Carmilia C.
In this week’s Q&A section, we have selected the following topic from our subscriber: “Does Image File Name Affect SEO?”
Question From Celine Goldman
“I’ve just started my blog with approximately 4-5 images attached to each content pages. Before I proceed to produce more images and uploaded it into my new content, I have a question that bother me: does picture file names affect SEO ranking?”
“I’m a bit lost here since when I Googled this query, some of the source says the image file name affecting the SEO, while some said they’re not.”
“The reason I’m asking this is because re-naming each picture before upload might spend sometimes and effort. I just want to make sure that it will worth my time and effort if I will rename each picture before upload it. Can you please confirm about this?”
Does Image File Name Affect SEO?
Yes, the image file name does affect SEO ranking in both search and image SERP. The image file name will give the search engine clues about the subject matter of an image. For example, a file name of “green-apple.png” is far more informative than a random file name “IMG003.png”.
This is also confirmed by Google in this post.
When Google try to understand what is an image in a webpage about (to determine the position in image SERP), they will look on the following:
- Image alt text
- Image file name
However, we noticed that most of websites are just optimizing the image alt text and completely ignore about the image file name.
Why Image File Name is Important in SEO?
It is more difficult for the search engine system to understand what is an image about compared to text. With a text context, the search engine can easily determine by what kind of keywords and synonym that you’re using in your paragraph. But an image? It is much harder to scan and detect what kind of image it is.
This is why by providing both image alt text and rename the file name are the only options for the search engine to understand what is your image about.
An image with clear alt text and file name will have more chance in matching the user search query rather than giving the file random name.
This is why we recommend you to re-name each of the image file name before you upload it into your website. It might just take additional several seconds to do and it’s worth the effort.