Ever heard about tags? Well you should have, because considering the relevance and amount of tags per image, your Microstock sales rise and fall. In this series I'll tell you about the importance of tagging and how to find the right tags for your images.

To start we need to define what a tag is, Wikipedia says the following:

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.
Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by item author/creator or by its consumer/viewers/community. Tags are typically used for resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks (both in social bookmarking services, and in the current generation of web browsers - see Flock). For this reason, "tagging" has become associated with the Web 2.0 buzz.
Typically, an item will have one or more tags associated with it.

So what does that mean for Microstock photographers? It means by choosing the right tags the chance of making your customers find your images increases a lot!

Tags are short and very descriptive, you don't often use more than one word per tag. The more relevant tags you enter, the better for your overall sales. Why? Because it is very unlikely that a potential buyer enters more than 3-5 keywords to find an image.

So if your image shows exactly what the person searching wants, but you missed to enter one important keyword, the sale will be left to other contributors.

In part II you'll find out how to find the right tags to describe your image!