Help Searchers To Locate Your Stock Photos With Correct Keywording

If you just list your stock photography with a few random keywords tagged you may

get a few sales here and there but it will be nothing close to what you could be getting. Choosing the correct keywords and leaving out others is crucially important in getting the maximum possible sales for your work. Keywording is the process of finding these keywords that will help buyers find your work and to be able to do this properly you must first understand how keywords work and which ones you should and shouldn't tag your photos with.

Keywords are used by search engines to find the most relevant content to a user's search query. For example, if a user searches for 'horizontal puppy photos' the search results will include any photos that are tagged with 'horizontal' or 'puppy' with photos that are tagged with both keywords at the top. The more matching keywords a photo has to the search query the higher it will appear in the search results. However, the inclusion of irrelevant keywords with your photo can negatively impact it's performance in search results.

To find the keywords that will help your stock photos sell first start with ones that are obvious at a quick glance. If, for example, your photo is of a man chopping firewood then a quite a few keywords will be immediately obvious at a glance. 'Firewood', 'chopping', 'man' and 'wood-chopping' are all great keywords to include. If a user were to search any of those terms they would be happy with finding your image.

It's very important that you stick with only relevant keywords when tagging your photos. Including irrelevant keywords can actually decrease the relevancy of your image in search results for good 'selling' searches. In our previous example there may be a dog in the background of the image, do not include 'dog' in the keywords. A user searching for 'dog' would not be happy with your image as they are more likely to be looking for photos where a dog is the focal point.

Aside from obviously irrelevant keywords you should also steer clear of implied or not entirely obvious keywords. Anything that is not immediately obvious from looking at your picture should not be considered a relevant keyword. Using the example of a family on a picnic you should avoid including the ethnicity of the family or dog in the background in the list of keywords. Although, they are in the photo they may not be immediately obvious or relevant to searchers interests.

The final thing to avoid is a trap that many people fall into when keywording their stock photos is to keyword everything in the photo. With our original example one could say that 'grass', 'trees', 'dirt', 'beard', 'pine-cones' and 'sky' are all in that image. Although this is correct including them as keywords is not. People searching for any of those keywords are not going to be interested in this photo.

To top off your keywording efforts make sure to include a good description and title with your image. If you use your main keywords in the title in the description you will help people from within and outside the stock photography site find your image. This is because Google will take into account the title and description when evaluating your photos for relevance against a search term. If a user searches 'family at the park' in Google images and your photo has 'family' and 'park' in the keyword tags, the description and the title there is a much higher chance you will appear at the top of the search results.

Remember that learning effective keywording is just as important as learning to take good pictures. An artist can not be appreciated if their work isn't seen and a business can not make money if their stock isn't on show. Make sure you give your work every possible chance to be seen and be sold.

by: Tracy Narvaez

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