I am trying to incorporate some good keywords into my etsy shops and my websites. I was told the names of the photos should
reflect the title and description and that the words in a title should be lower case and separated by a hyphen.
If my title uses a combination of key words, how do I do that?
For instance, dog breeds is a good keyword, and schnauzer is another good keyword. I have a schnauzer coaster set and zillion picturesof different breed coasters and can’t just name the photo or title “dog breeds”. So if I hyphenate it should it be dog-breeds schnauzer or dog-breeds-schnauzer. If I hyphenate all three then it will read that as the key word, right? If there are several keywords in my picture title, then it will read them as separate if each is hyphenated, right?
I was told the names of the photos should
reflect the title and description and that the words in a title should be lower case and separated by a hyphen.
Are you referring to the filenames of the image files? If so, it’s true that you should avoid spaces in the filenames (although not necessarily use hyphens instead). It’s also a good idea to standardise on the case, as some servers treat filenames in a case-sensitive way (but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should only use lower case).
But that’s got nothing to do with optimising for keywords. In fact, there’s no strong reason to optimise the filenames of the image files, unless you want people to search explicitly for your images. It’s much better to focus on optimising the text on the product page. That includes any captions you write for your images, and also the Alt attributes in your <img> tags. But it’s the text that describes the actual product that’s most important.
Yes. I was referring to the file names. Okay. Guess I was obsessing over something that’s not all that important. I am concentrating on optimizing text on the product page including the captions. Thanks for the reminder about the ALt tags.
Never put spaces in your file names, if you have to make sure you just put a dash. (-).
Also always make sure you edit the file names, alot of people think there is no point but if you have alot of images on your site then it’s important to have them indexed properly.
I’m not aware of any solid evidence that having your file names be keywords improves your site’s rankings however SEOMoz has it listed as a best practice of on-page SEO for a website. Even if it only provided marginal benefit, if you did it for all images associated with your website for their respective keywords, it can help boost a page that much more in SERP’s. I would recommend doing it.
The upper/lower case thing doesn’t matter for SEO. You should always make file names lower case to reduce the chance for errors.