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Author Topic: New blog post about my site, and Symbiostock  (Read 16165 times)

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« on: June 06, 2013, 11:29 »
0
Hello

I just posted a new blog post.

http://glennspecht.com/wp/i-opened-my-own-stock-image-store/

Please link to, reply, ping back, track back and all the other backs to the post and I will do the same... even though I don't know what most of those things mean... :)  ::)

This is what we have to do ( I think) in order to promote the network and our sites... talk about it outside of this forum.


Ron

« Reply #1 on: June 06, 2013, 11:33 »
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Hi there, I am meaning to write a blog entry as well, but I need to upload my portfolio first before going full blown promoting. I dont want buyers to come over and only find a couple of hundred images  :)

But I will definitely use my site to link to, reply, ping back, track back and all the other backs to the post as much as I can !

jareso

  • Boris Jaroscak
« Reply #2 on: June 06, 2013, 13:13 »
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I added link to your website to links section of my personal website:
http://www.jareso.com/links/

Hope this helps you a little. ;)

« Reply #3 on: June 06, 2013, 13:16 »
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Hi glenn,

Message posted !   ;)

I will put a link to your post for SEO

« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2013, 13:24 »
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I added link to your website to links section of my personal website:
http://www.jareso.com/links/

Hope this helps you a little. ;)


Thanks I appreciate the links

I think the days of  just having pages of links are fast fading from what I understand ( again please correct me if I am wrong).  Putting a response to my blog on my site linked back to your site has a "larger" value then a straight link.

If you mention my post ( with a link) in a post you make on your site, or on another site we both get credit ( I think this is called something like google juice)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_juice

Glenn

« Reply #5 on: June 06, 2013, 16:15 »
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.......
Please link to, reply, ping back, track back and all the other backs to the post and I will do the same... even though I don't know what most of those things mean... :)  ::)

This is what we have to do ( I think) in order to promote the network and our sites... talk about it outside of this forum.


check http://cascoly.com/symbio/testsymbio.asp  for some examples of what we can do with the images & keywords csv

eg, you can get a list of keywords across sites, and then jump to a search on various sites

the keyword list will also be handy for finding misspellings and other tagging problems

suggestions for other types of lists or searches are welcome

« Reply #6 on: June 06, 2013, 16:31 »
0
.......
Please link to, reply, ping back, track back and all the other backs to the post and I will do the same... even though I don't know what most of those things mean... :)  ::)

This is what we have to do ( I think) in order to promote the network and our sites... talk about it outside of this forum.


check http://cascoly.com/symbio/testsymbio.asp  for some examples of what we can do with the images & keywords csv

eg, you can get a list of keywords across sites, and then jump to a search on various sites

the keyword list will also be handy for finding misspellings and other tagging problems

suggestions for other types of lists or searches are welcome


Looks promising!

BUT: I tried adding my SY site to the database. I got a tsunami of error (?) messages for a response. I find now 3 of my images on the "nature" and "blue" pages but nowhere else.

« Reply #7 on: June 06, 2013, 17:03 »
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BUT: I tried adding my SY site to the database. I got a tsunami of error (?) messages for a response. I find now 3 of my images on the "nature" and "blue" pages but nowhere else.

thanks -- most of the output you see is for debugging, not necessarily errors - turns out people are putting all sorts of characters in the descriptions, etc so this helps when an error does occur

if you post a copy of the actual error message at the bottom of the screen it will help me track it.

meanwhile, I've fixed the problems you encountered and your images & keywords are now updated
« Last Edit: June 06, 2013, 18:04 by cascoly »

« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2013, 21:03 »
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BUT: I tried adding my SY site to the database. I got a tsunami of error (?) messages for a response. I find now 3 of my images on the "nature" and "blue" pages but nowhere else.


thanks -- most of the output you see is for debugging, not necessarily errors - turns out people are putting all sorts of characters in the descriptions, etc so this helps when an error does occur

if you post a copy of the actual error message at the bottom of the screen it will help me track it.

meanwhile, I've fixed the problems you encountered and your images & keywords are now updated


Luckily I still had one browser tab with messages open. Here's the last part:

description= "Street in San José, capital of Costa Rica. *** Exclusive on www.ImagoBorealis.com *** *** For editorial use only! *** width= "Street in San José, capital of Costa Rica. *** Exclusive on www.ImagoBorealis.com *** *** For editorial use only! ***

Provider error '80020005'

Type mismatch.

