FeaturePics Affairs
How to Increase Your Image Sales
Describe your image so FeaturePics visitors and search engines
can find it.
I'm sure you've heard the Woody Allen quote that 80% of success is showing up.
How do you increase your chances of selling an image by
80%? Ensure that people find your image on the net.
We wrote about software that recognizes and describes images in words, but
let's face it, the current image search methods depend mainly on the use of
image descriptions and links associated with an image.
First of all, FeaturePics will continue to improve a lot of things on it's end.
We are making the site more user friendly. In the meantime, you can help us a
lot by describing your images more effectively.
The main information you supply about your image is, image title, image
description (caption), and key words.
Image title
1. At FeaturePics.com the image name is turned into the page title.
The page title is a very powerful source of information for all search engines.
Sometimes we want to sound poetic, or very personal, and we give image names
like "I can see you", or "troubles ahead".
Unfortunately we need to be more logical and specific when we name our
images if the purpose is to sell them.
Put yourself into the position of when you type your search request in the
MSN/Google/Yahoo/Ask/Yandex input box.
You will specify the subject (machine, cheese, mouse, etc), most likely an
action (mouse eating cheese, policeman writing a ticket).
Because you have not had time to check 10 million links, you would want to be
more specific. For instance, say you will search for an image of a "white mouse
eating cheese" or "policewoman writing a ticket".
Google places high priority on the key words in your page titles when ranking
listings. Again, pick good image names!
Technical details:
1. Use 3-7 descriptive words for your image name
2. Try to avoid noise words (non-searchable words), such as: about, after
all, also, an, and, another, any, are, as, at, be, because, been, before,
being, between, both, but.... etc. The Index Server we are using to index
images is designed to ignore these types of words when it builds an index from
a set of pages. If you are running Windows (tm) on your computer - check the
folder %SystemRoot%\System32. You will find noise.fra, noise.ita, noise.nld,
and noise.enu files. These files list noise words in different languages. For
example, the English_US noise-word file is stored as
%SystemRoot%\System32\Noise.enu.
3. Don't include key words such as "stock photo", "stock image",
"picture" etc. We will do it on the back end.
4. We allow 300 characters for the image name. That may be too many
for the purposes of naming the image. 80 characters for an image name is a good
number.
Image description
Just imagine that a blind person ran across your image and cannot see it.
Describe your image in more detail. You can include information about
background, colors, time of day, season, even what cloth the subject is
wearing.
You can include some "advertisement" words here, but very carefully. "Eye
Catching Pictures" - why not? Convey to a visitor that your image is what they
want.
Technical details:
1. We allow 1000 characters for image description.
Key wordsThis is the area where I expect a lot of arguments.
Please look at your image page source code at any stock photo site. All your
keywords are converted to links. If you insert a relevant keyword and
the linking page has relevant images - it is good for your
page. Conversely, if the link points to a subject that is not related to
your image - your key word decreases the relevancy of this word.
Don't use 30-40 words - it would be too many links to your page. You need
10-15 good links!
We allow 1000 characters for key words and it will be changed as soon as we are
done with the "edit" function for your published images.
In the mean time - be selfish! Don't "promote" key words, promote your image.
When you are done with the image description, a "blind" person (all search
engines!) will know where to go:
From the title:
- the subject and the "role" it plays ("mother feeding a baby")
From the description:
- Information about age (young, old, senior, child)
- What is it like? (cold, wet, rusty)
- What is the subject wearing? (coat, sunglasses, jeans, etc.).
- Name of or type of building or designation? (ranch house, skyscraper).
- For animals/plants - common name, scientific name, color (if relevant).
- Time of day, if relevant (dawn, dusk, noon, night).
- Seasons, if relevant (spring, summer).
- What is the purpose? Why is this happening? Only if it is essential to
understanding the image.
From the key words:
- Words that match the subject/concept
- Synonyms (words that mean the same thing, but look different)
How FeaturePics indexes your images
Our index server takes into account the image title, image description, and the
keywords. If your key word is only in the key words - the rank will be very
low. Keywords that appear in the title, description, and key word lists have
the highest rank.
Similar images that support your image title and description will be listed on
the page. Title and description will be "bolded" and the important H1 and H2
tags will be applied.
Why we are adding "picture","photo","image" keywords?
Authors take realistic and good quality photos, and sometimes people that are
attracted by an image don't think that it IS AN IMAGE! They think they are
buying real things! We were reimbursing money to our visitors when they were
buying screwdrivers, flowers, frames, and gift boxes!
It doesn't mean that we are very unhappy about that, we just don't want to
mislead our buyers.
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