How important are image file names

[jjtech]

Hi,

How important do you think the image file names are for image search?
I know it used to be the best practice a while ago but is it still important?

Thanks in advance,

JJ

[KevinBudzynski]

Extremely important (and will continue to be).  Also, continue to use alt names and meta info.

It's also good to have good naming convention for image files on your site.

[simon_realbuzz]

From my own experience, I would say the images that send us the most search traffic are those where the file names have been labelled correctly rather than autogenerated such as 33456789.jpg. I would certainly suggest there is some correlation between filename and search performance, although of course there are other factors to considered. As a recommendation, I'd certainly suggest file names are important although I couldn't put a measure of quite how important. There's certainly no reason I can see for us to stop labelling filenames correctly.

[ProductPearson]

Very important. We do this ourselves and have seen true results from image file names, even when they are on a page with no relevant keywords and a different title element. It's the file name that always wins in the SEO, ie celebrity_name.jpg.

You can use a number of seperators, such as -, or +, but our favourite has been the underscore. I tend to avoid using spaces as the %20 part that fills it in the URL is attached to the keywords, which may harm the SEO. The seperators indicate them as seperate words.

[jjtech]

Thanks guys - I really appreciate your quick responses to my silly question:)

JJ