I use a lot of photos and video on my real estate website, as my mountain vacation area is beautiful, and visitors in many cases become vacation home buyers. Providing photos and videos of the area and nature bring a lot of traffic to my site. I always try to take the extra time to use "Alt Text" behind my images, as we're all told it's valuable for search engine exposure. I don't doubt that.
However, a recent look at the "Referrer" section of my site statistics showed a visit from an image search on Google. This happens all of the time, but this one was interesting because I hadn't done my job well. I had no alt image text, nor any description with the image. It had a title, but the title didn't indicate enough about its subject matter to get it displayed in the search that this visitor did: "campgrounds + 'new + mexico'"
However, the first sentence of this blog post with photos and videos started with "In my series of videos of campgrounds in Northern New Mexico, there..." So, it's obvious that Google's index of that page was used to show my image among others in the search for campgrounds in New Mexico.
Google just gets better and better at indexing and categorizing content other than just text, and in relating the text to media content on the page. Besides, it's fun to take photos and make videos, and you can make a Sunday drive a business trip by taking photos for your website [consult your accountant :)].
