Want to make it easier for buyers to find your work on search engines?

Descriptive text and links are two areas that can make a huge difference.

Descriptive text
Whether you’re editing your own site or your LicenseStream Gallery, your first step to search engine success is to write lots of descriptive content about your featured content. It’s critically important to write your descriptions in the language your clients use for searching. Chat with a few clients and simply ask them what terms they use when they search.

Make sure that your description contains enough detail that you’ll come up high in the search rankings if someone is doing a very specific search. For instance, you don’t want to stop at “Dog catching Frisbee” in your description. Keep going and include all relevant details such as “Vertical shot of dog catching Frisbee in Central Park on a summer morning.”

Links
How important are links to your pages/content to search engines? Put it this way: if you don’t have someone linking to your page, Google doesn’t even index it. As critically important as it is to have at least one link, the more links you have from relevant sites the higher your placement in the search rankings.

Search engines consider pages that are linked to from related sites are “higher quality” and they rank these pages accordingly. You will want to take care when looking for opportunities for others to link to you because “link exchanges” or direct link swaps are discounted and can even be penalized by the search algorithms.

Look for an upcoming post where we’ll explore responsible linking strategies in greater depth.

Note: If your potential clients are agencies who will be searching by detailed shoot information then the Keyword Generator in LicenseStream in the “Activate Content” process can be a big help. This keyword set is leveraged when visitors search your LicenseStream Gallery. You can also copy and paste these keywords and use them right on your site or blog – wherever you have that particular shot displayed.