This is absolutely key for maximising sales. That’s why I’ve dedicated a page to this subject.

It doesn’t matter how good a photo you take. If you’re selling it online, you’ll need to make sure people see it. You do this by assigning keywords to your image. If a buyer searches on a keyword attached to your photo, it’ll appear in the results section. Easy, right? Wrong. Debates still rage on the forums of the stock sites amongst established professionals about how to get keywording right. I’d hardly say I’m a great expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to know how to keyword relatively well.

Your photo is the commodity you’re selling. But the keywords are like the different branches of stores where you sell it. By thinking carefully about the different keywords you can add to bring interest to your photo, you increase your chances greatly of getting sales.

All sites are unequivocal about spam keywords. That is, attaching a bunch of keywords that have no great relevance to your image, in the hope that you’ll draw visitors who weren’t really looking for your image, but might buy it anyway when it’s presented to them. This is seriously frowned-upon and is to be avoided.

So how do you keyword your image to give it the best chance of success?

Look at your image. Think about words that you would use to describe it. Here’s an old image of mine as an example:

So, we’ve got a bunch of grapes. Big deal. How else would you describe it??

For me, I go through a three-step process:

1. Specific
2. General
3. Conceptual

So, in this example, I’d have some words as follows -

Specific: bunch, grape, grapes (if the site doesn’t automatically assign plurals) and "bunch of grapes" (depending how the site handles phrases)

General: fruit, fruity, juice, juicy

Conceptual: taste, tasty, tempt, tempting, sweet, sweetness, health, healthy, healthfood, health-food, nutrition, nutritious, nutritional, wellbeing, diet, weight-loss, nourish, nourishment, nourishing, vitamin, vitamins

Let's look at how this shot of grapes on one site shows up in search results on certain keywords:

health: 62,462 results
diet: 31,047 results
bunch: 8,391 results (lots of flowers shots returned too)
grape: 5,652 results
wholesome: 1,401 results
healthfood: 86 results
health-food: 81 results

Beginning to see the value of ensuring your keywords are comprehensive and well-thought-through? I'm guessing I pick up most of my sales for my grapes from the unusual keywords of 'healthfood' and 'health-food'. On both of those searches, my image is returned on the first page of results too. Who's going to search through 500-odd pages of 'health' photos before they get to mine? Not many folks, I think.

It's a great idea to add the proper name of the object of your image. For example, if it's a flower, include the latin name if possible. Anything to ensure that if someone puts the proper name in to their search, your image will be returned. I have a stock photo of my kitchen floor, which is one of my best sellers - and I think that's because I have 'travertine' in my keywords. That's the particular type of marble that the floor is made of. If you search for 'marble' you'll get 2000+ images returned on many sites. Search for 'travertine' and see how many you get. No more than 50, I expect - giving my floor a far better chance of selling!

A professional I know told me to keep practicing ‘keywording’ all the time. In your spare moments, look at objects and practice going through keywords that you’d use. With some practice, you should get to the point where you can come up with a wide and useful range of keywords for any image within a minute.

This is great advice, because the quicker and better you can add your keywords when uploading, the less time you're spending per image.