Cloudinary Folder Naming Conventions
Overview
Whilst Cloudinary offers our end users a flexible and limitless way to name folders we think that it is important to have some standards when creating folders. The main driver for this is to have clean and consistent urls when requesting assets.
Image URLs tend to appear as a long list of random characters that are not intended for viewers and are not very useful to search engines. Concise and meaningful image file names are better for search engines to extract information about an image, therefore supporting our site’s SEO ranking.
Often times, users’ uploaded image files which do not have descriptive names. This creates a great challenge for developers and site content managers who need to maintain SEO friendly URLs, short, and meaningful URLs.
Google promotes its users (Rapha) to create good URL structure as it uses the URL path as well as the file name to help it understand images. By constructing them logically and cleanly we will thus improve our SEO.
Note
Generally, if you upload assets into Cloudinary, it will use a random file name (public id) instead of a filename. We have disabled this feature so we always use the filename provided.
We have also further made our URLs more SEO friendly by using a custom domain (CNAME) instead of the shared res.cloudinary.com URL
Examples
Bad image URLs
SEO-friendly image URLs
Folder Naming Conventions
Going forward we would like to promote the following naming convensions:
- All folders to be in lowercase
- No spacing in the folder names. Words should be linked together with the use of
-
By adopting those we should match the SEO-friendly image urls in the example above.