Correct Captions and Keywords

[Alan Robinson]

I recently have submitted and got accepted a few hundred images of Dog and Cat Breeds, however my captions and keywording needs a great deal of improvement.

I think I am over thinking and going overboard with my tags by trying to do a bulk copy and paste.

I have got to the stage of getting a breed image onto the first couple of pages but then find on the last pages of the search featuring all my other images.

Any guidance would be very helpful

[Alan Robinson]

Hi Guys,

Do the words in the caption title have to be highlighted as a supertag?

Many thanks

Alan

[Steve F]

Just now, Alan Robinson said:

Hi Guys,

Do the words in the caption title have to be highlighted as a supertag?

Many thanks

Alan

 

no.

[Steve F]

On 18/04/2024 at 11:02, Alan Robinson said:

I recently have submitted and got accepted a few hundred images of Dog and Cat Breeds, however my captions and keywording needs a great deal of improvement.

I think I am over thinking and going overboard with my tags by trying to do a bulk copy and paste.

I have got to the stage of getting a breed image onto the first couple of pages but then find on the last pages of the search featuring all my other images.

Any guidance would be very helpful

 

You are doing some common errors of newcomers to Alamy:

• Keyword spamming (too many keywords / tags)

You should be aware of CTR (click through rate). Your pictures will appear at a certain level (e.g. first page, 10th page... etc.) in searches by clients, depending on various factors. CTR and Sales are the only factors we know about for sure in the secret formula Alamy uses to set our search ranking. Your CTR rank (on your Dashboard) is a function of the number of times a client zooms (clicks on) one of your images versus the number of times your images appear in a client search, but are not zoomed.

CTR=Zooms/Views * 100

This is basically a long way of me saying, don't spam keywords. E.g. don't put sky, blue, clouds for every single outdoors picture you shoot. There is a tendency to try to put lots of keywords for your images to try to get them seen by clients. So they may well appear in searches, but if they're not zoomed by a client, your CTR rank will drop. Which means your images won't show as high up in client searches. You don't want your images to get buried in the 360 million images on Alamy. By all means, put a lot of keywords in for certain pictures if they're relevant. Captions and keywords are almost more important than the image itself because you can have the most amazing images ever, but if they're keyworded wrong, no one will ever see them.

 

Also include singular and plurals  of words if appropriate. Don't worry about moving the line to optimised (green) - we have collectively decided that this is not a good idea unless you really need that many keywords.

• Too short captions

Captions are searchable by clients. Your captions are far too short. Aside from that, clients will be reading captions on search pages by hovering over an image. If they're looking for e.g. a certain place and neither the place nor the country is mentioned in the caption, they will probably move swiftly on to one of the hundreds of other images available.

Include the Latin as well as the common name of plants, insects and the location (including the country). Some helpful links:

https://www.alamy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Captions-and-Tags-checklist.pdf

https://www.alamy.com/blog/tips-for-your-captions-from-the-sales-team

https://www.alamy.com/blog/captions-and-tags

 

Try to make use of all 150 letters available to you in the caption. Include British and American spellings, e.g. color and colour. You should include what you can see in the image and any extra wording to try to make an image more saleable, e.g.:

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/16942-images-sold-in-august-2023/?do=findComment&comment=344625

[Steve F]

Alan, I copy pasted my response above. You don't need the country if you're doing pet breed images. But do include the Latin name if possible and a longer description.

[Alan Robinson]

Thanks Steve,

Theres a lot to go through there and digest, and I will lengthen the captions as suggested

Many thanks

Alan

[Alan Robinson]

To start with I made every effort to move the line to green.

Thanks for your help

[Steve F]

10 minutes ago, Alan Robinson said:

To start with I made every effort to move the line to green.

Thanks for your help

 

No problem. Green is ok, but only if you're not including irrelevant keywords. e.g. I have 83 'optimised' images on sale and 5,288 images on sale with 'poor' discoverability. My sales are pretty good for the portfolio size. There's lot of threads on the Forum on discoverability, plenty to explore!

[Alan Robinson]

Hi Steve,

In dogs we specialise in breed standard show stance so probably 60% of images should indicate this somewhere.

Is this okay or will this have the effect of bringing different breeds together in the search?

Cheers

Alan

[Steve F]

5 minutes ago, Alan Robinson said:

Hi Steve,

In dogs we specialise in breed standard show stance so probably 60% of images should indicate this somewhere.

Is this okay or will this have the effect of bringing different breeds together in the search?

Cheers

Alan

 

Hi Alan,

Yes, you should include it if it's relevant. It's almost impossible to stop your images coming up in false searches, you can just reduce this by not including irrelevant keywords.

Steve

[NYCat]

I do suggest putting most important words in both the caption and as supertags. It can help the placement of your image. I congratulate you on getting those darn cats to hold still! I would use different words than you have in many cases. I don't know what you mean by "satup". I'd say simple and common expressions such as lying down or sitting, side view or front view. It looks like you have group tagged some images so kittens is in tag but not in image. Check that each image has very accurate tags that don't contradict each other. Good luck.

 

Paulette

Edited April 23 by NYCat

[Alan Robinson]

Hi Paulette,

 

Thank you for those important points, kind comments and your wishes, I will be starting to re-annotate all of my images tomorrow bearing all I have learned in mind, with hopefully more success.

 

Cheers

Alan