The 12 Commandments of Keywording success according to Cutcaster

The 12 Commandments of Keywording success according to Cutcaster ;-)

1. You only need between five to fifteen (5-15) keywords. Twenty (20) is the highest. Better tagging means better search results, bringing in more users, which means more sales for your images at higher prices then other sites. We would rather have fewer files that have better keywords than more files with plenty of irrelevant keywords

2. Keywords need to be separated by a comma. Compound phrases need to be separated by a space and then surround by commas. You can remove any quotation marks.

3. You can add ONE SET of location tags. Avoid using locations as tags unless there is something in the photo that makes its location recognizable. Not a seagull in the blue sky.

4. Remove all the keywords that are obviously not in the images

5. Remove tags that could be tangentially related, but aren’t really illustrated well by the photo. i.e. picture of cat, adding in “mouse”

6. Remove tags that are related to the photo, but so vague that no one would ever use them to search.

7. Take a few of the choice words and make them far better by turning them into a phrase

8. Don’t “stretch” your tags into irrelevancy, in order to generate more hits for an image. This can be very frustrating for our users, who tend to search literally.

9. Figures of speech, nicknames, slang, metaphors and metonyms can create a ton of problems in a search engine. Please don’t use them. The reviewers will add them in if necessary.

10. Proper Names and Catch Phrases — Don't Break Them Up. If you have a keyword that is either a very common set of two words, or is a proper name, enter it as is. The search engine has the ability to recognize many phrases that operate as a common term but contain more than one word, such as "hard drive," "hot dog," or "White House." It also recognizes the names of many public and historical figures.

11. You do not need to type in ‘car, cars’ to cover the singular and plural versions of a noun. Type in only the one that is more accurate for your photo. If there is only one car, type in “car.” Your image will come up in a search for both car and cars, but it will be ranked higher if the plurality matches what the buyer searched for.

12. Be as literal as possible. Describe just what is in the images.

Read Dan Heller's blog article on the reasons why keywording your images correctly is so important.

Image, keywording and description help

At Cutcaster, the majority of our search results use your title, description and keywords to get your images and videos found. How well you title, describe and keyword your content is how well it will come up in search results on the site and on popular search engines. I really need your help making sure that your content is properly labeled. I know it takes more time but we need this to be concise, clear and relevant so buyers are put off. Since we are in the early stages of our site we have a real opportunity to keep the search results as relevant as possible and keep buyers happy. I had a conversation with 2 potential buyers today and they said they biggest consideration for using a site was search results relevancy so I am going to be stressing this and working to help you guys. We are only so many people here at Cutcaster i.e. not many, so we need all your help.

Here we go.

From the title:

- the subject and the "role" it plays ("boy petting dog," "mother feeding child," "dog barking at squirrel")

- do NOT use punctuation, exclamation or any other marks or weird characters in the titles

From the description: Get as descriptive as you can

- Information about age (newborn, young, old, senior, mature adult, over the hill, child, stone age)
- What is it like? (hot, dry, putrid, wet, yellow, rusty)
- What is the subject wearing? (t-shirt, nude, coat, viser, jean shorts, etc.).
- Name of or type of building or designation? (apartment complex, oil rig, office).
- For animals/plants - scientific name, common name, color (if relevant).
- What time of day, if relevant (sunrise, dawn, dusk, midday, noon, sunset, night).
- Seasons, if relevant (spring, fall, summer, winter).


From the keywords:

- Words that match the subject/concept
- Synonyms (words that mean the same thing, but look different)
- you only need 10-20 keywords at most
- don't over keyword

If you notice content on the site that is spamming on keywords or not categorized right will you please notify us by clicking on this button "Flag this Media" on the media details page. You will be helping us all if you do it and buyers will be more likely to come to the site because results will be relevant.

Has anyone tried using Stock Photo Express?

I ran into this company today and it seemed to solve a lot of issues that contributors run into when uploading photos on the internet in bulk. From the website, Stock Photo Express is software that makes it easy to manage your stock portfolio, associate IPTC/XMP data with your images, and batch upload them to selected microstock photo agencies.


Features of Stock Photo Express

• Write IPTC data (e.g., image title, description, keywords, copyright) into image files

• Account for the status of each image

• Copy and paste IPTC data from one image into another

• Multithread upload of your images to selected stock agencies

• Schedule uploads

• Add any microstock agency which supports FTP uploading

• Status accounting for each image

• Metadata search in your images

As we know at Cutcaster, this takes a lot of time and could be a great product to save you some time. Let us know what your experience is with software like this.

Stock Photo Express