Image file names will show up in most SEO reports, with many suggesting filling out all the anchor tags correctly. WordPress gives many more naming options for images including tags, description etc. Does it make a difference to SEO?
One website we manage named their chocolate product images by the packaging they came in, including “slide boxes”. They started getting hits on Google for image searches of slide boxes! This was not of any benefit to them in terms of winning new clients, but it did prove that a well-named image could get found.
Images are an opportunity to include your target keyword and even add some niche. It you have multiple images on a page, then they could all be called, TargetKeyword1.jpg, etc. Or, even better, would be to add a differentiating but relevant keyword to each one. I even write the filenames almost like a short sentence (always with the target phrase at the start and then going down in keyword value).
What about a gallery page? Full of images, but clearly your target keyword is not “wedding celebrant gallery”. So it is easy to think that any work might get lost because the homepage will always rank higher. Regardless, I always write the structure of a site to be keyword rich and keyword smart in every available place right from the start. I call this the structural on-site SEO and if built well from the start it will increase in value over time. Good on-page SEO is a duty of care issue – a site will perform better, and you are unlikely to ever go back and change it once it is done.
Images are the most difficult to change once they have been uploaded to the media library (not impossible, they will just need renaming locally then re-uploading, and re-linking). You will put this task off forever, unless you do it before the initial upload to media. Take the time, build it in to your method to always rename images.
A client will likely give them to you as IMAGE679.jpg or some similar default made by their camera. Keep a copy of those names to aid future communication with client, but rename them immediately. I usually pair it with the process of cropping and resizing for web.
So, with a gallery, does Google read every file name on the page? Or only the placeholder image? It depends how the page has been coded.
Take this <a href=”huntervalleyceremonies.com.au“>Marriage Celebrant from Newcastle and the Hunter Valley</a> as an example. The footer images are all named by the target keyword of each page, marriage celebrant central coast etc. This includes the alt tags as well.
But then on the <a href=”huntervalleyceremonies.com.au/gallery“>Wedding Celebrant Gallery Page</a>, you’ll see three placeholder images, each with 8-10 images in a modal pop out. But upon examination of the code (View Source option in your browser) you can see that in fact each of the image file names are visible to a search engine upon loading that one page. So there is a chance to put many wedding ceremony phrases, including more niche phrases like “celebrant for eloping” “fun wedding celebrant” etc.
Some pages will only display the file names upon loading each modal, depending on the way the site is coded, but I prefer this method for maximum optimisation of a single page.
The syntax for naming an image for good SEO is shown from an example of the site above:
<img class="foot" alt="Marriage Celebrant from Hunter Valley Ceremonies" src="http://huntervalleyceremonies.com.au/img/Marriage-Celebrant-Hunter-Valley.jpg" > It can be summarised as:
<img class="foot" alt="Keyword Alt Tag This Can Be a Descriptive and Almost Flowing Sentence" src="http://DomainName.com.au/img/KeywordRichImageName.jpg" >
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