One of the most important things about images and SEO is that images are mostly exempt from the popularity contest part of the regular Google search results. So even if your site isn’t ranking super high in the regular search, you can do well in the image searches with little effort. I’m also pretty confident that the alt image title plugin we used on schoonerbayco.com will do a nice job in conjunction with an updated file naming convention.
Previously, image files were named using pretty much just the item SKU- not very useful to Google. So moving forward, we are going to use the product title as part of the file names before upload.
The product post titles are already very SEO-friendly and descriptive, using keywords we are trying to hit— though they include product dimensions (which I don’t think would be of much use in most image searches). So we’ll just strip out the dimension information and leave the nouns and adjectives that describe the image contents, but also append the file names with the store name. We will leave the SKU and image dimension information at the tail of the name just before the .jpg or .png extensions.
In our pursuit of better SEO, I went and looked through the Google documentation on images again. This time looking to see anything specifically about search and the image file name capitalization.
The information is pretty broad, not per usual Google de rigueur. You can find it here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en
I also checked a few other places to see if anyone specifies anything regarding capitalization— for what it is worth, most of the example image file names found used standard English capitalization or all lowercase (some of that is probably server dependent, is the OS used capitalization specific?).
My guess is the words used matters way more than the use of capitilization and I didn’t find anything that specifically contradicts that.
Below is a link from a Moz.com post on Google image SEO that confirms my statistic about the volume of image searches. It’s a good short (5 min) read on Google image SEO with some relevant links for more information:
https://moz.com/blog/seo-photos-visuals-graphics-whiteboard-friday