Image files - does the file name help SEO?

[stevegibson]

Hi folks.

I'm curious about something.

Is there an SEO difference between:

img border="0" src="keyword.gif" alt="keyword"

and

img border="0" src="nonkeyword.gif" alt="keyword"

i.e. do you get an SEO advantage from having the name of the image file being one of your kewords/keyphrases?

Or is the file name just irrelevant from an SEO perspective and it's all in the "alt" tag?

Cheers,

Steve

[freetraff]

I think there must be at least tiny advantage, because search engines will tend to dig deeper in future. But this advantage is so tiny, that you really must think if it would be wise for you to spend time on this.

If it costs you nothing and someone will do that for you for the same money - you can try. Otherwise better give more effort to content and links.

[bcombs]

Originally Posted by freetraff

I think there must be at least tiny advantage, because search engines will tend to dig deeper in future. But this advantage is so tiny, that you really must think if it would be wise for you to spend time on this.

If it costs you nothing and someone will do that for you for the same money - you can try. Otherwise better give more effort to content and links.

The problem with this approach is that there are nearly infinite things that *might* make a difference. One is better served by focusing on things that are known to make a difference (and there are plenty of those).

That said, I've not seen any indication that image file name makes any difference in relevancy.



Brian

[stevegibson]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Steve

[DataFeedFile.com]

I do not think so.

Very little result can be achieve using images as SEO source.

I always disallow robots from crawling my pictures files, because it is very bandwidth consuming and does not offer much SEO benefits.