Keywording images is not much fun, but it’s important. This is true whether you are selling your images through microstock sites, uploading them to your own website for direct licensing or to help with traffic and brand building. Keywords need to be relevant to ensure a good user experience – you don’t want someone to land on your page and be irritated because the image has nothing to do with the keyword they searched on. Cast a wide, but relevant net. It’s far better to have 100 people visit and 20 people buy than it is to have 10,000 visit and all of them leave.

Don’t Forget About Titles and Descriptions

If you care about SEO (and you should) then keywords aren’t the only items that matter. You’ll need Titles and Descriptions to maximize your chances of getting found via search. Remember to keep things concise, relevant and focused on what people are likely to be searching for. iStock had a great post on this very topic recently and I recommend reading it. The crux of the issue is to be literal and descriptive.

“Localized Rainstorm” is not a good title for the image above. Much better to go with the more descriptive “Dog Peeing on Fire Hydrant” that the photographer chose. Titles aren’t about being witty or making potential buyers smile, they are about making sure your image can be easily found when someone is searching for the subject of your image.

Fix Your Page Titles (The Best 15 minute investment you can make in SEO)

The single most important factor that you control for your SEO is the page titles. This is the string that displays in the browser window title area (above the URL) and is controlled by the <Title> element. It is crucial that you select titles that contain high relevance search terms.

There are a ton of images online that may have keywords, but have the image filename in the title. This may come as a shock, but “DMC_33430934.jpg” is not a highly used search term for a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset.

If you’re interested in learning more about page titles and ranking factors, check out the results of this survey on SEOmoz. Titles & Keywords are the top 2 factors listed.

There is no magic SEO bullet and it’s a process of continuous improvement. Having said that, fixing your title tags is a relatively straightforward thing to do and has a concrete benefit. (The time consuming part is making sure your images have good titles & keywords.)

Image Title First – Your Brand Second

Another important aspect to keep in mind is that you should lead with the image title, not with your own brand. The reason for this is that you want to rank highly for searches for ‘Golden Gate Bridge’ – you already rank highly for the name of your business.

As a result, “Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset Stock Photo | Eye Rock Photography” is generally better than having your business name at the front. This is even true on your home page. In general, a guiding principle with SEO is that you want to rank highly for your concept/category where possible. Those who know your name already know how to find you.

You can see this good examples of this use of “Keywords | Brand” in action at a range of sites around the web including:

In general, as long as you have the keywords somewhere in the title, you’re ok, but having them listed first is generally considered the best approach. (Screenshot below is from the results of the SEOmoz survey mentioned earlier.)

My Images Sell Themselves

After someone arrives at your site, this is true. At that point, it is all about the image. To get people there, however, you need to make that image’s page visible to a search engine crawler. Today’s crawlers are text driven and need to be told what the page is about. Without a title, description and keywords, your images are effectively invisible.

Good keywording is critical if your images are online in any capacity whatsoever. Whether you are licensing them through microstock sites, your own website, or merely sharing them online to get them noticed, the words you use to describe them matter.

Keywords in Spreadsheets Don’t Count – Embed them in the Image

Keywords that live in spreadsheets are of no use to your images when they are online. They need to be embedded in the image file itself so that the metadata travels with the image. Microstock sites use IPTC Title, Description and Keyword fields to describe images and SEO-aware web services for image archive/display and sales, like PhotoShelter, will read these fields as well. Most photo editing and collection management applications will have ways of editing the image IPTC fields effectively.

We Can Help

As part of our Back Office Services, we offer IPTC-embedded keywording and SEO friendly titles and descriptions. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us and we’ll get back to you to discuss your requirements.