Introduction to Microstock Photography – Keywording 101
Keywording is immensely important if you want your images to sell. Once in awhile I receive e-mails from photographers mentioning that their pictures do not sell. When I take a look at their portfolios, I see beautiful pictures with horrible keywords. Put simply, keywording is more important than workflow. Many photographers spend hours editing a single picture only to give it horrible keywords. In this post I’ll attempt to provide some guidance on keywording.
Without proper keywording, buyers will never find your picture. No matter how beautiful it is, buyers will never see it. Therefore, you need to make as full use of the keywording space as possible. Most sites allow you to use up to fifty keywords and I suggest that you reach this limit for many of your photos. This does not mean you should keyword spam. Many sites automatically catch keywords such as “teen” and “sex” and ban you if you are found keyword spamming. Your keywords must also be relevant to the specific picture. Choosing a large number of relevant keywords people would actually use is as much of an art as a science.