Image Keywords, How Important are they?

This is something I've always been interested in. I feel as though someone could perhaps have the greatest image in the world and yet, not get it sold at all because of the weak keywords the photographer used. I'm curious, I have a lot of "couples in love" studio images but before I submit them, what would be the common keywords people would use to search that theme?

If you want to get bogged down in keywords, cool, I sell a LOT of media all over the place, my keywords are a joke most of the time because I don't have time to waste on it as I upload a lot at a time all of the time. I just follow a basic rule, describe what it is, what it does and where it is at, past that everything else is just spam tbh.

how would you best describe an attractive couple in an embrace? Just so I can get an idea of how far off I am?

first I look at the 2 most popular keywords, beautiful and backgrounds, you have already met these main attention getters now we seal the deal with people as that too draws more attention, I base this off my own sales but I would say Two beautiful people in love embracing one another. I also use Shutterstock keyword generator for keywords to get the ones I would not have thought of. I think Pond 5 cuts at 84 characters on the title so get as much fuel from that as you can as that is what gets hit first for searches. Google keywords also has metrics available to gauge keyword use, if I was only doing a couple videos a day I would really go all out with that as google is what drives a lot of the traffic to your videos. Hope that helps my man, just a few things I have learned on the subject, I see people trying to sell it also, that to me is crazy!

this is excellent info Madvideos! Thank you very much!

Keywords are as important as the image itself. Without accurate keywords, customers will never see your images. Spamming keywords does you no favours and will not help your fellow contributors either, as it will annoy customers trying to find relevant images and will reflect badly on Pond5. Often some of the automatically generated keywords are wrong and should be deleted.

You need to think what customers will search for rather than what you words you want to use. Often they are the same thing of course.

Generally, stay clear of keyword generators. Is a computer searching for your images, or a human? It's a human, and you need to use keywords thought out by humans. Sometimes it isn't obvious and you'll find using concepts is helpful. Let's say you have a silhouette of a man and child. Apart from the obvious words you could also use concepts such as "love", plus also non-obvious words for when customers are searching for an image to illustrate something non-specific such as "family", "loving parent", "single parent", etc..

I would say something about phrases too but I'm currently unsure how Pond5 handles them so I'd better not write anything that may not be correct. At another agency I won't name, phrases are absolutely vital to making a decent number of sales.