Travel Photography | The Importance of Keywords

© 2007 Wazari Wazir | Taman Negara | Malaysia National Park | Batek People

This is a picture of Batek people, one of Malaysia’s  aboriginal groups, some people call them “Orang Asli”. I took this picture at the riverbank of Sungai Tembeling, National Park in Pahang. They are “nomadic”, moving from one place to another. I’m not going to write about Batek People here, or to tell you the history of Batek People settlement here in Malaysia but the purpose of this post is about “Keywords”. This blog will concentrate more on photography and nothing else. If you like to know about Batek people I,m very sure you can do your own research, so lets get back to “Keywords”.

Actually this picture has been bought by one of publisher that produce a travel photography book just recently, they bought the original one, I mean with no editing and in colors, so I’m sharing a black and white picture here. I will not going to tell you how much I charge for this picture but more  importantly is how to make your picture get notice by search engine, like Google for an example.

The answer lies in key wording, some photographers especially newbie doesn’t care much about keywords or to put a caption to their picture or as simple as “tagging” their pictures. We must understand that Google can’t see your picture, but Google can READ, I mean if you upload your masterpiece picture on the internet and just put a title like DSC888, but your picture is about a beautiful sunset shot, do you think Google can find your picture if someone search and type “Sunset” and suddenly your picture pop up in the search engine? No, that won’t happen, Google doesn’t know that you have a Sunset picture, Google know that you just upload DSC888 picture.

Next time when you upload your picture and hope that Google will find it, please make sure to  put a little bit of information about your picture, a full caption will be great, like when, why, where, how and who is in the picture, all this information will make your picture visible to the Google engine. Easy for you and easy for someone who wanted to find certain type of a picture. My picture above may not be the best picture of “Batek People” in Malaysia , maybe there are thousands of a better picturse out there but Google or the Editor of the book publisher that was looking for this type of a picture can’t “locate” it because someone who may have a great picture than mine doesn’t put any information about the picture on the internet or doesn’t put any caption about the picture.

A simple caption will do and off course there are other factor that will determine whether your picture can be found or not in the internet but without any words, your picture is “invisible” from Google search engine. A picture like mine above is about  life, portrait, human interest, poverty, hope, poor, love, National Park, people, Malaysia, you can tag this picture with that kind of keywords, a keywords that was related with the subject, just don’t put Madonna or Angelina Jolie as one of your “Tag”, that will be misleading and surprise people when they wanted to search for Angelina Jolie and suddenly this kind of  picture appear.

I think by now you understand, the importance of keywords, you can start put a keywords or “Tagging” in Lightroom or in Bridge in Photoshop, you can also Automate or batch processing your keywords if you have a lot of a pictures under same category, it is time consuming but believe me, it is worth the effort. Believe me, if you have a great picture with  keywords or caption, don’t be surprise if you will get an email from strangers who wanted to buy your picture, isn’t that sound great.

Tips from me, if you have a picture with lot’s of view, in flickr for an example but doesn’t have any keywords or just simple keywords, try to add more keywords or write a little bit longer captions about that particular photographs and believe me, your picture will have a better chance to be on top of Google ranking. That’s the power of keywords, it may not make your rich but sometimes it pays the bill.

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