File Naming Conventions Best Practices.
There are three general rules that you want to follow for naming your folders, documents, and images intended for the web. Following the best practices will insure you give your users the best user experience and help with the visibility of your website in terms of SEO. The best practices for user experience are also the best practices for SEO.
1. Names should be as short as possible
and meaningful.
2. Names should not contain any spaces
or specials characters other than a hyphen or underscore. Use a hyphen where you would normally put a
space.
3. Use all lower case letters. Many web servers are
case sensitive, ours is not however, it's best to get in the habit of using all
lower case. It cuts down on typos and redirects and is more SEO friendly.
Good names:
mountain-view.jpg
mt-rainier-view.jpg
playing-on-beach.jpg
trip-insurance.pdf
Bad names:
img-2048465099345j287f5bn(1).jpg - (bad because its meaningless and has extra characters.)
Beautiful picture of Mt. Rainier.jpg - (bad because of spaces AND a mix of upper and lower case.)
HOUSEINMYRTYLEBEACH.JPG - (bad in all upper case AND no hyphens to separate words.)
Revision 1.8