MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Selling Stock Direct => Topic started by: rimglow on October 28, 2012, 18:02
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Here's a weird question. When keywording the photos that you sell on your personal website, do you include your name? How would that affect Google searches?
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I don’t have direct selling type of my portfolio websites, I only have "traffic sender" type of portfolio websites. When I keyword my photos and graphics on these websites of mine I use my real name as well as nickname. Mostly due copyright reasons, to let my visitors know the proper copyright of my images.
Such as example:
http://www.jareso.com/photo/316/strbske-pleso-in-high-tatras-at-summer/ (http://www.jareso.com/photo/316/strbske-pleso-in-high-tatras-at-summer/)
And there is:
Copyright Note: © jareso (Boris Jaroscak) | www.jareso.com (http://www.jareso.com)
In my case my name and nickname affects traffic coming from search engines in minimal way. Just very few people actually search my real name (Boris Jaroscak) or my nickname (jareso) in search engines. And when they do search for it, they are usually not images buyers at all.
Such as they are my old classmates, etc.
People just looking for way how to contact me for example.
If you want to include your name or nickname because you believe it will help your sales I will probably disappoint you. It doesn’t work in most cases.
It works/may work for top sellers whose names and nicknames are wide known, but not for 98% of contributors.
Most of buyers usually don’t leave the agency where they are used to buy images. They will simply not put your username, nickname or real name to search engine(s) just to find other sources where your images might be available for purchase. It may happen sometimes, but not so often as you might imagine. Buyer finding you by your name, first finding your images in some stock agency and than going and searching for your name in search engine is very unlike scenario.
I know these statistics also from other projects (not personal portfolio websites) that I run. Simply, searches for user names are rare and if there are searches for user names these are in most cases done by authors searching for themselves not by buyers looking for authors!
Best way to attract buyers are titles and descriptions describing your images in detail. I personally prefer long "story like" descriptions of my images.
Such as:
http://www.jareso.com/photo/283/rare-manor-house-in-pribylina/ (http://www.jareso.com/photo/283/rare-manor-house-in-pribylina/)
http://www.jareso.com/photo/269/famous-orava-castle-slovakia/ (http://www.jareso.com/photo/269/famous-orava-castle-slovakia/)
Long descriptions bring traffic from search engines. Of course most of traffic are people that are not image buyers (for now), they can be just searching for example for some facts about Kremnica town in Slovakia and they can be brought to preview page of my image:
http://www.jareso.com/photo/324/church-and-fountain-in-kremnica/ (http://www.jareso.com/photo/324/church-and-fountain-in-kremnica/)
But the more visitors you get, the bigger will be your chances for finding some buyer.
It is simple game of numbers, nothing more!
When you will have some traffic you will soon or later bump into some buyer in some time-frame.
And when you multiply amount of that traffic 2x times, in same time-frame, your count of buyers will raise 2x times.
If 4x times, than 4x times. And so on, and so on.
It is simple as that!
Of course there may be some fluctuations, depending on various circumstances, such as traffic quality, etc.
But overall, it works like that.
My personal portfolio websites are also human translated to many languages as part of my little marketing experiment with my portfolio websites. ;)
Btw. I am always looking for more translators, if anyone wants to make some $$.
http://www.microstockgroup.com/ranting-general-stock/%28paid%29-looking-for-translators-for-my-personal-stock-photo-website/msg251966/
(http://www.microstockgroup.com/ranting-general-stock/%28paid%29-looking-for-translators-for-my-personal-stock-photo-website/msg251966/)
Such as I have English version:
http://www.jareso.com (http://www.jareso.com)
And than version for:
1.) (jareso.sk) Slovenská republika (http://www.jareso.sk)
2.) (jareso.cz) Česká republika (http://www.jareso.cz)
3.) (jareso.pl) Polska (http://www.jareso.pl)
4.) (jareso.it) Italia (http://www.jareso.it)
5.) (jareso.se) Sverige (http://www.jareso.se)
6.) (jareso.ro) România (http://www.jareso.ro)
7.) (jareso.dk) Danmark (http://www.jareso.dk)
8.) (jareso.de) Deutschland (http://www.jareso.de)
9.) (jareso.gr) Ελλάδα (http://www.jareso.gr)
10.) (jareso.be) België (http://www.jareso.be)
11.) (jareso.fr) France (http://www.jareso.fr)
12.) (jareso.es) Espańa (http://www.jareso.es)
13.) (jareso.hu) Magyarország (http://www.jareso.hu)
14.) (jareso.bg) Република България (http://www.jareso.bg)
And more are on the way. ;)
My personal portfolio websites are far from fully translated. Parts that are not translated are temporally running in English.
My aim is to have it 100% human translated, including, titles, descriptions, keywords of my images.
But why I mention it?
Because human translation of portfolio website is by far the easiest and most powerful way how to multiply traffic.
Depending on count of languages and respective language popularity, it can multiply traffic of your websites many times!
So when thinking about creating of your portfolio website don’t forget about translations!
The amount of traffic that can be brought from search engines in this way is usually very underestimated!
As I told my portfolio websites are still not fully translated. Especially most of titles, descriptions and keywords still need translation.
For now my jareso.(xy) portfolio websites receive about 1000 unique human visitors a day, various people that visit my portfolio.
I mean 1000 unique human visitors a day is counted for all jareso.(xy) domains collectively.
So about 30 000 uniques a month for all jareso.(xy) domains (language versions of my portfolio websites).
Considering the count of jareso.(xy) domains 30 000 uniques a month for all of them collectively is not that much.
I plan to get it to higher numbers.
Also not all jareso.(xy) domains are fully translated so there is much more space for traffic rising.
I mean domains where almost everything is fully translated to respective language bring the most of the traffic.
Such as on:
(Also most of titles, descriptions and keywords are in respective language there. Thus these attract various searches.)
http://www.jareso.cz (http://www.jareso.cz)
http://www.jareso.sk (http://www.jareso.sk)
http://www.jareso.com (http://www.jareso.com)
On the other side, those jareso.(xy) domains where there are minimum of translated parts bring much less traffic.
And thus there is a space to boost traffic on them once when their content will be fully translated.
Also, I have done minimum in field of promotion of most of my jareso.(xy) domains. So there is space for traffic rising for most of them also in this field.
So. I am not sure if this answered your initial question.
But this is my opinion to the topic.
Want traffic boost? Translate, translate, translate!
It is game of numbers. With enough traffic on your website(s) you will (soon or later) meet some buyers.
(Pssst ... it is secret, don't tell anyone! :o ;D)
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Wow! Thanks for the info.