Too often when viewing file names on websites I notice that the owner decided to put_underscores_between_all_of_the_words in the name of the file.  This is a common programming practice and since many website owners have experience with programming they do the same with all the file names on their sites.

The pitfall of this practice is that Google will treat the name of the file as one word.  Meaning that if you upload a file with the name of ‘foo_bar’ when someone does a google search for ‘foo bar’ your page will not appear anywhere near the top of the results.  If the user instead had searched for ‘foo_bar’ they will find your page towards the top.

The two best places you can fix this issue is with image names and URLs.  If you have an image that you want people to find through a Google image search do not put underscores between the words in the file name.  If the URLs on your site describe the page that the user is viewing and would like a Google search for the words in your URL to display your URL (I.E. you have a page with URL of help_with_cats and someone searches for ‘help with cats’ you want your page with the same title to appear in the results) you need to remove the underscores.

That’s great, you say, but what do I replace the underscores with?  You can get away with filenames that have spaces in them, but you can’t do the same with a URL.  The interwebs does not permit this.  The answer to your question is the same key on your keyboard.  Google treats the hyphen character as a space.  So files and URLs with hyphens in them are treated as separate words.  So if you have a file on your site named ‘foo-bar’ and someone does a search for ‘foo bar’ your page will display in the results.  The same is true for URLs.  Your page titled ‘help-with-cats’ will show up higher in search results for the search ‘help with cats’.

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