Help Searchers Find Your Stock Photos With Correct Keywording

If you just list your stock photography with a few random keywords tagged you may get a few sales here and there but it will be nothing close to what you could be getting. Choosing the correct keywords and leaving out others is crucially important in getting the maximum possible sales for your work. Keywording is the process of finding these keywords that will help buyers find your work and to be able to do this properly you must first understand how keywords work and which ones you should and shouldn't tag your photos with.Keywords are used by search engines to find the most relevant content to a user's search query. For example, if a user searches for 'horizontal puppy photos' the search results will include any photos that are tagged with 'horizontal' or 'puppy' with photos that are tagged with both keywords at the top. The more matching keywords a photo has to the search query the higher it will appear in the search results. However, the inclusion of irrelevant keywords with your photo can negatively impact it's performance in search results.The first step in correctly keywording your stock photos is to write down the most obviously relevant keywords that describe the image. For example, a photo of a family picnicking in the park in Autumn. Your starting keywords for this image would 'family', 'picnic', 'park' and 'Autumn'. A searcher looking for any of those keywords is likely to be interested in your image.Part of correct keywording is knowing also what not to do and there are a few things that you should avoid when tagging your photos. The first thing to avoid is including irrelevant keywords. It may be tempting to lure in extra searchers by listing a lot of keywords but in reality you are going hurting the overall relevancy of your photo for the profitable searches.Another thing to avoid that could decrease your photo's sales is including keywords that are implied or not obvious from the image itself. Continuing with the previous example, the man chopping the firewood is from a set of photos around a campsite. However, in this particular image you cannot see the campsite. Although one could deduce that the man is probably camping do not include 'camping' in your list of keywords, it is not relevant to this specific photo regardless of what is in the rest of the set.The final thing to avoid is a trap that many people fall into when keywording their stock photos is to keyword everything in the photo. With our original example one could say that 'grass', 'trees', 'dirt', 'beard', 'pine-cones' and 'sky' are all in that image. Although this is correct including them as keywords is not. People searching for any of those keywords are not going to be interested in this photo.After you are done tagging your keywords you can apply your newly learned skills to the writing of relevant titles and descriptions. The title and description are important for searchers within the stock photography website but they can also help you get people from Google searches too. External search engines such as Google take all of the data attached to the photo into account so make sure to include your main keywords in both.Keywording is simply a tool for getting your work to be noticed. Your work will not sell if it does not show up in search results regardless of how good the photography is. Learn how to keyword just like you would learn a new photography technique, your efforts will pay for themselves rapidly.