/symbio/read-images.asp, line 128

I believe I am guilty of "putting all sorts of characters in the descriptions"  ;D. But the capital of Costa Rica is San Jos (with that funny fly-poop-thingy on top of the last e  ;)). There's no way around it...

« Reply #9 on: June 06, 2013, 21:50 »
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thanks for the details

not a problem  - don't worry about what you put in the description (several of my zipped collections are proving to be the most complicated!)-- I just need to work thru the possibilities that people come up with!  CSV is not a forgiving format, so it just takes a few more steps.  that's what beta is for.

I just discovered today that some records, rather than being 1 or 2 lines in length can be up to 20 or more!

« Reply #10 on: June 07, 2013, 00:51 »
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thanks for the details

not a problem  - don't worry about what you put in the description (several of my zipped collections are proving to be the most complicated!)-- I just need to work thru the possibilities that people come up with!  CSV is not a forgiving format, so it just takes a few more steps.  that's what beta is for.

I just discovered today that some records, rather than being 1 or 2 lines in length can be up to 20 or more!

That sounds messy. I hope you'll master the CSVs from our SY sites eventually and create a hub site that rocks. I am looking forward to it. - Best of luck!

« Reply #11 on: June 07, 2013, 04:09 »
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I made this:

http://symbiostock.info

Now there is only self-expanding list of Symbiostock sites. Every hour it takes one site from list, gets its symbiocard, images info, and looks for next network sites. Only one found site is added per hour.
« Last Edit: June 07, 2013, 04:12 by ajt »

Ron

« Reply #12 on: June 07, 2013, 04:29 »
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That looks useful, thanks. This weekend I am going to dedicate to uploading my entire portfolio to my site.  But it needs to be done in a controlled matter as the site displays the images in uploaded order. So if I upload my new stuff now, and my older stuff later, my older work sits up front. But once its done,  I can link too.

Probably I will be out tomorrow morning at sunrise to shoot a few images in Bray, Ireland at Bray's Head. Early rise, around 3am, so I might take a big nap when getting back before getting to work on my site.

I love photography !!

« Reply #13 on: June 07, 2013, 09:39 »
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That looks useful, thanks. This weekend I am going to dedicate to uploading my entire portfolio to my site. 

Go slow with the uploads.... once processed it is a bit of a pain to change things...not impossible but difficult.

For SEO reasons you may want to rework the titles of your images so that they are different then on stock sites.


Ron

« Reply #14 on: June 07, 2013, 09:54 »
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Thats a lot of work, I dont think I want to do that. Changing 800+ titles is too much. I appreciate the heads up though.

steheap

  • Author of best selling "Get Started in Stock"

« Reply #15 on: June 07, 2013, 11:35 »
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Quote
Thats a lot of work, I dont think I want to do that. Changing 800+ titles is too much.

Just a comment from someone who is changing all the descriptions and adding "bold" highlights on the key concepts in the title. It is a lot of work (and I'm only at 340 images so far on the new site), but this is the ONLY way that a buyer will find you (in my view) - hence the work involved in getting a well keyworded and described image is critical to making a success. Otherwise it becomes a vanity site that only you go to.

Isn't the idea of this to get the max leads from Google to our sites?

Steve

« Reply #16 on: June 07, 2013, 12:12 »
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Quote
Thats a lot of work, I dont think I want to do that. Changing 800+ titles is too much.

