Image Titles - How important are they?

So you are sitting there trying to think about what to title your newest photo. You want it to be seen by potential buyers but how important is the title and what are some good rules of thumb to go by when selecting a good title. Dennis spoke about the description a few weeks back in a brilliantly written post and now I will do my best to help you with the title.

1. At Cutcaster, the title you give your image is turned into the page title for search engine reasons. It is so important. The page title is a very powerful source of information for all search engines and is a way for potential buyers to find your image from the many others that are out there.

Names like "I can see you", "flower" or "time to go" all sound pretty good but don't help you getting found. For a lot of reasons, its important to be more logical, direct and specific when we title/name our images if they are going to be found and sold.

Try this test. Type in a search request on Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN and put yourself into the position of a potential buyer. Most buyers from the ones we spoke with told us that they will specify the subject (machine, pizza, dog, etc) and then most likely an action (dog eating pizza, referee blowing a whistle. Try this and see what comes up.
Because you don't have time to check all the links that pop up for one of those searches you might be more specific and search for an image of a "yellow lab eating pepperoni pizza." hahaha. I don't know what but you get the picture or will be able to find one similar the more direct you are. Google places a lot of emphasis on the keywords in your page titles when ranking listings and that is why we added them to the site so buyers can organically find your awesome work. So pick descriptive and direct image titles!

Some pointers to help you because not everyone is an expert including me:

1. Try to use 3-7 descriptive words for your image title

2. Try to avoid non-searchable words. For example after all, about, an, also, and, another, any, are, as, at, be, because, been, before, being, between, both, but.... etc.

3. Don't include key words such as "stock image", "stock photo", "picture of" etc. We will do it on the back end for you.

4. 80 characters is a good number and about the max you want to go up to for an image title.

5. Do NOT add in symbols to the titles because google won't recognize them for SEO purposes and it sometimes breaks our pages ;-(. Here are some examples: ^, !, *, &, /, &, # etc

It is Not Required, but Your Description May be Priceless!

One of our dedicated members Dennis Thomsen brought up the issue of describing our images in the Cutcaster marketplace to us and we felt that Dennis, as a former photo journalist and newspaper editor, would be an ideal person to share his experience as to why describing your images is so important for image buyers and those that want to sell their images.

Below is a little post he wrote about the best way to describe your content and why it is so important. Enjoy and please add any comments at the end. Thank you so much Dennis for passing on some education to all of us.


Like many of our members, I like to check out the Cutcaster collection to see what is being submitted, and to look for holes in the collection. I've also been checking out the new and improved search engine (more changes coming according to John). My examination of the collection led to this guest blog. The goal is to share with the Cutcaster community what this former photo-journalist and newspaper editor views as a big concern if our images (and Cutcaster) are going to get serious consideration from buyers.

Is a picture always worth a thousand words? Photographers and artists would like to think this is the case, but it is not always true. We are in the business of marketing our images, and buyers are looking for images which fit their needs. Do they care about descriptions (captions)? The answer from most buyers is YES! Descriptive captions are part of the marketing information buyers use in the decision making process.

When we go through the Cutcaster image submission process we are required to title, keyword and price our images. It is optional whether we describe (caption) images. In fact, we can leave this field blank if we so choose. What I've observed is many image descriptions are too short, lacking detail, or completely missing. If our goal is to sell our images or increase our sales, this may be a big mistake.

Many high end buyers we hope Cutcaster will attract in the upcoming marketing and advertising campaign need what is referred to as the "five W's and H" in the descriptions. This information, the who, what, when, where, why, and how, of an image should not be ignored when you go through the upload process. Few images can stand alone. Those descriptions (captions) provide details buyers need in the decison process. It may help your sales figures if you review your photo descriptions with an eye toward checking and editing for present tense, active verbs, and the five Ws. Captioning is not always easy and it can be time consuming. It is a skill that develops with practice, just like keywording!

If you want to learn more about this photo caption (description) process, there is plenty of help available on the internet. You might want to check out some of these sites for caption writing basics:

"What Makes a Good Caption?" which is a good starting primer -

http://www.notrain-nogain.org/train/res/Write/caps.asp

Photo Caption Checklist site which provides more captioning thoughts

http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/content/318.cfm

and the following site is also worth visiting - Writing Photo Captions which summarizes the AP stylebook guidelines:

http://mysite.verizon.net/res8dhka/mcpaul/caps.html

The above are a great starting point if you are new to captioning or want to work on improving your image descriptions. Books have been written on this subject. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Hope you find something useful here and your comments are welcome.

Check out images belonging to Dennis here:
http://www.cutcaster.com/studio/pub/739083431

Choose your words wisely- Keywording Help

Why do we say that at Cutcaster ;-)

So, you’ve got that shot. Everything is perfect. You’ve nailed the exposure and focus. The composition couldn’t be better and you burned the midnight oil at your computer in your digital “darkroom,” preening and fluffing that shot or your clip to perfection. The only thing that is left before you send it out to the world of buyers and viewers is to make sure your keywording correctly describes your hard work so it doesn't fall into the content abyss.

Keywording your content is important for many reasons due to the technological impairments we encounter when identifying and trying to search for content online. No great solutions have popped up to help us with this and we must rely on human input of keywords/metadata to make it easier for us to search for what we are looking for. We have talked at lengths about this search and cataloguing problem.

All too often clips and photos which are poorly keyworded are lost into this content abyss and out of site for interested parties. It does you no good if you have that great shot and no one can find it. For selling content, keywording is one of the most important steps towards making sure you content is found.

Here are a few ethical tips to help you with keywording your valuable content either to sell it or make it easier to find on other sites. If you know any others please add them in the comments.

1. Know the point or concept behind the clip or photo you have shot. You should always be thinking about your target audience and what they would be interested in or how they would search for it.

2. All your keywords have to be relevant. We have had countless conversations or seen many community threads started by angry searchers who say they find many irrelevant keywords and content in their searches because uploaders spam the keyword section. This may help your contents chances of being seen but can irritate and completely turn off a buyer or viewer if it is totally off base.

3. You should not turn keywording into a word association game. Don't try to take your concept six steps down the road and turn it into something it isn't. I.E. mouse --> hole --> cheese --> cat --> pet. This doesn't help anyone.

4. Don't include keywords that are not in the shot. Some common repeat offenders are sex, sexy, woman, babe. We can only guess what they are looking for.

5. A thesaurus can be great if you run out of ideas or if English is your second language. You can find help online or in your Microsoft Word.

6. Using antonyms are useful but only when describing certain clips or images. A good example is "go" and then using the opposite "stop" for a traffic light. Or "hot" and "cold" when describing a thermometer.

7. When English is your first language, one must always be aware that their can be different meanings to the same words. There are some subtle differences between American English which you would learn in Japan, the Philippines and Russia and British English which is taught in India, Pakistan, Australia and much of Africa. Our advice is to cater to both forms of English when keywording as buyers and viewers are able to find it from all over the world.

These little tips should help you with your keywording. When all else fails it may be time to call your 7th grade English teacher for a little help.

There are keywording programs available. Here are a few below.

http://www.keywording.com
http://www.abouttheimage.com
http://www.a2zkeywording.com
http://www.jaincotech.com
http://www.keywordcompiler.com
http://www.keedup.com
http://www.africamediaonline.com
http://www.keywordingindia.com
http://www.onasiadigital.com
http://www.careydam.com
http://www.adnetinfosystems.com/
http://www.keywords-to-go.com/
http://www.keywordcompiler.com/