Naming Your Craft Images for Search Engines

Let's face it, no actual person really looks into what the file name of your images are on your craft tutorial pages right? Nope, they don't. Which is why you've never cared that the finished picture of your adorable bunny craft is called IMG_01254.jpg right?

Well, search engines care. They care a lot. Search engines can only read text, they can't read images. Ever notice how sometimes when you search for something there are listings for websites and sometimes 3-4 boxes of pictures about 1/4 of the way down the page that says "image results"? Or wonder how when you use image search how the search engines pick which picture to show up and in what order?

They're trying, but until they get there, don't let your crafts not be seen in image search!
Follow these guidelines and when someone searches for "lady bug headband" in either the web search or image search you'll be showing up!

• Name your files appropriately.

-If it's a craft that is for Halloween, include the word "Halloween" somewhere.

-If the craft is really popular, like a birthday card, add identifiers to help it stand out like "purple birthday card" or "balloon chipboard birthday card."

-The name must make sense: if you looked at just the name and not the picture, would you know what it is?

• Use dashes instead of spaces or underscores.

-Search engines have an easier time reading a dash and they don't see spaces at all. So the search engine will see "birthday card craft" as "birthdaycardcraft."

-For example "monkey-pencil-topper" is more easily read than "monkey_pencil_topper"

• Take out "stop" words.

-These are common words that slow the search engine's crawl like "and" "&" "for" and "your"

-So instead of "puppy and cats pictures for your home," call it "puppy-cats-framed-pictures."

• Make those pictures pretty.

• Use alt text

-Alternative text is hopefully being populated automatically for you by your site's image uploading tool. If you name your files using the above method, your alt text will be the file name and you won't have to worry about this.

-If you see in the HTML code after you upload the photo alt="craft-name-here" then you're good. If you look and see alt="" then you're not so good and should type in the photo name in between the "" quotations, complete with dashes.

That should do it! Follow these instructions and you'll start seeing yourself in pictures! Google's image search will only show the top 20 results after a search is performed but the new Bing search engine from Microsoft will show ALL the images in one results page. This could mean up to 100,000+ images! Users can filter the results in the left sidebar by size, colors, styles and even if they include people. Image search is definitely evolving so don't get stuck behind!

Want more info on making your site more search engine friendly?
Picking Keywords For Your Crafts Site
Choosing and Setting Goals with your Crafts Site