Stuck for keywords!?
No one sees my great imageYou may know the feelling, great picture but no one seems to view it thus no sales.
The image is great but maybe the keywords are not, or maybe the image and the keywords are in competition with too many others similar images.
Not the best match but the first reasonable match
When I buy images, I tend to buy one of the first I find that is a reasonable match to my requirements ( I am a busy person!). I may try a few different keyword combinations but I rarely look at all the pictures a serch gives me. I may look at 5-10 page and then do an alternate seach.
Example: ideally I want picture of Casarecci pasta, a search gives me nothing. I search for pasta -lots of images and after looking for a bit I see a great picture of spaghetti - you know - pasta is pasta and I use the spaghetti image. had I looked throgh all 333 'pasta pages' I might have found Casarecci pasta but I would also have died of boredom.
Even if I look for any kind of pasta, I am still going to stop at the first ok match. I use different keyword combinations when I search but rarely look through more than a few pages before I find a compromise.
From a byers perspective I wish sellers could read my mind and include all relevant keyword for an image especially very specific ones.
Struggling for wordsAs a seller I stare at my images sometime struggling to find keywords that are more than just run of the mill. It is easy enough to describe the elements in the image, but a lot harder to come up with the ideas and concepts that the picture expresses.
Wiki helpWhen I keyword I start by with the easiest first - 'naming' every elemnet I see in the image. Anyone can do this, just describe the elements that you see. Afterwards - and this is the trick - I look these word up in www.wikipedia.com. Skimming the articles I get a whole new array of relevant keywords including ideas and concepts which I again can persue in wikipedia. This is what a few basic words gave me in wikipedia:
Fork cutlery kitchenware tool eating utensil metal
pasta spaghetti macaroni dried egg Italy Italian noodles Bolognese Kitchen Meal gastronomy Fast food
basil herb Lamiaceae cusine cooked recipes cook recipe flavour
meal eating restaurants cafeterias food snack entrée nutrition tea
Word help
Now I think a about the ideas and concept the picture might convey. Some are allready 'suggested' by the wiki search!
I type them into word and use the thesaurus to give me alternative words with similar meaning:
meal eat mealtime lunch dinner supper
eat consume scoff dine
Every new word generated, you can look up and find new keywords.
Remember the variations
For every word dont forget to type the gramatic variation i.e.
eat eating ate eaten
Dreamstime help
I often do a very specific keyword search on dreamstime including the main elements in my image. With the pasta shot above I may search for : 'fork pasta basil isolated'. Look at the keywords in the images the search have brought up. Look especially at the keywords in a small font size (indicating that not many images have the keyword) Do they fit the image aswell or maybe they will work as inspiration. For every new word you can do the whole wiki word thing again!
Sometimes misspelling a word and spell check it in Dreamstime gives a load of variations on the word (remember to corret the misspelled word afterwards)
Job done
