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Home  Adventures in Pixelland Keywording Do's and Don'ts
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Keywording Do's and Don'ts |
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Written by Steve Smith
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Monday, 20 February 2006 |
 How often has this happened? You go to a stock photo site to look for a particular image, let's say a shot of a couple dining in a nice outdoor restaurant with the Grand Canal of Venice behind. Into the search box you type 'Restaurant Venice couple' or something like that and you select the option (if not default) to show results with only ALL of the words. So you should see a series of pictures that match your search, right. That's what you expect to see, and in fact you may even see a few images like what you had in mind. In addition to that however, you see a close-up of two scrumptious looking pork chops smothered in some sort of brown sauce. You see two pigeons sitting on a railing in focus with a blurred city scene behind (is that Venice?). You see a typical North American strip mall with two restaurants, one of which happens to have a tacky neon sign with the words, "Venice by Night" in the window.
You get the point. The results you achieve are not what you expected. If you were a stock photo buyer, what would you do? If you are patient, you might try another search, a different way. You might not. You might just go to the next site in the list and try that one with the same search to see what you get. That's a lost opportunity.
Now you are the photographer with some great images that meet the customers needs almost precisely, however you made a few critical errors in your keywording and/or your captions. First, you misspelled "restaurant" as "restaraunt", a very common mistake, but a critical one. Secondly your caption says "Two Lovers Enjoy a Romantic Dinner in Venice", however in your keywords you did not translate "two lovers" to "couple" and lastly, you made reference to the canal as "Canal Grande", the local term without referencing the common English translation. So that's three strikes. Unlikely even the most sophisticated search engines out there can resolve that one.
Another question, how many times have you looked at the sales reports on a particular site and said "Man, I can't believe THAT image sold, mine is much, much better!". Did you take a look at how it was keyworded and captioned? Did you compare it to yours? I'm willing to go out on a limb here and make this claim. A well keyworded image of decent quality will outsell a poorly keyworded image of exceptional quality, however a well keyworded image of exceptional quality will outsell both many times over.
Here's a few key things to keep in mind when keywording and captioning your images (in no specific order).
1) Both keywords and captions matter and should compliment each other, not duplicate each other. Captions should describe the image without going overboard. Keywords should fill in the gaps left out by the captions. Most, but not all, sites search both caption/title and keywords.
2) Watch your spelling. Obvious point but so many don't take the time to spell check before submitting. Also consider including common misspellings or country specific variations in your keywords (tire vs. tyre, check vs. cheque, etc).
3) Singular vs. plural, past tense vs. present tense, etc. Peoples brains work differently in this regard. The "couple" vs. "two lovers" decision for example.
4) Try to think like a customer. Think in terms of what they may see in your image. Think of potentially relevant concepts that the image may portray. Just don't overdo it.
5) Very important, make sure the caption, especially, is relevant to the image. Lets look at the close-up of the two pork chops for a second. The photographer happened to take this photo while at a restaurant in Venice (they were just prepared so well and looked so good..), but is that relevant? Now that image shows up under searches for Venice, which confuses buyers. My recommendation, only mention the location if the location is clearly part of the shot.
6) Don't clutter your keywords with duplicate words, or using the word photo, image, stock photo, etc. That's a waste of good keywords and most search engines worth their salt will largely ignore that stuff. Let the folks who run the site include those words as standard keywords for every photo.
7) Remember the variations. For example a photo researcher looking for nice pictures of the English countryside might use England, English, British, Britain, UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, etc..
Keywording is one of the most challenging and, to most people, least exciting aspects of managing your images, however, if you can master it, and you have good images that are in demand it WILL pay dividends.
Happy keywording....
(c) 2006 Steve Smith, World of Stock [Contact] [Bio]
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Last Updated ( Monday, 20 February 2006 )
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