SEO and Images Names

[Ghome1971]

Are the images names really important in SEO.

For example if I am targeting a page to Hip Kids Tee Shirt should I call the image hip-kids-tee-shirt-jolly-roger.jpg.

Thanks

Geraldine

[Duncan Rounding]

I understand this to be true. All references add to keyword density and if in doubt it can do no harm. Also good if someone searches in Google Images too.

[jont]

You should not use overly long names (for images and URL's for that matter). It also brings up the issue will people be searching for tee shirt, t-shirt, t shirt, tee-shirt (not necessarily in the images but to highlight a point in your example)?

I personally label my images with the product number. This makes finding the images much quicker and also stops it being picked up in Google Image searches for people wanting to "borrow" or even worse hot-linking to the image on my site.

What is more important is the "alt" text which comes from the product name - hence the point about the tee-shirt etc wording above

[Duncan Rounding]

What is more important is the "alt" text

..........

[Ghome1971]

Each page has been used to deal with the issue of T-Shirt, TShirts, Tees etc. So one page has an alt tag "hip Kids Tee jolly Roger" and another "Hip Kids T-Shirts Beaste Boy" Are these name too long. Should I call them "Hip Kids Tee 05" or Hip Kids T-Shirt 02" ie a number for the design.

Geraldine

[pinbrook]

Alt tag and image name are 2 different factors

the alt tag sould be a description of the image (for disability accessibilty) therefore "Hip Kids T-Shirts Beaste Boy" is good.

image name could be Hip-Kids-T-Shirts-Beaste-Boy.gif or anything else you want eg 12345.gif

Alt tag is more important than imagename.

Like Jont i use product ref as it helps me when using a csv import file as I can easily generate image names from product references.

Unlike jont, I disallow spiders from my images to ensure they don't end up in Google images for others to steal/hotlink

[Ghome1971]

Thanks everyone - Again!

[jxm28788]

You should not use overly long names (for images and URL's for that matter).

What is the reason for that...?

[Duncan Rounding]

What is the reason for that...?

i don't think Google will 'read' more than about 50 charcters or so.

[jxm28788]

is that 50 for the page name or 50 for the whole URL (and inc http:// ?)

[wjcampbe]

Google will read the whole page. However, for display purposes they will curtail tags and titles at a length of approximately 60 characters. The remainder of the title or tag is dropped for index purposes. However all body text is indexed and used for search, with relevant extracts shown on the results page.

Body text is the content of the page that is seen by a human visitor to the website. More and more, as each SE refines it's algorythms, the only IMPORTANT text, is the text that is visible to the human being accessing your site.

If you build your site concentrating on what your human visitors need to see, you will accidentally build the site the search engines need. The sole money making function of an SE is to get human beings to use that SE by providing useful relevant search that finds the page(s) containing the information/products the human is looking to find.

How many humans read the title bar? How many humans read the META tags? Add both numbers together and that is the total number of minutes you need to spend agonising over the characters, and content of these elements of the page.

[Ghome1971]

but we can't get the potential visitors to find the site unless these details produce the listings

[wjcampbe]

Yes, that's the whole point of recent changes in the way one particular SE indexes the web. The details visible on the page will drive the traffic. If the content of the page is not what the human being wants to find, then no amount of invisible tags and titles will get that page into the search results for that term, for more than a day or two.

Page content - visible to human visitors - rules the day. Read the Google advice for webmasters, read Matt Cutts blog, read the honest 'white hat' SEO pundits - they are all saying the same thing and have been for a few months now, build for the human visitor - it's the only long term guarantee of success.

Make everything else line up in passing - url, tags, titles, but concentrate on the visible page text.

[Ghome1971]

great explanation. I feel I have to manipulate my site a little though otherwise I can't include all the keyword phrases. For example I have put an Elvis T-Shirt in the subsection Baby Elvis Clothing then built the text around baby elvis clothing rather than Elvis T-Shirt (as this has been used with another Elvis T-Shirt)
http://www.stardustkids.co.uk/acatal...-Clothing.html

Geraldine

[pinbrook]

I agree with almost everything Bill says with one small exception which is the <TITLE> tag. I feel this is important for spiders, thus a page should have its title well crafted.

For me, the body text and title have equal importance. Body text for human visitors. Title for spiders.

Get these 2 right and inbound links to this page and you should start to see decent listings.

Repeat the above for 10 keyphrases/10 pages. Then measure the results



Do your optimisation bit by bit - as you get more time look at the other items, ie h1 tags, alt tags, page names, image names and so on.

Above all do not go overboard as you may end up spamming, and don't lose sight of your human visitors.