HOW TO IMPROVE DISCOVERABILITY?

[William James Warren]

Howdy, I'm William James Warren, an old warhorse selling stock for >60 yrs.  Globe, Black Star, Lensman, Westlight, Corbis, Getty Images, ScienceFaction, SuperStock.  Have recently rejoined Alamy, with >750 vintage images, many 5 figure earners, several 6 figure, all thoroughly key-worded by a full time pro key-worder!

 

I'm gratified by the 14 sales in the first 4 months, And yet am perplexed to find most classified as: Undiscoverable.  In a trillion image world, how does one become more Discoverable?

[Mr Standfast]

Hello William,

 

Nice pictures.

 

Have a search of the forum, plenty to see on discoverability, but the idea of high discoverability is a  Red Herring. The discoverability bar only relates to the volume of discoverable information.

 

Keywords and a relevent caption that covers who, what, why, where and when will do the heavy lifting.  Of course your mileage may vary..

 

James

 

 

Edited March 17, 2022 by Mr Standfast
clarity...

[Joseph Clemson]

Do not get worked up about the Discoverability bar, it means absolutely nothing to someone who is capable of captioning and keywording properly. It's only effect is to mislead unwary beginners, and some people who ought to know better, into adding spurious keywords and thereby gaining false positive returns in the Alamy search. This has a negative effect in the long term as it tends to reduce's one's CTR and therefore one's position in the search rankings.

 

I am reluctant to proffer advice to an old warhorse and/or a pro key-worder, but Alamy has it's own ways of working. A significant one is that the caption is heavily weighted in the search engine. Therefore, you might find it beneficial to redo some of your captions to include specifics about each image. Keeping the caption as a coherent sentence, Include key details that you may already have in the keywords: place (where relevant), species, Latin names etc. The combination of a detailed caption and well crafted keywords gives you the best chance of sales - though having good images does help too!

[Vincent Lowe]

Two of the images I looked at have 'Philippenes' in the caption - do you mean Philippines?

[Michael Ventura]

PLEASE Alamy fix this "discoverability" problem.  Contributors new to Alamy (and even some veterans) will flood their keywords (tags) with irrelevant words until they reach a "Good Discoverability" status.  This is bad for everyone... bad for the buyer, for Alamy and for the contributor.  Buyers get frustrated by seeing photos that don't pertain to their search at all, which could drive them elsewhere for their photo needs.