Apify's standards for Actor naming. Learn how to choose the right name for scraping and automation Actors and how to optimize your Actor for search engines.

Naming your Actor can be tricky, especially after you’ve worked hard on it. To help people find your Actor and make it stand out, we’ve set some naming guidelines. These will help your Actor rank better on Google and keep things consistent in Apify Store.

Ideally, you should choose a name that clearly shows what your Actor does and includes keywords people might use to search for it.

Parts of Actor naming

Your Actor's name consists of four parts: actual name, SEO name, URL, and GitHub repo name.

• Actor name (name shown in Apify Store), e.g. Booking Scraper.
  • Actor SEO name (name shown on Google Search, optional), e.g. Booking.com Hotel Data Scraper.
  • If the SEO name is not set, the Actor name will be the default name shown on Google.
• Actor URL (technical name), e.g. booking-scraper.
  • More on it here Importance of Actor URL
• GitHub repository name (best to keep it similar to the other ones, for convenience), e.g. actor-booking-scraper.

Actor name

The Actor name provides a human-readable name. The name is the most important real estate from an SEO standpoint. It should exactly match the most likely search query that potential users of your Actor will use. At the same time, it should give your Actor a clear name for people who will use it every day.

<aside> 💡 Your Actor's name should be 40-50 characters long. You can change your Actor name freely in Apify Console.

</aside>

Actor name vs. SEO name

There's an option to step away from your Actor's name for the sake of SEO optimization — Actor SEO name. The Actor name and Actor SEO name serve different purposes:

• Actor name: this is the name visible in Apify Store and Console. It should be easy for users to understand and quickly show what your Actor does. It’s about attracting users who browse the Store.
• Actor SEO name: this is the name that appears in search engine results. It should include keywords people might search for to find your Actor. It’s about improving visibility on search engines and encouraging users to click on your link.

For example:

• Actor name: YouTube Scraper