Stock House Thursday: Alamy.com
Following up last week’s analysis of 123rf, I will now take an in depth look at how Alamy handles keywords.
First, a quick introduction to how I am going about this process:
I am not choosing the stock houses in any particular order other than I plan on starting with some of the big players first, as they have a lot more contributors, and after all, I would like this information to be useful to somebody.
For the record, these aren’t really “reviews,” in that they will have no thumbs up or down at the end. This is not intended to be a recommendation or otherwise about any of the stock houses I will analyze. Most of the elements I’m looking at don’t necessarily have an objective right or wrong answer. The only thing that really matters is that the photographer know the correct way to keyword for the individual stock house.
I hope to provide an in depth look at how stock houses deal with keywords, and how their search engine works in order to give their contributors a complete set of requirements so that they can keyword their images get maximum exposure at the site.
If you haven’t read my introductory post for this series, on the various ways stock houses differ in their keyword standards, you probably should read 10 Ways that Stock Houses can be different in their Keywording Standards first.
Here are the variables I analyzed:
- Plurals
- Synonyms
- Variant Spellings
- Verb Forms
- Other Forms of the Word
- Phrases
- Punctuation
- Prepositions
- Capitalization
- Abbreviations
- Tab Delimiters
- Keyword Weight
- Number of Keywords Allowed
- Faceted Search
Plurals: I did searches looking for dog & dogs, boy & boys, tureen & tureens, child & children, man & men, knife & knives, box & boxes, couch & couches, baby & babies, and ibex & ibexes.
- Result: Alamy returned the different results for each set of keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include the plural form of any of your keywords.
Synonyms: I did searches looking for sofa & couch, child & kid, frustration & aggravation, boy & male child, happy & joy, mad & angry, daffodil & narcissus, boy & lad, elevator & lift, and apartment & flat.
- Result: Alamy returned different results for each set of keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all appropriate synonyms for your keywords.
Variant Spellings: I did searches looking for closeup, close-up & close up, makeup, make-up & make up, snowman, snow-man & snow man, tabouli, tabbouleh & tabouleh, Hanukah, Hanukkah & Chanukah, airplane & aeroplane, and industrialization & industrialisation.
- Result: Alamy returned different results for each set of keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all appropriate variant spellings for your keywords.
Verb Forms: I did searches looking for frustrating, frustrated, frustrate & frustrates, baking, baked, bake & bakes, running, run, runs, & ran, standing, stand, stands & stood, and sleeping, sleep, sleeps & slept.
- Result: Alamy returned the different results for every form of each verb.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all forms of any verbs.
Other Forms of the Word: I did searches looking for frustrating, frustratingly & frustration, amazing & amazement, happy & happiness, angry & anger, and joy, joyful, joyfulness & joyous.
- Result: Alamy returned different results for every form of each word.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all forms of any word.
Phrases: I did searches looking for “wooden chair”, wooden chair, wooden + chair, wooden and chair, “chair wooden”, chair wooden, chair + wooden, chair and wooden. I did similar permutations of searches for Scottish terrier, Washington DC, Mount Ranier, and chef’s hat.
- Result: Alamy treats phrases in quotes differently from all other combinations of words.
- Wooden chair” returned 2,163 images,
- “Chair wooden” returned 677 images,
- All other combinations of the words (wooden chair, wooden + chair, wooden and chair, chair wooden, chair + wooden, chair and wooden) all returned 11,936 images
- If a buyer searches with quotes, Alamy looks within your keywords for the phrase in order. If you have wooden, chair, table in your keywords in that order, you image will be found if the buyer searches for “wooden chair,” but not if they search for “wooden table”
- Prognosis: It is important that you do put the words of important phrases together in your keywords. Alamy does not alphabetize or reorder your words, so you are in control of how phrases can be keyworded. Alamy also allows you to put brackets around a phrase, like [wooden chair] this is another way to keep words in a phrase together and imply a relationship. Alamy also allows you to put quotes around a phrase, such as “wooden chair”, and this will rank this image high for a search for wooden chair, but will not return this image for a searches for either chair or wooden alone.
Prepostitions: I did various searches with prepostions; salt and pepper shaker & salt pepper; waiting, waiting for, waiting in line & waiting line.
- Result: Alamy appears to leave prepostions upon upload. Yet they appear to ignore prepositions when included in the search
- Prognosis: It appears that you do not need to include prepositions in any of your keyword phrases, but I’m not positive about this.
Punctuation: I did various searches with periods; NY & N.Y., Washington DC & Washington D.C., with commas; chair, wooden, and Washington, DC, with hyphens; closeup, close-up & close up, makeup, make-up & make up, and apostrophes; chef’s hat and baker’s dozen.
- Result: Commas and apostrophes are completely ignored in searches
- Prognosis: You do not need to include commas or apostrophes in any of your keywords,
- Result: Periods are ignored in search if they are at the end of the word, but treated as a space if in the middle of a word.
- Prognosis: You do not need to include periods at the end of a word, such as Mt or St, but you do need to if in the middle of a word, such as D.C. or N.Y.
- Result: Hyphens are treated as hyphens in search.
- Prognosis: You do need to include hyphenated version for any of your keywords that have one.