Just a comment from someone who is changing all the descriptions and adding "bold" highlights on the key concepts in the title. It is a lot of work (and I'm only at 340 images so far on the new site), but this is the ONLY way that a buyer will find you (in my view) - hence the work involved in getting a well keyworded and described image is critical to making a success. Otherwise it becomes a vanity site that only you go to.

Isn't the idea of this to get the max leads from Google to our sites?

Steve

Exactly. I really hate doing all that work. Even more so when current sales (zilch) don't really justify it. BUT when we want our SY sites becoming a success we have to go that extra mile. Changing titles/descriptions to be different from what is out at the micros has been discussed earlier. One suggestion to save work was to do all that work with just a few images per (main) category/niche. This way these images would work as "beacons" driving buyers to your site (hopefully in droves  ;D).

For me it is a really slow process. I have 100 images online now and I hope by end of the summer it will be 1000. But hey, Rome wasn't built over night either!  ;D - I go for it because I believe SY will be a game changer in the micro stock/ image licensing world  8).

« Reply #17 on: June 07, 2013, 12:15 »
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I have learned such a lot since I first started that I am re-editing many of my old images as well - then creating some new ones just for a break from that.

« Reply #18 on: June 07, 2013, 12:29 »
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I didn't know need to edit the title and description until I read this post, am I too late to edit it now? most of my images already indexed by google.

Ron

« Reply #19 on: June 07, 2013, 13:33 »
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What happens if the title is the same as on the micros? I am changing some titles, as some images do not have titles, my older ones, and then the description is taken as title, which I then amend. So there are slight differences. What about new work? That work is submitted at the same time to all agencies as my own work? So the indexing happens at the same time. Would it be better to submit work to my own site first and then to the agencies?

Anyhoo, I will change titles then, if it makes that much difference.

Thanks for convincing me. I guess, changing titles is ok considering I am submitting to Alamy where the editing is a horror show compared to this  ;D

« Reply #20 on: June 07, 2013, 13:41 »
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Isn't the idea of this to get the max leads from Google to our sites?

Steve

IMHO  Yes and No.

If you live by the google you die by the google... if google decides it doesn't like Symbiostock for some reason... we are....

So the other goal should be that once we have a client in the network, they will return to the network before going anywhere else.

Google gets them in, we work hard to keep them coming back.

« Reply #21 on: June 07, 2013, 17:13 »
0
Quote
Thats a lot of work, I dont think I want to do that. Changing 800+ titles is too much.

Just a comment from someone who is changing all the descriptions and adding "bold" highlights on the key concepts in the title. It is a lot of work (and I'm only at 340 images so far on the new site), but this is the ONLY way that a buyer will find you (in my view) - hence the work involved in getting a well keyworded and described image is critical to making a success. Otherwise it becomes a vanity site that only you go to.

Isn't the idea of this to get the max leads from Google to our sites?

Steve

maybe -- not clear that google doesn't already discount bold -- and if they search for similar images, the microsites are still going to show up first no matter what your description says

« Reply #22 on: June 07, 2013, 17:26 »
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What happens if the title is the same as on the micros? I am changing some titles, as some images do not have titles, my older ones, and then the description is taken as title, which I then amend. So there are slight differences. What about new work? That work is submitted at the same time to all agencies as my own work? So the indexing happens at the same time. Would it be better to submit work to my own site first and then to the agencies?

Anyhoo, I will change titles then, if it makes that much difference.
 


I don't know that anyone has actually SHOWN it is effective -- we have some anecdotal evidence of it happening.  I've gotten 1900 pages indexed on google for my site and about 200 images indexed out of 1500 images.  no  one's reported getting more than 20% of their images indexed yet

otoh, my images that I find online -- like my 'moose walking' appear multiple times from different agencies, even though the captions, etc are identical

one positive note -- warmpicture had a pretty good record of getting images listed in the first few rows of images, beating out agency images that had been online longer.

another factor to consider -- unlike previous sites like smugmug, sym creates a unique, detailed page for each image, and this may be why there's been such success in getting sites indexed on google.

