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Here is an introduction to SEO of your Symbiostock site. This is taken from the HELP section of your Symbiostock site (partly).
How to Succeed Selling Images Direct
Maintaining a website and making it succeed is a fairly ongoing job. It can be as much or as little as you want it to be. But there are some things you should take into consideration in promoting your images:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Most likely you are accustomed to a routine of embedding information into your images, then upon upload, the agency extracts this data and produces an image page. 6 or 7 agencies might have your same image with the same content! Your image competes with itself this way, and does not help your search rankings if your website share’s the same content as these other agencies.
While the automated upload routine is perfectly is perfectly possiblewith the Symbiostock system, it will not profit you very quickly.
Meaningful information is everything in the world of SEO. This tends to be a little bit of extra time/work which is well spent. When you upload images to your site, save them as drafts. Then follow them up by changing certain values. In order of priority:
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- Change the image title. Think of keywords or key phrases you know buyers will be searching. Put these toward the beginning of the title, as this is where they have the greatest weight.
- Change the “slug” / URL that will appear in the address bar. In wordpress, this appears below the title. Change before you publish. Generally if it matches the title, that will be helpful. You can also attempt to add contextual meaning by using related keywords, though its not certain how much this helps.
- Write a meaningful description, using your keywords. Use natural language, not keyword stuffing, but something that appeals to the search engine and to the reader. In fact, you may find it helpful to add more information regarding the image (and accompanying files). Make an attempt to bolden certain phrases you wish to stand out to both people and search results.
- Your keywording (taxonomy/tag) system is important, but probably not hugely important to SEO as this was one of the first things exploited in the early days of search engines. Still, adding relevant keywords and taking away the useless ones will increase the value of the page content.# Categories are also a taxonomy system like keywords. But groups of related images may be gauged by search engines as a way to estimate the subject they should fall under. For instance, if “Lock” is found in your title, a search engine would not know what sort of lock we are referring to unless the context is obvious. Lock of hair? Section of a water-way? Door lock? Wrestling move? If you want to score high in search, be sure context is obvious through any reasonable measure you can take. Taxonomy systems most likely have some relevance in putting your content in front of the right paying crowd.
Content and links toward the top of your page have most value. Content at the bottom (toward the footer) has less value.
Symbiostock will continue to be developed using markup that is relevant to machines, such as microformats/microdata, and will always attempt to be on the leading edge of SEO as it gets perfected. This will give you a huge advantage in getting found in places beyond just Google, but you can only increase this advantage by putting the work mentioned above into your content.
On that note, please ignore most paid search presence unless it is directly related to microstock and has proven results. Facebook and Google paid searches (in my opinion) will unlikely pay for themselves in this field.
Your Network Presence
Being a part of the Symbiostock network benefits more than just humanbrowsing! Its valuable backlinking system. It quickens your search engine presence with new content. What happens on your friend’s site will affect yours, and the other way around. As networks mature and their sites increase in age and content value, you will find your team efforts effect everyone and yourself to a large degree. Daily sales should be the expected norm after a year or so.
Symbiostock will not be developed around human stupidity! If any exploitative or greedy activity happens in networks (things too many to mention) this will have to be policed by your own human discretion. Policing and exploit suppression will not be built into the code. Your network is based on trust. Adding experienced professionals to your network who you intend to cooperate with is the smart way to go. Indiscriminately adding people just to promote – will either not benefit you or rob benefits.
Avoid adding content which will flag you (and your network associates!) in a content area which is blocked or filtered!
Symbiostock Goals
Symbiostock’s main goal is to be a strong network. Thoughtfully created content, a strong SEO regimen, and a prolific networking system will hopefully make Symbiostock a well recognized and trusted network.
While the system is made to promote licensed content, its main objective is to bring customers to artists and build professional relationships.
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