naming images and seo?

[fishboy]

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Hello,

just a quick question. I know it can help with seo if you name your images and create alt tags using key words but my question is this...

1) will chopping up your images into smaller ones and using repeat keywords in their names actually help that much?

2) Let's say i chopped them up reeeeeeeal small and had 50 tiny images that made up my navigation, will i be punished for over use of these kywords or will they be simply ignored?

For example say i'm building a football website, how would images such as football1.gif, football2.gif, football3.gif, football4.gif rate compared to football_boots.gif, football_shirts.gif, football_gear.gif etc.

Any thoughts?

Cheers.

[lowndsy]

The fuller names are better, but neither compare to nice, easy to find text.

[fishboy]

Oh for sure, there's plenty of text and key word links i was just a bit dubious about getting penalised for "over seo" if that's possible?

[Frostie]

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it better to us a - and not a _

I thought Google took 2 words seperated with a _ as a single word, so football_goal_post.gif would be interpreted as footballgoalpost? If you use the - it takes it as seperate words so football_goal_post.gif would be recognised as football goal post?

Finally, how does the robots file affect this? Say for example I have it set to disallow all robots from entering my images/ directory, would it still make use of the gif names as they are listed in the html/php files in the root directory which it does have access to?