Capitalization:
- Prognosis: Capitalization does not matter at all. Alamy ignores capitalization when searching.
Abbreviations: I did searches for New York & NY, and apartment & apt.
- Result: Alamy returned different results for each set of keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all common abbreviations for your keywords.
Tab Delimiter:
- Prognosis: Alamy makes it very clear that all you need is a space between your keywords, though a comma or semicolon is fine, but uses up your precious character limits
Keyword Weight: This can be based upon order of keywords (first being more important) or number of keywords (less keywords means each is more important)
Here is what Alamy states on their website:
Proximity
- Tells the search engine that words adjacent to each other should receive a higher relevancy score.
- Example: Giant squid blue whale
- Outcome: A customer searching for giant squid will see this image further up the search results than a search for giant whale.
- Benefit:Your images where two or more words logically live together will be seen higher up a search when the customer searches for those two or more words.
Exact match
- Tells the search engine to only find results where the search terms are an exact match for the keywords.
- Syntax: Double quotation marks “ ”.
- Example: “Golden Gate Bridge”.
- Outcome: This image is only found for searches where the phrase in double quotes is an exact match for the customer search terms, so in this example this image will not be found for a search for ‘Gate’.
- Benefit: When customers search for proper names ‘John Smith’ ‘Statue of Liberty’ ‘The World Cup Final’ images keyworded in this way will be found earlier in the search results.
Weak match
- Tells the search engine that words within square brackets are related, but not necessarily to be treated as an exact phrase.
- Syntax: Square brackets around words [ ].
- Example: [giant squid] [blue whale]
- Outcome: This image can be found under searches for giant squid or blue whale, but it can also be found for searches for squid or whale etc.
- Benefit: This will improve the relevancy of your images This helps you define to the customer that it’s the squid that is ‘giant’ and the whale that is ‘blue’ but also that the words on their own are relevant too.
Ordering
- If there is an obvious order of priority in the keywords you have applied to an image, we recommend you enter the keywords according to this order. Equally if the decision is too difficult to apply to an image, you probably don’t need to worry about it.
- Syntax: Type the keywords in order of importance.
- Example: If an image features a dog in the foreground and a cat in the background then the following order of keywords would be appropriate – dog, cat
- Outcome: A search for ‘dog’ would return this image higher up the results than a search for ‘cat’.
- Benefit: This will improve the relevancy of your images.
- Result: Through my searches I saw plenty of indication that these rules do apply.
- Prognosis: There is definitely weighting based or order. There is also substantial evidence that having fewer keywords results in a higher ranking.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Alamy is one of the few stock houses that weights keywords by either of these measures. Most stock houses, do not give any weighting to keywords, so do not assume that they do. It is very important to pay attention to this when submitting to Alamy, but counter productive at almost any other stock house.
The fact that Alamy does weight keywords is the source of the biggest piece of misinformation circulating.
ALLOW ME TO REPEAT: Virtually no stock houses other that Alamy rank images based upon either order of keywords or the number of keywords.
Number of Keywords Allowed:
Result: Alamy has the most complicated keyword structure in the industry. They insist you divide your keywords into:
- Essential keywords: 50 characters
- Main keywords: 300 characters
- Comprehensive keywords: 856 characters
The good news is you have room for roughly 150 keywords, which is almost always plenty, however, you have to do the extra work of prioritizing your keywords and inserting them into these three different fields
Faceted Search: I looked at each of the faceted search option that they have available to searchers. They have five faceted search options:
- Age
- Number of People
- Ethnicity
- Viewpoint
- Location
- Orientation
- Image Type
- Date Taken
Result: The buyer could user any of these faceted searches to narrow down their results. However, if they don’t and instead do a keyword search for the term such as male or horizontal, Alamy’s search engine is not able to recognize that they should return the same results as if someone had checked male or horizontal.
Prognosis: You do need to keyword all words found in these faceted search options.
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A few additional notes about Alamy.
Alamy may have a complicated system for uploading your keywords, but they do offer a good bit of advice and best practices. Here are three links:
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That it seems to me is everything you need to know about the way Alamy deals with keywords. In summary:
- Plurals: You do need to include the plural form of any of your keywords.
- Synonyms: You do need to include all appropriate synonyms for your keywords.
- Variant spellings: You do need to include all appropriate variant spellings for your keywords.
- Verb Forms: You do need to include all forms of any verbs.
- Other Word Forms: You do need to include all forms of any word.
- Phrases: Keyword phrases are important and you do need to keep them in order, or enclosed in {} or “”.
- Punctuation: You do not need to include commas or apostrophes. You do need to include periods in the middle of a word, and you do need to include hyphenated words.
- Capital Letters: Capitalization does not matter at all. Looks a little more professional, but not essential
- Abbreviations: You do need to include all common abbreviations for your keywords.
- The tab delimiter: You are expected to use a space as your keyword separator.
- Keyword Weight: There is definite weighting based or order of keywords, as well as strong indications that fewere keywords is better.
- Number of Keywords Allowed: Alamy has a three tiered system for your keywords.
- Faceted Search: You do need to keyword all words found in their faceted search options.
Previous Stock House analyses:
