Back in June I decided to come out of my cave here in Norway and attend Cepic.  While I was there I shot a little video interview with Carmen Pietraru (a Dreamstime admin) and asked her about how to best keyword and choose titles and descriptions for your images.  She shared lots of great info that is well worth listening to.

Valuable Keywording Tips from Dreamstime.com

And here is the blog post
http://blog.microstockgroup.com/keywording-secrets-from-dreamstime/

Thanks Tyler that was very informative. Any thing to help with rank is always helpful.

Thanks!

Cool video Thanks Tyler. BTW I like your haircut, lol.

Quote from: Dreamframer on August 30, 2010, 21:37
Cool video Thanks Tyler. BTW I like your haircut, lol.

thanks, but I think the term haircut should be used very loosely 

Not much new except the last 5 seconds when she had a (provoked) slip of the tongue telling that 25% of the buyers search by categories. I heard inside rumors like that from another site too. That might give a backlash to sites without categories.

Dreamstime? Time waster, no more and no less.

Quote from: Szakaly on August 30, 2010, 22:15
Dreamstime? Time waster, no more and no less.

How big is your port there Szakaly, and can you give us a link to it?

I just checked my DT statistics. This August was my BME, with RPI $1,42
Also my referral earnings there were BME.

Last year's August is my second BME. Lol, it looks like I sell most during summer slowdown.

I almost didn't watch because I thought I pretty much understood the way keyword/title/description worked at DT, but there were some surprises for me.  

One important factor that I didn't know is that having MORE keywords can hurt your search rank.  I always use every applicable keyword and it usually ends up being between 20 and 50.  I didn't know that having 50 could hurt your search position.  I don't think it was always that way.  Wonder when it changed?  Might explain why my sales there lately seem to be dropping...?

Great interview Tyler!  BTW, I was surprised that your English is perfect without any accent. Did you say you lived in the US at one time?

Quote from: lisafx on August 30, 2010, 23:48
I almost didn't watch because I thought I pretty much understood the way keyword/title/description worked at DT, but there were some surprises for me.  

One important factor that I didn't know is that having MORE keywords can hurt your search rank.  I always use every applicable keyword and it usually ends up being between 20 and 50.  I didn't know that having 50 could hurt your search position.  I don't think it was always that way.  Wonder when it changed?  Might explain why my sales there lately seem to be dropping...?

Great interview Tyler!  BTW, I was surprised that your English is perfect without any accent. Did you say you lived in the US at one time?

Yeah, I am actually Canadian but have lived in Norway for the last 6 years.  

I didn't know that too many keywords would hurt your rankings either.  I suppose I had heard that you should only have the words that are necessary but I hadn't ever heard a specific number on what was a 'good' amount.  I often end up having between 35-45 so I should probably try and trim down too.

I knew that too many keywords can hurt my ranking, but since I submit images to more than 10 websites, I didn't want to pay attention to write keywords for every site separately.

Quote from: Dreamframer on August 30, 2010, 23:21
I just checked my DT statistics. This August was my BME, with RPI $1,42
Also my referral earnings there were BME.

Last year's August is my second BME. Lol, it looks like I sell most during summer slowdown.

Did you mean return per download ?

Nice interview Leaf, and some interesting info. I decided to review some of my images at DT to see if making any changes made any difference to search placement and sales, however, when I went to edit, next to the keywords field there was this following message:

This image has been rightfully reported as having bad keywords and an editor approved the needed corrections. At this time you can add more keywords only through the key-mentoring system.

Everything is greyed out and I can't change anything, including titles, description and keywords. I went through two pages of images and they were all the same. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Come to think of it, did DT have some sort of system where contributors received reward for reporting keyword spam?

Quote from: qwerty on August 31, 2010, 09:05

Quote from: Dreamframer on August 30, 2010, 23:21
I just checked my DT statistics. This August was my BME, with RPI $1,42
Also my referral earnings there were BME.

Last year's August is my second BME. Lol, it looks like I sell most during summer slowdown.

Did you mean return per download ?

