Recent SEO experiments show that if you link to the same page twice from any one page, only the first link counts for major search engines like Google. If your website has images linking to products before the anchor text link, it means that said anchor text link is not counted by the search engines. Instead the image link is counted as the first link. This has a negative impact on your keyword-rich SEO work.
Use First Link Checker to find out quickly and easily if this is a problem for your website.
Fixing your First Link Problem
One way to fix the problem is to concentrate on placing anchor text links above image links. Alternatively you could exclude images that link, however, this is not the best solution as users have become accustomed to clicking on an image in order to be taken through to another page that contains information about the image.
The best alternative is to use code to place the anchor text link above the image link. Although it will appear the opposite once live, search engines like Google will look at the code in order to determine which link is first. Use CSS absolute positioning to push the text link below the image