Quote Originally Posted by jacobitejake View Post
Am I right in saying that you should also make a point of naming each image in your website as well as using 'Alt Text' so the file has valid name rather than say 'pic1.jpg' e.g. a picture of a horse would be 'horse.jpg'.

To give the image a name, just select 'Names' after right clicking on the image and in this example you would add the folowing (filename="horse") without the brackets. The only issue I've found in doing this is that you have to remember to use a different 'name' if you have say two pictures of horses as it will overwrite the first one and you will then have the same picture in two locations on the website.

From what I remember, Google ranks page content higher if the image files are relevant to the text they correspond with, and indeed the keywords and description on that page.
You are correct in what you say about naming of pictures but don't overdo it. Remember that search engine robots can't see pictures so it doesn't match your picture names with the content of the pictures.

Re Google ranks - what you said used to be true, but since Google is now getting significant income from website advertisers, the whole ranking system has gone a bit belly up in my opinion. I was recently searching for a specific make and model of camera using google and the results were quite interesting - all the top sites were those camera shops that advertised with google and the remainder on the first couple of pages were websites that did camera reviews. Switch to bing and you get a totally different picture