes a little bit of time to do, but how they can really benefit us too. I would rather spend time with this small issue than work with some of those bigger things we need to do/should do:)...Just being lazy sometimes...LOL:) Thanks again for sharing your time here with us Mary. Have a wonderful weekend!:)

    Kim
    LilacsNDreams

    ReplyDelete