All lower case and dashes: 2 reasons why this simple naming technique works!

Posted by Laura Bergells

February 4, 2008

file name power

When naming web pages and photos, don’t drive yourself nuts! Stick to this easy, consistent, powerful 2-part formula.

All lower case words
Dashes between words

Free your mind! This simple, easy-to-remember naming technique can actually free your mind, so that you have time to apply your creativity to more meaningful areas of business development!

And what’s more — using this simple naming convention has three HUGE marketing and web development benefits:

1. Most people tend to search using all lower case. By using all lower case keyword phrases, you align your site with how most people behave. Further, most search engines have a harder time indexing CamelCase (first word capitalization) than the simple lower-case-with-dashes. Most search engines treat dashes as word separators. And really - when was the last time you typed ALL CAPS? If all caps is considered screaming in IM land: it’s screaming on your website, too!

2. The search engines can easily crawl lower case and dashes. Historically, underscores have been problematic for Google searches. Further, any spaces you leave in file names get automatically converted to the very ugly and unmemorable %20. Instead of a nice, clean “my-picture.jpg” you’ll get a “my%20picture.jpg”. Not pretty! And not easy-to-remember…which leads me to point 3:

3. Eliminate coding nightmares. If you start combining all sorts of naming techniques, things can get really ugly! You start wasting your time and creativity. For example, I sat with two folks last week who were trying to link to their images. As they were coding, I heard them talking out loud — it went something like this:

Let’s see: what combination of caps, spacing, dashes, or underscores did I use? Was it myPicture.jpg or My-Picture.jpg? Maybe it was my%20Picture.jpg? Oh, bother. Broken link. That must not be it…

What an aggravating, unnecessary hassle! Stick to the dashes and lower case. The search engines will love you. And you can surely use your creativity for something more meaningful than naming a file. Free your mind!