Images and SEO

I've been looking into how the name of an image can affect a websites position in SERPs and found some useful info, so I thought I'll share it with you guys...

What's more important: Alt text or file name?
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forum...howtopic=45580

Short list of very important SEO things to always do ever:
http://www.menehune-foundry.com/seo-voodoo.html

From what I gathered, naming files appropriately (ie, with keywords) definitely gets your images to the top of image searches - althought this doesn't necessarily mean the page containing the image will be at the top for content search.

In my opinion, since images are regarded as content (of a different kind), then having highly ranked images for a certain terms will definitely weigh towards a high position for that page in content searches.

What do you guys think?

ps.: having said all this, I have just remember that the robots.txt file I use on all my websites disallows indexing of images within the website, ie.: my images do not appear on image search results. BUT, the pages with the images do well on content searches, which is where I got my conclusion from....

Lol, you posted this in a hidden forum, spinal. Moved it into the open for you

LOL, I wondered why nobody ever replied...
Then I forgot about it!

Hi,

In addition to your useful tips on images for SEO, if you register for a Google account and access the webmaster tools you can enable the "Enhanced Image Search" so that images on your website will be indexed for the Google image search.
This can sometimes generate quite a useful new way of surfers being able to find your site.

Click Click
http://www.clickclickdesign.com

I agree - I do that for all my sites

You'll need it too... Those tables aren't at all going to help your rankings!

Hi Spinal,

Yeh, some of the Google webmaster tools are pretty good actually, just a shame you can't force a reindex

Click Click
http://www.clickclickdesign.com

lol, I know, we have a new site under development that's tableless that was a temporary table catastrophy...

Click Click
http://www.clickclickdesign.com

Haha, good move If you run into any sticky situations, we're here to help! Not to mention, our critique forum will help shed light on any unnoticed problems you may have. Didn't see you in the intro forum, so welcome to our community!

You can't force a re-index, but you can make your site so 'juicy' for the spiders that they'll keep coming back at least every other day.
How?
- RSS feeds and Google Sitemaps
- Spotless code so spiders don't hit any errors
- No broken links
- Light-weight pages - I mean, table-less, remove white spaces, the lot.
- Absolute link paths
- Semantic code - H1, h2, etc...
- Good descriptive meta tags
and so on...

Googlebot re-indexes pages on my sites every few days