A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks a fairly basic SEO question. The member asked if the name of the image makes a difference in how a page might rank.
Does the name of the image(s) on your page have much of an SEO affect on Web sites? I don't mean images that act as links to other pages, but just in general does the name of standard images on a page have much of an affect on the SEO of the page?
Moderator, Ian Mcanerin, replied "yes." He explained that he tested adding an image to a page for a specific keyword phrase, and that keyword phrase was not found anywhere els eon that page. Then shortly after, he conducted a search for the keyword phrase (i.e. the name of the file) and up came the page.
Now, the question is, how much of a boost would you get from an image name on a page?
Most people feel it won't help much.
But Ian suggests using it for misspellings.
One way I use this (it's why I did the test in the first place) is for misspellings. If I can't misspell the word on the page, then I put in in the meta keywords (for Yahoo and MSN) and then name the images with the appropriate misspellings (for Google, Yahoo, and MSN).It won't help much with anything competitive, but can be useful for long tail terms and misspellings.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
