[SOLVED] Image names and SEO

[mikeyt]

I understand the importance of having correct title and alt information for images, but I have read that it is also desirable that the actual naming of the image is also relevant, especially if you hope for your images to turn up in Google Images search (i will be selling Canvas Prints so for me Google Images is a great search avenue)

From what I can see, images are renamed when imported into a new product to a format of "10-50.jpg", "10-50-small.jpg" etc, rather than keeping the name of the original image and adding the prestashop references to the beginning (and end) "10-map-of-the-world.jpg", "10-map-of-the-world-small.jpg".

Is this an option which can be changed or is image naming really not important?

[inveostore.com]

Search Engines don´t care about image names.

See http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewreply/373027/ for more details.

[Paul C]

Others disagree that having keywords in filenames on your pages does "help". It's just behind having keywords in the page url according to the last SEOMoz roundup (which isn't very much at all really).

If your theme and Prestashop version supports it then image names should be getting rewritten anyway though to the product name +decoration....

e.g. http://static.example.com/0324-5834-large/9ct-gold-bracelet.jpg


Paul

[mikeyt]

Search Engines don´t care about image names.

Yes but Google Images Search does - it might not have a few years ago, but now it does according to a plethora of articles on the web. As my shop will be selling Art Prints, google image search is just as important to me as normal search engines.

If your theme and Prestashop version supports it then image names should be getting rewritten anyway though to the product name +decoration….

I was experimenting with version 1.4 RC3 and the basic theme - on this the images names were not get re-written with a description - which was why i was wondering if there was setting somewhere, or some code that could be altered or even a special module, to allow product name + decoration like you said.

[Paul C]

The store I'm working on at the moment is a custom theme upgraded to 1.4 and the images are certainly being rewritten on there "out of the box". Do you have sef urls enabled? You should only have to turn on the friendly urls feature in preferences, then generate a .htaccess file from the tools menu and it should be done. Older themes might not support them if they don't properly form urls via the Link class, but it's fairly easy to go through a theme and update it.

Paul

[mikeyt]

Thank you Paul C - that was exactly what I was after - i hadn't generated the .htaccess file

Done what you suggested and now all the images have "proper" names.