This post will outline the best practice to optimize images and naming your images so they are most effective when used on your website and when people use Google Image Search. Even today many hotels do not name each image to give them most effect.
Why is image naming so important?
Hotel Websites generally contain many images which gives the potential customer the best opportunity to experience of the property in advance of booking a room and becoming an actual customer. There are many benefits to naming your images in a way that is descriptive of the image itself. Indeed if you, for a moment, view your preferred search engine, like Google, as a human being then the file name should describe what the image contains. This helps Google identify more accurately what the image is and can display it if a search is performed relating to the image itself.
There are two main ways to better name/describe your images enhance both search engine and human understanding of what the image is.
Image Filename best practice
There is the question of using a hyphen or underscore to separate the words in your file name. Google sees the following….
- Hyphen: /Hotel-Suite-with-view-of-park.jpg Google sees “Hotel Suite With View Of Park.jpg“ i.e hyphen – is seen as a word separator this is the best image naming policy.
- Underscore: /hotel_suite_with_view_of_park.jpg Google sees “hotelsuitewithviewofpark” i.e. underscore _ is seen as a word joiner
- Generic: /dsc13000786728.jpg Google sees a series of letters and numbers but cannot identify what is contained within the image itself
Alternative Tag (ALT tag)
Using “ALT tags” (short for”Alternative Tag”) is a great way to describe your image so as Google can find them and those with visual impairment can understand the image. The ALT text usually pops up when you hold your mouse over the image or hyperlink in question.
The perfect solution is when you use both of the above as this not only helps the likes of Google but is also imperative for “screen readers” (used by the visually impaired) to describe the image to the website visitor.
This was written by myself Iain from Hotel Web Support. I hope that you found it useful.
Summary:
- Use hyphens to separate the words in the image file name
- Use ALT tags to give the image a proper title describing its content
Both of the above methods with assist in better Google ranking of your images and get the images right up in front of your potential customer.
More Hotel Web Tips coming soon.