two mistakes you should not do with your metadata

I never really put any effort in titles or descriptions at istocphoto. When preparing the transfer I did not have time to create them from scratch for my entire portfolio. As a result of this many files have the same or very similar descriptions as other files from the same video shoot. To explain why this is bad, let me quote Tom Spota, the Director of Video Acquisition at Shutterstock Footage “We spent many millions of dollars on SEO last year for Google and search engines. If your descriptions are poor, then people will not find your content off of search engines. That is one of the strengths of Shutterstock”. Even if other agencies did not spend as much, the same rule applies. Unfortunately I did not find any publicly available data on how many people actually use Google or any other off agency search, when searching for stock footage. Even if it isn't much, it is still good to have meaningful descriptions.

My keywording isn't done properly either. I mean it has been don properly with istockphoto, but then I uploaded the keywords I have fetched from istockphoto to other agencies. This probably is a mistake. Read this keywordsmart blog post for in depth explanation of how different can keywording standards be between agencies.