Re: How to chose file names for pages and images?

Problem is to avoid what might be interpreted as "keyword stuffing".

General idea to remeber there is, as usual,
"When in doubt, build for human visitors, not for spiders"

As a human visitor, you would probably be fine with 2-4 keywords but would run away of a 10-keywords filename, right?
There is probably a certain value for which indexing programs consider that this is spam... no idea which value, so I'm just using my own feeling of a reasonable use. I would not think there is such a wide difference between 2 and 4


There are I think several different aspects:
1 - the picture by itself, as it would be found by image search
2 - the picture by itself, as it would improve regular (text) search
3 - the picture "text" (filename, alt text, etc) as it would improve the rank of the page it is part of.

For 1/ certainly relevant keywords, whichever a (reasonable!) number certainly improves the chance of the image to be found in an image search. NOTE thet this is specially important for photos of persons, if their name is part of the filename then certainly these pictures will get high marks.

For 3/ I would think that again a reasonable use of keywords would favor the relevance of the page for these keywords...

Item 2/ is probably a more fuzzy area, since there is (yet) no clear common experience on how/ when /why pictures do appear in search results. What is certain though is that:
- if images are returned in the answer page, all results returned after this mini gallery are pushed down, and some of the results will trhen move below the "fold line"
- if yours are part of the images published in the gallery, this is a rank booster, even if your page is displayed lots farther
- and of course, if you make a "full" (some images of yours in the gallery + your page above the fold), you are king.


PS NOTE: when I write "When in doubt, build for human visitors, not for spiders", this needs a slight adaptation: never use "javascript-only" or "flash-only" navigation/ content, since these are not really spider-readable. If for the look you want to use them, be sure to provide an additional "regular html" alternative.

2010/7/20 non <andreainfusino@gmail.com>

hi Bernard,

sometimes i consider the option to insert related / synonim and typos in keywords. But i think you have covered all the necessary topics on file naming!

But i have red here and there that's much better not to create long filenames, so it could happen that 3-4 kw in filename is too much. Have you seen any ranking difference using a 4-word filnename instead of a 2-kw filename?

infati too many keywords filenames could decrease the total amount of relevance of the filename... what's you opinion on that?

Bye :)

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Bernard Savonet <bernard.savonet@gmail.com> wrote:

Discussion item 1:

Question: How to chose file names for pages and images to improve SEO as much as possible?

Most of us have some ideas there, or rather should.

My own strategy there is verry simple:
- index.* files must stay named that way unless you want to play with Apache configuration and htaccess
- for other pages: if they are manually created pages (as opposed to dynamically generated), use

• lower-case only, no accent or spoecial characters
• keywords separated by hyphens/ minus "-" (some would prefer to use underscores "_ ", I don't)
• more than 3-4 keywords is probably a waste

- same for pages structures and directories
- if possible, do the same for relevant images / pictures: not thos used for decoragion and style, but thos used to illustrate a post and add information: naming the pictures files with dashed-keywords is an important tool since it will help tour SEO on several fronts:

• for images alone, your keyworded images will score high on any image-search with these keywords
• on regular Google searches, chances are high that your images will score high too and them give you some additional exposure will pushing down competitors.

What is YOUR strategy for these?

All of us are currently making a scary useless place of this list, by not really adding value, and thus bringing in few interested / interesting people.

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