MicrostockGroup

The eight letters is easy. People grew up using MS OS which only allowed the eight.three naming conventions. Seems my whole collection of files, photos, articles and everything, before Windows 2000, is only eight letter file names. 

My keywords are not so good for pushing up views, but they are specific. Now, some people want to put down banana when you are looking at an apple, because it's fruit, and they get the people to see their images. But it's counter-productive and a waste of time for buyers to see images that aren't what they are looking for.

Interesting about the plurals. I'd think the search engines would be more intuitive and when someone types in "girl" it would find the word, partial occurrences and therefore "girls".

What was it someone wrote, that very few people search for the word "isolated"? Makes sense that they wouldn't because it would be half the photos on a website.

Good luck with the research and the software.

What about "background"?  This is probably the most abused keyword, you can see it in any type of photography.

Regards,
Adelaide

Yuri - any update on this subject? I'll gladly buy it when it's available.

I think that the concrete keywords is a very important point becaus of the nature of keyword searching.  If a buyer has browsing in mind, for a background for example, chances are they would do a category search and not a keyword search, a keyword search would be used when there is something in mind.  But a database with millions of photos is overwhelming and photos that do not belong are terribly annoying and time wasting, therefore to limit the list to only those most relevant, the searcher will try to be as specific, yet short as possible (same mindset as google searching, the internet is huge, and a google search is fundamentally similar to a keyword search). 

My top few keywords (for FT) are always a very concrete description of what the shot actually contains.  All of my sales on DT via keyword searches have been by very accurate descriptions of what the photo contains, yet only using a few words, just cross checking those searches I have found surprisingly few results for each word combination, as if the buyer refined the keywords until a nice accurate short list was presented to them.

The way I always begin keywording is to think to myself, what keyword combination would put this image on page 1 of google for me, with the most basic words.  After that the tenses and less basic words come, then the more ambiguous stuff.