Like a lot of the blogs I post, this one was prompted by a conversation with a client.
Let’s start with what are your ‘media’ files. This term covers everything from your images and your downloadable PDFs to your Videos. Think of them as the ‘things’ you use in your website rather than the copy (the words).
The name of a file can affect your optimisation efforts, how your media is found and listed by Google and how your media is presented to your audience. I often see people leave the raw (original) file name for their images (photographs/pictures) and videos. While there is nothing wrong in principle with this, you could make those names work harder for you by changing them to something more meaningful.
Images in particular are indexed by Google along with the other content from your website. Choose a name for your image file that represents what it’s a picture of. If you are using a picture of a Blue Giraffe sleeping then name your image along the lines of ‘bluegiraffesleeping.jpg’ or ‘sleepingbluegiraffe.jpg’. Since every file name must be unique on your website, if you have multiple images that show something similar then you need to differentiate them in the name. Perhaps you could name your other Sleeping Blue Giraffe image ‘bluegiraffesleepingonablanket.jpg’ or ‘sleepingbluegiraffe-blanket.jpg’.
The names you give your Videos are equally important and you should follow the same rules as for images. Have your video file name reflect what the video is about. If you are uploading into YouTube then think about your Video Title and Description and make sure they all tie together to represent what the video shows. Remember YouTube is a search engine too.
Finally let’s think about naming your downloadable PDF documents (you shouldn’t be offering Word docs). Here you should think about what your document is titled and make sure that the person downloading it understands what it is and can find it again when they need to. So if you had a download file all about the Sleeping Habits of a Blue Giraffe then you may name your document ‘Sleeping-Habits-Blue-Giraffe.pdf’.
You can use letters and numbers in your file names along with hyphens (-) and underscores (_) but other special characters are protected and you won’t be allowed to use them (like & and %) because they have a special meaning in a URL.
So now you understand about naming your files should you go and rename live files? Ones which Google has already crawled? You can BUT you need to tell Google to look for the new name instead. If you don’t know how to do this then please just ask us.