Images naming

1 - Findings & Impacts

There are several image formats used on websites: JPEG (.jpg extension), GIF (.gif extension), PNG (.png extension) and a relatively new format called WEBP (.webp extension) which is supposed to be 30% smaller in size and is now supported on almost 75% of the modern browsers.

Images can indirectly contribute to your SEO. At the moment, search engines are still unable to interpret the visual content of an image - which should not last for long. Meanwhile, there are techniques such as using the alt attribute tags <img> to tell search engines what the image is.

The images embedded on your site are an additional gateway for users of Google Images. Ranking well on Google images works the same way as ranking well on Google search: you will need to optimize the right tags and follow the best SEO guidelines.

2 - Recommendations

Good practices

• Be careful not to use images that are too heavy (see Loading: Images).
• Rename your image file using your main keywords. Prefer a word separator like underscores (-) to the underscore (_) (search engines do not consider the underscore as a separator) and name the image without uppercase and without accents.

For example, your product pages do not contain an optimized image file name - see below. Call of duty should be in the image file name.

• Define the ALT attribute of the image, which allows you to associate an expression with an image. The keyword placed in the ALT tag will replace the image if the browser has difficulty displaying the image in question.

Here's how images are called in the source code: <img src = "images / image-optimization.gif" width = "100" height = "90" border = "0" alt = "optimize image for SEO">

Bad practices

• Avoid the use of images that contain text; if that is the case, prefer the insertion of text directly in the source code to ensure good consideration from the search engines.
• If your image does not have any SEO objective (decoration, template ...), prefer the use of background-image (in CSS).