Or Better Put, ORGANIZE YOUR ASSETS…
Creating a Website is almost like baking cookies. You’ve gotta have all of your ingredients for the recipe before you even get started; otherwise, you could be in the middle of mixing chaos only to find out that you don’t have eggs or sugar (which happen to be two vital ingredients to baking delicious cookies). With that said, there are certain steps to ensure that you have everything ready before you begin. If you’re in the process of starting a website, it’s crucial to organize your assets. What’s going to go on our website, content, pictures, etc? Sift through everything that you have. Remember, users love dynamite content, but you must also have readable, well written text in addition to that fantastic video and images. The goal is to enhance the user’s interest and engagement, allowing them to spend a good amount of time on your website.
Go through all of your print materials, if you happen to have any white-papers or other useful info, choose images and resources you can use on your site that are interesting… If there’s something you don’t think will WOW, the user, chuck-it (I’M SAVING YOU TIME), clutter will always be clutter. Two words; eye-popping and useful are the two key ingredients you’re going to need for your website content. Engagement objects like fun images, videos and interactive elements like apps and social media type files are great to have on your site and should be housed in one file on your computer so you have easy access to them when you need to add them to your site.
Naming Your Files
After you’ve pulled the most outstanding content for your website and have figured out where you’re going to put it, you’re going to need to name each asset as you’re uploading them. ***TIP*** How you name your files is important because a search engine spider actually looks at the filename as an indication of what’s actually in the file. This is another good place to have your keywords, USE THEM!
Instead of naming your image of a Red Guitar like this:
*0047002.jpg
Rename the file and ‘SAVE AS’ your uploading to describe it, something along the lines of:
* Red Fender Guitar.jpg
Like I said, USE YOUR KEYWORDS. Not only is the file now easier for you to identify when building your pages, but it also now contains a couple of great keywords you’re potentially targeting on your site. The search engines will now pick these keywords up and read them, adding them to their algorithms for ranking.
USE filenames that make sense for both the user and the search engines. You might understand the gibberish you just used as a filename, but someone else who doesn’t know you or your sense of humor might not. Also, use full words instead of abbreviations. Searchers don’t generally use abbreviations in their search patterns unless a product or service is very uncommon. Same goes for videos or podcasts. Make sure that the file name is descriptive and simple, in the long run it will help both you and search engine.
When naming your files with phrases, don’t leave spaces between words. Nor should you use an underscore (_) to separate words. Search engines interpret the underscore as it own character, so it’s like naming your file Redxfenderxguitar, which misses an opportunity to use your keywords when a search engine spiders your data. Instead, if you have to use spaces (remember, the search engines can parse words from web page filenames without any help), use periods or hypens. They won’t be read as a separate character. That way, you can have files that look like this:
limited.edition.red.fender.guitar.jpg
or
limited-edition-red-fender-guitar.jpg
Something to keep in mind; even without spaces, periods, or hypens in your filenames, a search engine can actually parse out up to 500 words that are concatenated (run together with spaces). You might want to use hyphens in places where there could be confusion in the parsing, either for a search engine spider or for the user. In those cases, you might want to throw in a dash or some periods in order to make it legible. For example, the distinction between womensexchange.jpg and womens-exchange.jpg is important!
Thanks For Reading!
The Adventure Continues>>>
~ JAWS
