some questions about: image filenames and ALT tag

Hey Guys


My 1st post overhere, nice board, and awesome articles.
I allready read the most of the articles ;-)

AnyWay I'm right now for the first time seriously SEO'ing a website(not yet online) Inktomi/Google/Yahoo
But I'm really curious about the results. But I have some questions about SEO'ing the image file names and the ALT tags.

I just read that Google will only read the ALT tag if the image is also a link.

Well I was planning to use only the logo from the website, and on every webpage.
So I was planning to use 2-3 keyphrases for the image filenames, keywords seperated with hyphens, and than just the title than I'm using for that specific webpage for the ALT tag.

I'm using for every webpage a different title/meta description/meta keywords, and of course I'm also trying to have these keyprases in the text content, and in the H! headings, and links. But what I wanted to know is it really usefull to rename a image file stuffed with key phrases? And are the ALT tags usefull? And I guess a combination of both would be the best of all, and preferable linked images.

I'm not planning to rename all images/buttons of every webpage, 1/2, but I think one, and than only the logo, for every webpage a unique name and ALT tag. But do you think Google will see this as SE spamming? And is there a chance that I will get a penalty for this?(So I will use thelogo because it has a link, but everywhere the same link to the homepage, and same size, only it will have different filenames)

And what is the MAX words/characters per filename/ALT tag.
And will it affect me when I will add the disallow line into my robots.txt file to block my /images/ directory of being indexed?



Well thanks for your attention, I hope someone of you can help me further with this

I believe the txt from the image's alt and Titles are read in like text.

The file name may get you listed in google images, so there is no reason to deny the robots access to that directory.

And remember, making your site good enough for people to link to it will get you further than having the site tuned to perfection.

Thanks for your reply, yeah well there is absolutely no point why I should have my images in Google images?
And it's also no point to get my logo 9 times in Google with a different filename, so I guess I will leave the filenames how they are, and will only do the ALT tag and the HTML files itself, than I will work on link popularity, I can always do this later with the filnames of the images, anyway thanks for your reply, does it make a difference to use an underscore or a hyphen or a plus between the key words in your HTML file names?

Okay found it allready in some previous posts: a HYPHEN(DASH) is what you need to use, not an uderscore.