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I work for a small company that offers basic SEO services to the clients we host on our servers. We're basically still pretty green in this. We have some sites that do quite well, and some that aren't ranked anywhere, despite having been submitted for far longer than some that are doing well. Most of our clients have small sites with limited content, and this is probably where most of our frustration comes from.
We try to stay away from possibly controversial or 'dirty' SEO tricks such as cloaking and the like, but often times we're at a loss as to whether doing a particular thing is beneficial, harmful or just irrelevent. One of these is image paths. For example, if I'm running a pet store and I put all the pictures of my cat products in a directory such as /images/cats/image.jpg, does this affect my ranking any for cat related searches? Does Google take into account the whole path or just the file itself, or do they care about the paths of images at all when it comes to ranking the page?
I tried searching for threads related to this topic but I didn't uncover anything that seemed to address this. Thanks in advance.
IMO, images aren't really that big of a deal anymore. A few years ago they may have mattered.
Unless you are intent on getting your images listed in the Google image search, I wouldn't worry much about where/how they are named/placed within your directory layout. All mine go in /images and I name them whatever.
When building a site I have found the very best 'rule-of-thumb' is to think what would benefit and inform your visitors the most. Google's aim is to be the most relavent Search Engine for humans, if you make your aim to be the most relavent site for humans, you and Google are singing from the same song book.
Most of our clients have small sites with limited content, and this is probably where most of our frustration comes from.
There is no denying that they will struggle long term if they do not continuously add content. With 3.6 billion pages out there content is king and small site pages ultimately get buried under the larger ones. The latest Florida update has highlighted this. There are now 0000's of Webmasters out there that are paying this price as they relied on all their traffic from a few pages rather than a few hundred or thousand!
