The Importance of Names for Web Photography

Web photography is one of the most important elements of your website.

So, how much care and attention do you place on naming? It may not seem that important after all nobody really notices if the name of the picture is “SHDS411DS45X”. Or “My dog Spot playing fetch at Central Park,” right?

My dog playing fetch in Central Park

Although it is true that most of your visitors won’t notice the name of the images. Google and other search engines rely on the names to offer them as search results. The better the description of the image, the better chance of it showing up in search results. If the goal is getting more traffic to your website, going back and naming all the images can be a very effective technique.

The name of the photo is what is done prior to uploading to the website, so you may need to re-download the images from your site and re-name and upload again. After putting some effort into improving your site titles, it can be helpful to check what worked and what didn’t. To do this, go to images.google.com and enter the names of some of the images on your site. It’s important to note that some time will need to pass before the Google spiders will have a chance to crawl and index your site. Look to see if your images are pulling up in the top search results, this is a good indicator that you’ve made good strides in SEO.

Updated on May 18th, 2020:
Proper naming of website photography is still as important as ever. We offer free images to use on your website on our Billings Montana Web Development Resources page. I also recently wrote a guide on how to boost site SEO through taking images of the local town and posting them for free use on your website. Read that article here: Photographing Local Town SEO Trick

For more information about SEO, or to get started on an SEO plan for your business call 406-208-8733