Best way to name JPG's

[chris ashdown]

With respect to search engines what is the best way to name jpg's for instance you could use
red-sweatshirt.jpg
red_sweatshirt.jpg
red sweatshirt.jpg
redsweatshirt.jpg

As I understand from OWG the names of the images are taken into account by the search engines, but do they understand that all above are the same thing

any suggestions welcome

[Jenny]

Chris
leaving gaps between names for images is not a good idea. You will get warning re some servers cannot recognise the names or something to the words like that on upload.
Always good to keep them lower case as well, for server reasons. I had to change the names of one websites page names from _ to - as the SEO said it would be better for ranking but there is still debate out there on this one. Not sure if this applies to image names as well.
Jenny

[KarenBM]

That's interesting - why would case affect ranking?


Karen

[Jenny]

sorry doing 2 jobs at once.. some servers see the case as different names, or at least used to. more from a server point of you than for SEO
Jenny

[pinbrook]

IMO - use either dashes or underscore

don't use spaces as older browsers have problems with them,
don't use nothing to separate words as spiders aren't clever enough to work out the 2 words.

[chris ashdown]

Thanks all for your wise answers, think i will use underscores

[jont]

Underscores are the better option, dashes can cause issues with certain scripts causing them to break - not necessarily an Actinic issue but just good practice

[webyourbusiness]

I concur - we always use underscores!

[procheck]

Definitely keep lowercase because I've spent hours trying to see the difference between "song.mp3" and "Song.mp3" when my brain read "SONG.MP3". For downloads, it can come back as not found on some browsers.