Image naming best practices?

[OSD]

While I have found many good sources of information for naming images for SEO purposes, I'm having trouble finding an up-to-date, exhaustive and authoritative source for image names, alt tags, etc. For instance...

• Max characters for image name?
• Max hyphens?
• How descriptive should you be? "ice-cream-flavors-icon_._jpg" or "ice-cream-flavors.jpg" or simply "ice-cream.jpg"
• How similar should the image name, alt text and page title be?
• At what point are you overusing a keyword? Rules to follow?
• So much more, but you get the idea!

Anyone have a good reference or an answer to all things related to images and SEO? Thanks!

[David-Kley]

1. Name the image what is showing in the picture

2. Describe briefly what the picture is or what it means in alt text

3. Make sure to allow your images folder to be crawled in robots.txt. It would be a shame to go through all that work and have the image folder blocked

4. Mark up your images with schema: http://schema.org/ImageObject

[Mike.NW]

Remember that we are moving toward consumer friendly content. So putting in a ton of keywords that are just for crawling purposes will not win on Google, you must provide value. But, do not misunderstand keywords are valuable.

PAGE TITLE: Should be geared toward high value keywords; List of Ice Cream Flavors, Best Ice Cream Flavors.

IMAGE NAME: Long Tail Keywords; Good Old Vanilla Ice Cream, Best Ice Cream Flavors in Summer. Ice Cream Flavors With A Little Twist.

IMAGE ALT:Should be specific to the picture. Remember people most people only look at the first page in a search result but when looking for images they tend to search through 2-4 pages (and can do it in seconds)!

I use the On-Page Optimization Tool in Moz to determine my page score for a specific keyword.

On-Page Ranking Factors

All the best,