“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
True, but if you want Google to wake up and smell the roses (or in my case, espresso).. you need to give them what they want.
Some documents need time stamps – yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss-what-it-is.xxx implicitly sorts in chronological order. 24 is too intense for me, but a great way to time stamp.
Most articles are best renamed with keywords. When we travelled to London, I created a PDF of the London Tube, emailed it to my iPhone .Mac account, and had a nice bright scalable map easy to read on my iPhone in dark, cold and wet London.
Here’s the file name I used:
uk_london_tube_map.pdf
I gives me everything I need to find the file on my computer. Being a digital kind of guy, I use the 2 letter International Internet Codes or State Code as a prefix.
th_bangkok_wat_pho_reclining_buddha_01.jpg
Back in ancient times (i.e. before taking the Bloodhound Unchained class last week), I would have used a more cryptic code, but Greg’s engenu batch creates ALT tags from the file name, so all my file names will now have embedded keywords for SEO juice.
th_bk_wp_reclining_bdh_01.jpg
But the bits are free.. no extra charge for using more of them…though I would like someone to tell me if I need to stay within an XXX character limit.
Adobe Bridge (Mac & Windows) is superb for organizing and renaming photos and movies.
Anonymous says:
Great tips- informative post, and Welcome Aboard! I’m new to all this SEO stuff, but I did learn to name photos and files with keywords. I haven’t used the underscore between them, just spaces, is that bad? And here’s a question way beyond my understanding-when posting somewhere that I know they will be scraped or to a place with no-follow- should I NOT label them with keywords?
May 7, 2009 — 8:19 am
Karen Frederick says:
Great tips,informative post, and Welcome Aboard! I’m new to this SEO stuff, but I do name photos and files with keywords. I haven’t used the underscore between them, just spaces, is that bad? And here’s a question way beyond my understanding-when posting somewhere that I know they will be scraped or to a place with no-follow- should I not label them with keywords? Am I g-juicing the competition?
May 7, 2009 — 8:25 am
Ira Serkes says:
The main reason to use the underscore “_” or hyphen “-” is for human legibility.
Nature, and the internet, abhors a vacuum… and you don’t want your code to suck.
A web site URL or file name can’t have a space ” “, so whenever you type a space in a file name, it’s converted to the HTML code of %20. Not very pretty. That’s why you see %20 from time to time. It doesn’t have anything to do with your Internet Market Share.
I use the underscore character all the time; others use the hyphen. I don’t think there’s a different for SEO, I find the underscore easier to type and easier to read.
If someone knows if the hyphen is better than the underscore, please let us know.
May 7, 2009 — 2:52 pm
Joshua Hanoud says:
@Ira – everyone I’ve talked to about hyphen vs underscore has told me there’s no difference in regards to SEO. Personally, I prefer underscores as well. Fantastic use of technology re: the tube map to iphone.
May 8, 2009 — 7:38 am