so, for me, I've got thousands more images to upload before I do much tuning on individual images;  if people keep reporting their progress here we'll all benefit. 

another place to enter your image info is the combined image & keyword db's l've set up at http://cascoly.com/symbio/testsymbio.asp  once I get it debugged and have more interactive searching i'll starting promoting it more, but alrerady you can get the images, categories and other information for various sites

« Reply #23 on: June 07, 2013, 17:32 »
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I made this:

http://symbiostock.info

Now there is only self-expanding list of Symbiostock sites. Every hour it takes one site from list, gets its symbiocard, images info, and looks for next network sites. Only one found site is added per hour.


what do you plan to do from here??  are you doing anything with the images & keyword info?  we should coordinate so we don't duplicate too many efforts

if anyone wants to use the combined image and keyword tables i'm building I can send the table info so you can write you own db queries

« Reply #24 on: June 07, 2013, 18:33 »
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What happens if the title is the same as on the micros? I am changing some titles, as some images do not have titles, my older ones, and then the description is taken as title, which I then amend. So there are slight differences. What about new work? That work is submitted at the same time to all agencies as my own work? So the indexing happens at the same time. Would it be better to submit work to my own site first and then to the agencies?

Anyhoo, I will change titles then, if it makes that much difference.

Thanks for convincing me. I guess, changing titles is ok considering I am submitting to Alamy where the editing is a horror show compared to this  ;D

Here is what Leo wrote about this in the Symbiostock Help section:

Quote
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Most likely you are accustomed to a routine of embedding information into your images, then upon upload, the agency extracts this data and produces an image page. 6 or 7 agencies might have your same image with the same content! Your image competes with itself this way, and does not help your search rankings if your website share's the same content as these other agencies.

While the automated upload routine is perfectly is perfectly possible with the Symbiostock system, it will not profit you very quickly. Meaningful information is everything in the world of SEO. This tends to be a little bit of extra time/work which is well spent. When you upload images to your site, save them as drafts. Then follow them up by changing certain values. In order of priority:

    Change the image title. Think of keywords or key phrases you know buyers will be searching. Put these toward the beginning of the title, as this is where they have the greatest weight.
    Change the "slug" / URL that will appear in the address bar. In wordpress, this appears below the title. Change before you publish. Generally if it matches the title, that will be helpful. You can also attempt to add contextual meaning by using related keywords, though its not certain how much this helps.
    Write a meaningful description, using your keywords. Use natural language, not keyword stuffing, but something that appeals to the search engine and to the reader. In fact, you may find it helpful to add more information regarding the image (and accompanying files). Make an attempt to bolden certain phrases you wish to stand out to both people and search results.
    Your keywording (taxonomy/tag) system is important, but probably not hugely important to SEO as this was one of the first things exploited in the early days of search engines. Still, adding relevant keywords and taking away the useless ones will increase the value of the page content.
    Categories are also a taxonomy system like keywords. But groups of related images may be gauged by search engines as a way to estimate the subject they should fall under. For instance, if "Lock" is found in your title, a search engine would not know what sort of lock we are referring to unless the context is obvious. Lock of hair? Section of a water-way? Door lock? Wrestling move? If you want to score high in search, be sure context is obvious through any reasonable measure you can take. Taxonomy systems most likely have some relevance in putting your content in front of the right paying crowd.

Content and links toward the top of your page have most value. Content at the bottom (toward the footer) has less value.

Symbiostock will continue to be developed using markup that is relevant to machines, such as microformats/microdata, and will always attempt to be on the leading edge of SEO as it gets perfected. This will give you a huge advantage in getting found in places beyond just Google, but you can only increase this advantage by putting the work mentioned above into your content.

On that note, please ignore most paid search presence unless it is directly related to microstock and has proven results. Facebook and Google paid searches (in my opinion) will unlikely pay for themselves in this field.

I think that's good advise. The few reports I was reading here about images showing up on google were promising. Is that good enough to rank #1? I don't know and I doubt it but at least I'll try and see.



 

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