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Posts
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You warned me a positive note would have a negative response! However I do not regret posting it. People would have flamed Symbiostock anyway…it was just a volcano waiting to go off.
Nonetheless, great work! I’m happy you’ve done well! Its inspiring to me as well.
Could you explain how exactly you get “green images” … I tried but I never managed to get them green, just yellow … perhaps you could make one step by step example. If I could manage to get them green by Yoast, I would like to do exactly what you do … 3-5 images a day, which will accumulate nicely over the year.
Again: Thanks a lot for your positive thread!Its about consistency with your focus keyword. It should be in the title and the url and also in the copy. Links to your own site and other sites help your page. Relevant but repetitive text seems to help and you need to have at least quite a few words in your description. I have a number of templates that I use and just change out the focus words and relevant info. This way I don’t need to write all new descriptions every time. No-one actually reads the text but if they do it should at least make sense.
Finally your focus keywords should use common sense. If looking for a lizard image what would you’re 12 year old type into Google? Pretty sure “stock image” wouldn’t be one of the first three words. More like “scary green lizard”. Despite what we would like to believe, agencies are not going to buy from our symbio sites. If you use the keyword “stock” you are now competing against SS, IS and DT. You are simply not going to win that battle. Stop thinking like an micro stock site and start thinking like the artist you are. People want to buy from you, you just need to help them find you.
I am attaching a photo ( I hope) of what Yoast wants. This image is “green”. Now that I know what it wants I can do this every time. It takes about 5 minutes of cut and paste and some editing.
Hope that helps
[attachment=0:3uotehhw]Screen Shot 2014-01-28 at 4.34.23 PM.png[/attachment:3uotehhw]Sorry, that image was for the home page on my baseball-softball specialty site.
This is the one for an image. Notice there are some similarities and a few differences[attachment=0:3o2j8ptj]Screen Shot 2014-01-28 at 4.52.26 PM.png[/attachment:3o2j8ptj]
I don’t quite understand how the storms get going but they certainly do.
I appreciate your comments and I thought I’d experiment with getting one of my image pages green (I’ve been working on every one to get it orangey yellow as I’ve uploaded). I have my forcus keyword phrase (it’s never just one word as I couldn’t make it unique) and all the checks on that being the places Yoast wants it to be. Except for a couple of dozen I missed, titles are unique. But that doesn’t get me to green.
Once I figure out something reasonable and buyer friendly I’ll post about what I did and what I’ve decided to do, but thanks for bringing that issue up in your list of things.
Wow, I sure do suck at that. I’m doing tons of things wrong, and I’ve done all those things wrong for more than 650 images now.
You generate a thumbnail image for everything you upload? You format every page? You link to other pages on every page? You write two paragraphs of redundant copy to get the keywords repeated? My god, I just feel like crying now.
But thanks for sharing all of this with us. It is interesting to see all the work you’re doing on every page. I do appreciate it.
Not really. I formatted one page originally. When I upload I open two browser windows. One for the image I am uploading and one that is similar but previously uploaded. I select everything from the previous image and paste into the new image. All of the formatting comes along with it. Then I just change the pertinent info. Cut paste, cut paste about 5 times and a few edits. It’s not as bad as it sounds. You don’t need the mini image to get to green. I do it because I see it as another door to my website. The more ways in, the more customers. Also I can control the name and link of that image. I can’t do that with the automatically generated thumbnail. I have a small illustrator script that generates those images and I do ten at a time. It takes about 7 minutes to do 10. I upload them all at once and then edit afterwards. I set a goal of 10 images a week sometimes I make it sometimes I don’t but at least it is manageable. 1300 images or even 600 is way to big of a task to contemplate. I would never get started. I prioritize my new or exclusive images first and the images that were there before I started this process I try to chip away at. Focus on a couple a day. It’s a little like your posting on Facebook. A little at a time makes a big difference in the long run.
It really isn’t as bad as it sounds. I’m not sure what I would do if I had thousands of images but I think it would be a scaled down version or maybe use the batch editor. I am sure there is a solution.
Well, I finally got to green, but it was a bit of work. Not as “green” as you, but I don’t have the patience or fortitude to try harder. 😯
I upload 5-10 images per day, so generating thumbnails and all the other work you do is just too much for me. I’m just including my logo instead. I’m not sure if that will make a difference. Already uploading to my Symbio site has added an hour of time to my day. If I have to do all this cutting and pasting I’m going to cut back on what I upload there.
Here’s the copy I wrote to get to green. Anyone is welcome to pick it up/modify/use it. Of course, you’ll have to edit and insert your own links, images, etc. For photographers all the stuff about vectors makes no sense, obviously.
http://vector999.com/image/topiary-framing-garden-gate-background/
Thank you Dennis, for the informative and encouraging post. I see a few areas I can improve although it’s clear to me that a good part of your success is the type of artwork you offer which is very appealing to the general consumer. I can picture local teams and individual fans having use and desire for your images. And I say that with admiration for your unique images the way you’ve been able to leverage your product and link your multiple sites.
By the way, there was some discussion of incoming links and I see you have 99 and I have 111 according to Alexa stats but my sales sure don’t rival yours so incoming links may not be much of a measure of sales success.
I’d love to see my poll stats start growing as your generous sharing of SEO advice helps all of us start climbing to higher levels. The poll was made with the option to change one’s vote for that reason, so we could track the changes as we all started to get more sales.
Well done, Dennis! Your post is very inspiring. Your success is proof that SEO and providing images for a market niche in demand can work for individual artists.
Leo has done a tremendous job providing us an online sales platform with top-notch SEO build-in. Now every Symbiostocker who wants to be successful has to use its SEO power. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of work. I try hard with my photography. All of my uploaded images show at least yellow and an increasing portion of currently around 10% green on Yoast. I can see results in google search ranks and increasing incoming traffic from google and other search engines. However, it looks like that my images that sell best on the micros (my niche) meet the fiercest competition in search ranking (and I am not even talking about the agencies!). It looks to me that I’d have to up my SEO even more to make my most marketable images being found, seen and hopefully bought as well.
Your post and this discussion provide some good pointers. Thank you all at lot!Thanks a lot for this detailed information, Dennis. This is very useful for the network, I think.
OK, after some sleep I got up this morning and realized my copy needed a lot of work (I’m a copywriter, after all).
I’m here for SEO now:
My new copy gives you the green light for SEO, includes helpful info for buyers and also promotes your Facebook page, Twitter feed and similar images. (I also give folks the option to purchase my images at the micro sites….way down at the bottom.) Note that I repeat the image title a few times in the copy.
I’ve created a Word doc and copy and paste from that. I’ve put NAME OF FILE into my copy so it’s easy for me to see where to cut/copy/paste in the image title.
http://vector999.com/image/topiary-framing-garden-gate-background/
Thanks for posting an update on what you did. I think the idea of having some sort of template (which makes modifications quicker) is a good idea
Yessss! Now change the first line to- Headline 5- and you are there!
Way to go@shelma1 wrote:
….I upload 5-10 images per day, so generating thumbnails and all the other work you do is just too much for me. I’m just including my logo instead. I’m not sure if that will make a difference. Already uploading to my Symbio site has added an hour of time to my day. If I have to do all this cutting and pasting I’m going to cut back on what I upload there.
an easy way to get thumbnails is to pull them from a search at http://symbiostock-search.com
eg, search topiary — then ‘view source’ and cut:
Topiary framing garden gate background.of course, this means your image must already be published… but you can keep thumbnails of OTHER similar images and add them instead
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