What’s in a name?
Think about how long and hard new parents ponder over the name of their first born. It can take many, many hours, days, weeks, even months and years (See Behind the name). Hell, my wife and I are probably still a couple years away and she must have asked me 20 times over the last few years, “Would you like this name for a son/daughter?”
What about the amount of time that an author spends trying to pick the title of a book? Speaking of books…why do we call a book a book? Why isn’t isn’t it a koob (see Koob) or obok (which means “next to” in Polish) instead of a book? Who cares, right? Well, actually we ALL do. You see, the word “book” is a name of the object that refers to that which we all know as a book. It’s actually a very important identifier and allows us to communicate with one another (at least English speaker to English speaker).
The name for everything is just as important as the name you give your son or daughter, the title of a book, or the term used to identify an object. That namecan actually make or break you in a lot of ways. In the world of internet marketing, you MUST treat names and titles very important. How important is it really?
Think about this example, for a moment. I start up a new business and call it “Aaron’s Antiques”. Then I go create a website and take some pictures of my store and put them on the website. Now, someone browsing the internet decides that they are looking for antiques in the same geographic area as Aaron’s Antiques. So, they pop over to their favorite search engine and search for Antiques. They find a few results that interest them but nothing that grabs their attention so they decide to pop over to eBay and I never get found.
What happened?
Well, a LOT of things probably happened and I don’t want to (in this post) get into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and techniques but here is something that likely happened: I didn’t properly name the pictures right. Remember, I said that I took some picture and uploaded them to the site? Instead of properly defining the alt tags of the image “Aaron’s Antiques” or “The best antiques shop in all of Michigan!” or something that could grab someones attention, I didn’t. So, instead of the user finding a PICTURE of my nice antique shop (that would probably solve their problem) that is right down the road from them, they didn’t. Is it that simple? Yes and No.
Yes, because you can (and should) simply add a basic attribute to all of your images for SEO purposes. There are many great reasons for this:
- For those browsers that can’t view images (such as the search engine crawlers)
- It can help your search engine rankings and overall findability (post on that coming soon)
- MOST IMPORTANTLY, it promotes accessibility for handicapped viewers that use screen reading software (all of the big name software for these purposes these days will actually read the text inside the alt attribute to the users IF it is provided). To do so, simply add alt=”whatever describes your image here” inside the img tag in your HTML. So, in the above example, I might write:
<img src=”images/image1.jpg” alt=”Antique Lover’s Paradise – The best antique store in all of Michigan” />
No, because this example only covers a small part of it. For example, why did we name the image above image1? Shouldn’t it have a more descriptive name? Absolutely! Maybe something like AaronsAntiques-FrontOfStore.jpg which is a little bit long but “could work if it had to” but I suggest something like AaronsAntiques1.jpg. In any case, why stop there? Doesn’t “Antique Lover’s Paradise” sound better than “Aaron’s Antiques”? Maybe I should reconsider the name of my company.
What about the website name (url)? What about the names (titles) of all of the individual pages? What about the names of the sections in each of them? You starting to *get it*?
A name is soooo important in so many places and in so many ways. The next time you upload something, think about it’s name. The next time you create a resume, think about the section headers (those are names right?)
If you pay attention to the names, your internet marketing efforts will certainly improve drastically, especially if you test the responses of different names. I recently had a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign where I began an ad “The such and such” and I changed it to “THE such and such” (obviously, the ad didn’t say “such and such” 
). The click through ratio (CTR) on that ad jumped from 2.5% to over 9%. That’s about a 350% increase JUST FOR CAPITALIZING the word THE. How much of difference can changing certain word make? It’s insane. So, don’t just think about the names and titles either. Choose your words carefully. It CAN and WILL make a difference.
Aaron Hillyer, CITRMS
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