MicrostockGroup

It's a lot of work if you do it yourself. You got to keep it updated and that takes time for the maintenance of the site. It's not that hard to set one up...it's just the time involved keeping it updated.

The real problem with your own website is how to drive traffic to it. Not as easy as some might think.

Exactly. Google or Amazon, both of them would have the means to get sufficient traffic.

That's true. Google has the means, but they would rather let you pay them per click. I never thought about Amazon, which is on track to take about 15% share of retail sales  in the next few years, according to Gartner Research Partners. The problem is as was noted before, how to keep people honest about rights, releases, ownership. Driving the traffic to a website by search only really works when you have unique content, like you specialize in Polar bears or something.

It's not easy but if you know SEO and have a website platform that's SEO optimized it's entirely possible.

But are serious buyers really using search engines frequently enough to drive some decent sales volume?

Maybe everyone should read the whole article/interview again and take notes. It's so full of good information, it would take a couple of slow readings to find most of the wisdom.

Here's what stands out for me, that hasn't been discussed here yet.

"Over the past few years, we have also acquired several hundred generic domains to capture natural "type-in" traffic. "

All the SEO tricks and books and blogs will also need to address another obvious problem. Using a simple example, the number of Diamond and Black diamond on IS is 800. Now the optimist here says, well, I can use Photoshelter and Google and make some web pages and raise my ranking. Well maybe, but with 800 people all doing the same thing, it starts to become an interesting logic problem. I mean 800 people can't all be on the front page with a top rank... can they?

If someone acquires several hundred websites and domains, which all point to their main site, they are going to be first, and what chance does someone small have? Say there are 50 groups or agencies, doing the same thing, which will insure they are on the top few pages. See what's going on here? All the reading and theoretical planning, joining the right places, and making a great little website, is never going to put you up top!

At this point, 50 people competing for top rank, and 800 people competing for high rank. It's a stampede to the top and the small sites will be flattened. Or maybe some of you want to buy several hundred domain names and run that many websites, in order to get a good search rank for you photos. 

This may not be the ultimate solution, but it's mine. Find a specialty or favorite niche and concentrate on that.

and please don't take mine.

You mean SEO need to adress the problem that there's competition for top placement?  
Micro sites already have converted pic-title URLs so they try to use google too. No way that someone's personal site gonna beat their PR, if it's only about microstock. If there's something esle.. It's possible. Stock is preatty obscure small dot compared to net-hyped stuff's numbers. Even kids commentating starcraft matches beat it

Yeah now all the sites will say "Make millions on you snap shots by learning html skills" only 29.95 if you order within the next five minutes.....don't miss out on this once in a life time offer!!!

Now everyone will be taking web development classes rather than photography classes.

you don't have to link anything, the same thing can run on several domain names. domain name =/= place of hosting.

It's always been about the marketing.

Yes, it's a simple script that forwards anyone to the main site. But another benefit from any dummy site is creating a page link which directs people to the main site (even if no one ever sees it) which will count as a page link to a site and raise the rank, because someone has a link to a site. If that's a bit muddled, just think of it this way.

Here's one of mine "<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="8; url=http://www.gizex.com/hodagrr">" right before the </head> command in your html. By the way, I'm a dinosaur and still do my web pages manually with Wordpad! This one shows the page for eight seconds, says the site has moved and you will automatically be forwarded, and then takes the viewer to the new site. It can be invisible, which you may not notice, you enter one site name, it takes you to another main page.

The more people who have a link to a page, (on their independent site), the higher the rank of that page. You can't just post 50 links on your own site, to someplace, it only counts as one. When one place I work for wanted to raise their rank, they asked everyone that knew them to post a link on their websites, and now for the search they wanted, they are one of the top three, if not number one. It works, it's simple, you don't need to take some scam class and pay money for someone to tell you how you can be number one. Along with the thousands of other people who will also be number one, after taking the class - Which Is Impossible!

Our referral links are an example, so if we still have them for places that pay nothing and give us nothing in return, we're just doing free advertising and SEO for them. Good reason for a micro site to offer referral bonuses for a short term and get the free boost.