Yeah, return per download (RPD instead of RPI). Sorry for that.

Quote from: massman on August 31, 2010, 10:31
Nice interview Leaf, and some interesting info. I decided to review some of my images at DT to see if making any changes made any difference to search placement and sales, however, when I went to edit, next to the keywords field there was this following message:

This image has been rightfully reported as having bad keywords and an editor approved the needed corrections. At this time you can add more keywords only through the key-mentoring system.

Everything is greyed out and I can't change anything, including titles, description and keywords. I went through two pages of images and they were all the same. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Come to think of it, did DT have some sort of system where contributors received reward for reporting keyword spam?

I think if you edit some of your images now it will have some improvement, but you will have to wait for it, because I think your ranking depends on how many people buy your image after seeing it on the screen. If your image is seen many times, and bought very few times, you have to wait for this ratio to get better.
Maybe I'm wrong tho...

Quote from: Dreamframer on August 30, 2010, 22:18How big is your port there Szakaly, and can you give us a link to it?

Haha, Ivan, you're adopting my style ;-) - I don't even read posts of these new anonymous'es any more.

Quote from: lisafx on August 30, 2010, 23:48I didn't know that having 50 could hurt your search position.  I don't think it was always that way.  Wonder when it changed?  Might explain why my sales there lately seem to be dropping...?

Not exactly what she said. She said that if you want to rank high in one specific search, less but targeted keywords are better in the relevancy search. Of course, she said, if you want to turn up in more searches, more keywords are better. FYI: when buying on DT, I always turn the relevancy search off and I use downloads. Relevancy gives too many similars. With dowloads, the buyers before you did the hard work of sifting out the images with high impact.

Quote from: massman on August 31, 2010, 10:31Come to think of it, did DT have some sort of system where contributors received reward for reporting keyword spam?

You'll get 0.02$ if you suggest a number of missing keywords for an image, that's all. You have a month to correct a reported image. There are two options: either you neglected the comment, or the comment was too late. Sometimes, DT has very long lags on comments. Keymastering will cost you 0.4$.

Thanks Tyler- very informative. I guess i am going to have to work on keywording.Most of the oldtimers seem to get a least 30-50 keywords. i am lucky to come up with 10-15.
Smiling Jack

Quote from: Smiling Jack on August 31, 2010, 20:14
Thanks Tyler- very informative. I guess i am going to have to work on keywording.Most of the oldtimers seem to get a least 30-50 keywords. i am lucky to come up with 10-15.
Smiling Jack

well only having a few keywords might not be hurting you, as long as you hit the most important ones.

Same on IS.  Tough call.  If you only allow the buyer to find your image on a smaller set of terms, it is likely one will show up very strong.  If you take the position, as I do, that buyers want to use a lot of meta to find your image, the strength of any one might be diluted.

Quote from: massman on August 31, 2010, 10:31
Nice interview Leaf, and some interesting info. I decided to review some of my images at DT to see if making any changes made any difference to search placement and sales, however, when I went to edit, next to the keywords field there was this following message:

This image has been rightfully reported as having bad keywords and an editor approved the needed corrections. At this time you can add more keywords only through the key-mentoring system.

Everything is greyed out and I can't change anything, including titles, description and keywords. I went through two pages of images and they were all the same. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Come to think of it, did DT have some sort of system where contributors received reward for reporting keyword spam?

If you've disabled a certain percentage of your portfolio that will do that to your images as well.  Which I'm thinking that's probably what happened.  Just email support telling them you're not trying to quit just disabled some things.  From what I was told when I went through this earlier this year is that they do that to keep you from editing your keywords to get you and your port banned if you're trying to ditch dt before the 6 month wait period after your last upload.  Which sucks but can't change it.

Quote from: leaf on August 31, 2010, 07:10
Yeah, I actually Canadian but have lived in Norway for the last 6 years. 

Oh yeah, is it nice there? Toronto with it's heat and humidity and noise is getting to me...

Thanks for the entertaining and info packed interview!

Do more!
:-)