Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.

Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.

Agree also by adding "tangential" keywords you will probably reduce the ctr which might affect your ranking. This and their half hearted attempt at categories seem rather daft.

I'm just slowly doing the supertags.  Only 2 images optimised out of 2800.

I'm not fully sure how much effect supertags are having.
Make sure you keep checking regularly, it keeps changing.
Certainly a few months back, 'supering' a tag made a files fall back quite a bit in a search for the supertag, judged by before and after checks. I don't think it's so bad now.

Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.

Is that five yes to your five answers. I think so.  It's another carrot on a stick mission, from some stock agency.

Certainly time consuming but if it improves sales by even 10% I think it's worth it. I did key word some in a rush the first time round.

But if even more spammy keywording leads to buyers leaving ...
As they don't have any auto-translation, it might be worth the effort to translate the main subject keywords - but it would be difficult to guess which languages would work best, unless you have an obvious bias in sales location. Certainly adding main keywords in the language of the location of images could be helpful. Though it could also clog up searches where the same word has a totally different meaning in different languages.

My 400 images haven't had a sale since... let me check... oh yeah April.  And before that, I had one in January.  It's over.  I don't even waste time checking for sales, let alone jumping through more keywording hoops.   

Hey,
thanks for mentioning keyword.io, I built that a while ago, happy to see it's helping!

I once made a quick test based on 30+ million stock photos in the database and there indeed was a strong correlation between the number of keywords and number of sales. In short: The more the better.

But:

1. Irrelevant keywords certainly don't help and might actually hurt by reducing your CTR
2. There might be a correlation between quality of the asset and number of keywords - more experienced and devoted artists may invest more in keywording.

So use tools like keyword.io to find keywords that you might have missed otherwise, but don't try to fill up all slots with tangential stuff

Also, make sure to optimise your title/description and use the most relevant keywords there, too. Basic search engine optimisation...

Secret of trade

But that's the data I gathered for http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research into a big database, so it's a matter of minutes to run such queries on.

Some agencies do publish those numbers in their APIs, although you may not see those on their websites.

First of all a big disclaimer: I am not selling photos myself so all I say is from looking at statistics and educated guesses.

I totally agree that quality > quantity and to be very clear: Keywording tools should be used to find more _relevant_ keywords, not just max out the amount of allowed keywords.

That doesn't mean, that you shouldn't add very *generic* keywords, too, though.

For the fun of it I just looked for the most frequent keywords in the database, see end of post.

12.5% of images have the keyword "background". Further analysis shows, that 79.566% of assets with that keyword have 0 sales while 80.076% of ALL assets have 0 sales. Now I don't want to do the math to test if that's scientifically significant, but I would make the case that generic keywords don't hurt your sales. Other top keywords rank around 79.5 - 80.5, too.

Which makes sense to me intuitively - you will never rank for "background" or if your CTR would be crap, but your average buyer won't search just for "background" but for "dense forest background" - where your picture "dense forest" picture will get its chance once you add the generic "background" keyword.

(Another shameless pluck: check out http://www.keyword.io/tool/fotolia-longtail-finder to get ideas of actual search phrases based on fotolias's autosuggest. It's far from being as good as google's though, so you might want to have a look at that, too...)


Here's some raw data of the 100 most frequent keywords:

[
          {
            "key": "background",
            "doc_count": 4591388
          },
          {
            "key": "white",
            "doc_count": 3987768
          },
          {
            "key": "nature",
            "doc_count": 2484515
          },
          {
            "key": "isolated",
            "doc_count": 2435124
          },
          {
            "key": "beautiful",
            "doc_count": 2413848
          },
          {
            "key": "people",
            "doc_count": 2229395
          },
          {
            "key": "design",
            "doc_count": 2127786
          },
          {
            "key": "illustration",
            "doc_count": 1904740
          },
          {
            "key": "blue",
            "doc_count": 1888078
          },
          {
            "key": "green",
            "doc_count": 1886371
          },
          {
            "key": "young",
            "doc_count": 1874181
          },
          {
            "key": "woman",
            "doc_count": 1753721
          },
          {
            "key": "red",
            "doc_count": 1703703
          },
          {
            "key": "person",
            "doc_count": 1669872
          },
          {
            "key": "female",
            "doc_count": 1655572
          },
          {
            "key": "summer",
            "doc_count": 1603761
          },
          {
            "key": "beauty",
            "doc_count": 1568581
          },
          {
            "key": "travel",
            "doc_count": 1563713
          },
          {
            "key": "color",
            "doc_count": 1561565
          },
          {
            "key": "business",
            "doc_count": 1536681
          },
          {
            "key": "on",
            "doc_count": 1534946
          },
          {
            "key": "food",
            "doc_count": 1525440
          },
          {
            "key": "symbol",
            "doc_count": 1462259
          },
          {
            "key": "vector",
            "doc_count": 1444441
          },
          {
            "key": "happy",
            "doc_count": 1442463
          },
          {
            "key": "concept",
            "doc_count": 1404698
          },
          {
            "key": "black",
            "doc_count": 1355581
          },
          {
            "key": "old",
            "doc_count": 1328315
          },
          {
            "key": "girl",
            "doc_count": 1328268
          },
          {
            "key": "of",
            "doc_count": 1319744
          },
          {
            "key": "sky",
            "doc_count": 1319360
          },
          {
            "key": "closeup",
            "doc_count": 1314140
          },
          {
            "key": "caucasian",
            "doc_count": 1306044
          },
          {
            "key": "in",
            "doc_count": 1288970
          },
          {
            "key": "healthy",
            "doc_count": 1281133
          },
          {
            "key": "art",
            "doc_count": 1268722
          },
          {
            "key": "man",
            "doc_count": 1267496
          },
          {
            "key": "natural",
            "doc_count": 1241623
          },
          {
            "key": "abstract",
            "doc_count": 1221299
          },
          {
            "key": "portrait",
            "doc_count": 1202016
          },
          {
            "key": "adult",
            "doc_count": 1143252
          },
          {
            "key": "fresh",
            "doc_count": 1126741
          },
          {
            "key": "water",
            "doc_count": 1102621
          },
          {
            "key": "with",
            "doc_count": 1089499
          },
          {
            "key": "style",
            "doc_count": 1071221
          },
          {
            "key": "architecture",
            "doc_count": 1053418
          },
          {
            "key": "decoration",
            "doc_count": 1051273
          },
          {
            "key": "yellow",
            "doc_count": 1034675
          },
          {
            "key": "male",
            "doc_count": 1029181
          },
          {
            "key": "landscape",
            "doc_count": 1020224
          },
          {
            "key": "sign",
            "doc_count": 1015971
          },
          {
            "key": "modern",
            "doc_count": 1014797
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoor",
            "doc_count": 997496
          },
          {
            "key": "vintage",
            "doc_count": 993881
          },
          {
            "key": "pattern",
            "doc_count": 987256
          },
          {
            "key": "cute",
            "doc_count": 981877
          },
          {
            "key": "lifestyle",
            "doc_count": 980955
          },
          {
            "key": "holiday",
            "doc_count": 979195
          },
          {
            "key": "and",
            "doc_count": 977286
          },
          {
            "key": "texture",
            "doc_count": 968744
          },
          {
            "key": "the",
            "doc_count": 961560
          },
          {
            "key": "colorful",
            "doc_count": 959809
          },
          {
            "key": "view",
            "doc_count": 948446
          },
          {
            "key": "light",
            "doc_count": 941141
          },
          {
            "key": "nobody",
            "doc_count": 937180
          },
          {
            "key": "fashion",
            "doc_count": 921896
          },
          {
            "key": "tourism",
            "doc_count": 888435
          },
          {
            "key": "icon",
            "doc_count": 885558
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoors",
            "doc_count": 884011
          },
          {
            "key": "brown",
            "doc_count": 880305
          },
          {
            "key": "building",
            "doc_count": 875284
          },
          {
            "key": "city",
            "doc_count": 867419
          },
          {
            "key": "graphic",
            "doc_count": 864338
          },
          {
            "key": "one",
            "doc_count": 853655
          },
          {
            "key": "bright",
            "doc_count": 840991
          },
          {
            "key": "retro",
            "doc_count": 839586
          },
          {
            "key": "attractive",
            "doc_count": 834603
          },
          {
            "key": "hand",
            "doc_count": 833679
          },
          {
            "key": "health",
            "doc_count": 830408
          },
          {
            "key": "technology",
            "doc_count": 819292
          },
          {
            "key": "day",
            "doc_count": 817106
          },
          {
            "key": "wooden",
            "doc_count": 781709
          },
          {
            "key": "object",
            "doc_count": 777029
          },
          {
            "key": "traditional",
            "doc_count": 770831
          },
          {
            "key": "smiling",
            "doc_count": 769664
          },
          {
            "key": "fun",
            "doc_count": 768681
          },
          {
            "key": "plant",
            "doc_count": 767075
          },
          {
            "key": "pretty",
            "doc_count": 760217
          },
          {
            "key": "wood",
            "doc_count": 738521
          },
          {
            "key": "face",
            "doc_count": 725763
          },
          {
            "key": "smile",
            "doc_count": 716028
          },
          {
            "key": "spring",
            "doc_count": 713376
          },
          {
            "key": "season",
            "doc_count": 703530
          },
          {
            "key": "tree",
            "doc_count": 698072
          },
          {
            "key": "sea",
            "doc_count": 686473
          },
          {
            "key": "paper",
            "doc_count": 681462
          },
          {
            "key": "europe",
            "doc_count": 680923
          },
          {
            "key": "culture",
            "doc_count": 667678
          },
          {
            "key": "animal",
            "doc_count": 665415
          },
          {
            "key": "home",
            "doc_count": 659297
          }
        ]

[Edited to put the data into a code section]

Several do. They are interested in making sales through resellers, so they give them quite a lot of data. On some you can even see the artist names...

[Edited]: To be fair, alamy.com is not part of the database, not sure if they do provide such numbers.

Several do. They are interested in making sales through resellers, so they give them quite a lot of data. On some you can even see the artist names...

[Edited]: To be fair, alamy.com is not part of the database, not sure if they do provide such numbers.

What agencies? SS, IS, FT, Alamy, 123RF, pond5, or irrelevant minor tossers.

I'm making a huge effort to turn almost 3000 images from poor discoverability to good without spamming.[/url]

Even less worth it now:
http://discussion.alamy.com/index.php?/topic/7987-download-packs