Fine Art America - Image Descriptions and Tags
For this blog post I am indebted to Nadine and Bob Johnston from FAA who have written extensively about how to promote your work both on FAA and in the wider community. You can find their FAA site here.They also produce a weekly online paper, Artists News which you can read here. I recommend subscribing to it as it is a great source of inspiration, seeing the work of other creative artists on FAA!
Descriptions
It is important to include full descriptions with your images when you up load them. Bob recommends at least 20 lines (as shown on the FAA page for your image). This is not that difficult to do and let me share with you what I have learned from others.
You should try to include some, if not all of the following information:
- Your name
- A full description of your image and its context
- The names of objects in your image
- Predominant colours
- Where the image was taken
- How you created or photographed the image
Try to make the first sentence catchy or provocative (in a nice way) so that you engage the attention of your reader and draw them into your description. Perhaps something amusing. The more you engage with them the more likely they are to want to make a purchase.
This is all important for SEO but in addition, Bob points out, that if you do not take up this space for your promotion, FAA inserts its own content when people are searching for you, which promotes FAA instead of you.
If you provide this information, this provides both the FAA algorithm and external search engines with more data on which to index your image and make you more findable. Ultimately more views lead to more sales!
A great tip from Bob if you are short of content is to visit Wikipedia and look up your topic there and use some of their material to complete your description.
Tags
Once you have completed your description, you can turn your attention to your tags. These are also important for search, particularly in FAA.
As you can start to assemble your tags from the "key words" in your description, you will understand it makes sense to do the description first. You are allowed a set number of spaces and one way to make the most of this is to separate your tags by commas but do not include any additional spaces - see below:
blue,green,red,bridge,sky,sun,london
If you are struggling to find keywords which are relevant there is a great free tool you can use to make this easier - Thanks again Bob!!!
Microstock have a keyword Generation Tool which is quick and simple to use. Simply input your search terms and specify any terms you want to exclude. Tell the tool how many sample images you want it to show you, specify language and whether the images should be photographs, illustrations or vectors. Press Submit
The tool will show you images similar to your own and you simply have to select those which most resemble your own image. Then press submit again. The tool will then generate a list of keywords from these images which you can select and put into a box on the screen which then you can copy and paste into your FAA tags list. Job done!
It is worth being thorough when you upload your images and get all this right as it pays off in the long term by passively helping your images to be found by prospective customers.
My thanks again to Nadine and Bob for their great comments and contribution to this post.
Question of the Day: What else would you include in your Descriptions to make them more appealing to your potential customers?
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