File Name Optimization – LoyaltyHarbour

Why file name optimization matters?

The non-descriptive image file names may lead to an exclusion from the search engine results of your potential customers.

Like with Alt Texts, the file names help search engines to identify the image contents. Proper identification plays a major role in getting your web store displayed in as many relevant search results as possible.

To achieve better SEO, follow these simple rules:

Devote special attention to the meta-information of the visual content of your web page (i.e. file names and alt texts). Keep it descriptive and informative.
Maintain cohesion between the textual content, the visual content, and the meta-information.

Using Image Optimizer for SEO automation

Image Optimizer will help you to achieve both strategic SEO goals with ease. Its tools will allow you to batch optimize the filenames of the images on your page.

To enable this feature, head to the Image Optimizer "Settings" menu from the dashboard and scroll down to the "Filenames" section.

There click the "Enable" button. The setup procedure closely follows that of Alt Text optimization. Keep in mind, that there is no backup option for file names. The renaming will also change the image URLs permanently. This is usually not a problem if you are using Shopify themes that generate URLs dynamically. However, if there are hard-coded links to your store's images, they will need to be updated.

Here you can choose any of the available templates or create your own. A customized template may use one or several variables replaced by Image Optimizer with the data from your product database.

Here's the full list of variables available for a customized product template:

[product_title], [product_type], and [product_vendor] replaced with the corresponding information about your product.
[variant_option1], [variant_option2], and [variant_option3] replaced with the product's variant name if the image is linked to its variant as in the screenshot below:

[variant_barcode] and [variant_sku] allow you to place the product's barcode data or SKU number if your product has them.

Only characters, numbers, and dashes are allowed. All other characters will be replaced by dashes. The maximum filename length is 180 characters. Image Optimizer will also add a series of random numbers at the end of the file name (i.e. /running-shoes-334123.jpg). This is required to have a unique file name for each image.

Variables are replaced with an empty string if no information is present for any of them. In case you are not getting proper substitutes for [variant_optionX], make sure that the images are properly assigned to the product variants by following this Shopify guide.

As an example, the default template "[product_title] [product_type] [product_vendor] [variant_option1] [variant_option2] [variant_option3]" for an image of the green medium-sized shoes by Nike titled "Solar Running Shoes" will result in "solar-running-shoes-shoes-nike-green-m-238349.jpg" filename. As there is no information for [variant 3] variable, it's omitted.

Image Optimizer allows you to see how the new file names will look on your products before applying them. Scroll down to see the example. The first available product is displayed, but you can choose your own by clicking the "Choose another product" link.

Image Optimizer also works with the images for collections and in blog posts. You can customize templates for those types of images too.

By default, the only available variable [collection_title] is used for Collection images.

You can choose from two variables — [article_title] and [blog_title] for the Blog images.

If you have any other questions, feel free to send us an email at support@loyaltyharbour.com. We are here to help you the best way we can.

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