Hi,

I run keyword.io, a website mainly targeted at SEO folks. Today I added something useful for stock photographers, too.

The basic idea is to talk to a microstock agency's search form as if typing a search term a buyer would type, but with many different variations: "KEYWORD a", KEYWORD b" and so on. The result is a set of dozens or hundreds of search queries, buyers use to find pictures to buy.

You can use this data to optimize your title, description and keywords or to get new ideas for motives in a specific niche.

The tool is free to use. Give it a try, http://www.keyword.io/tool/fotolia-longtail-finder?q=office&audience=2 will give you more than 200 search phrases for "office" stock pictures for example.

Cheers, Robert

It is not a keywording tool, but the tool that gives the search combinations buyers search for. If you gonna pick your keywords from there to keyword your images, they hopefully gonna get denied

As I wrote, it's taking search queries from the autocompletion functionality from fotolia and pond5. Note there is no search volume or any other metric involved, it's just what those agencies believe their users are looking for - usually based on historic searches and their volume.

So this should give you ideas on how people might be searching in your niche and help you find new sub-niches you might want to explore. Definitely don't blindly copy/paste all that into you metadata

Well the basic idea is that you're in some niche already. Say you make pics from people working and their environment. So you can start with a small seed list - "office", "work", "desk", ... and get hundreds of ideas from there - and more than by just typing into fotolia search bar by hand, which will only give you ten-ish results.

But I see your point, this tool has a limited use case and there's room for better tools.....

Thanks for the site, is there a way to view the results sorted by top searches and not alphabetically?

Oh btw, I recently launched this: http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research

It extracts keywords and statistics of views and sales from 33+ million images, vectors and videos from multiple agencies, so this might be useful for keywording and research.

So you can pick your keywords and niches not only based on how frequent they are, but also how well they sell.

And yes, I did the some meta-analysis on this which confirms that the more keywords you have, the more sales you get. So you really should pick 40+ keywords per file. Just make sure they're relevant, otherwise they most likely will hurt your ranking in the agencies search engines.

Happy keyword hunting