Fire Critic An Unadulterated View of the Fire Service
I am starting a new column here at the Fire Critic! This one is titled “Blogging Tip” however the tips can be used for webmasters too. With the increasing use of Content Management Systems (CMS) and RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication) it seems as though the differentiation between blogs and websites has been blurred. This is not a problem and actually shows that more and more people are taking advantage of the interfaces that blogs were created with.
Today’s blogging tip – Naming your images to increase SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Let us say you have an image of a house fire with smoke showing in Albuquerque, New Mexico (for example). Lets say that the image in its raw form is named 0023.jpg. If you upload that image, the image will always be named 0023.jpg. People will see that image when looking at your blog, but not many will get to it if they are searching for images with the search term “house fire in Albuquerque, New Mexico”.
If you rename image 0023.jpg to “house fire in Albuquerque, New Mexico” then when people search for “house fire in Albuquerque, New Mexico” they will come to your image click on it and are brought to your site. This increases traffic!
To take this one step further you should actually name it “house-fire-in-albuquerque-new-mexico”. The dashes in between the words make it more friendly to web crawlers. The use of lower case apparently does too. Some interfaces, like the WordPress that I use does it for you automatically.
Let me know if you have any questions on making your website easier to use and increasing traffic!
The Fire Critic
