Tagging Photos - Be Creative - But Be Honest

If you are maniacal egocentric shooter and sheerly enjoy having people gawk at your photos to give you words of commendation and love, then smart tagging is a skill you really need to develop to feed your Ego.  Proper tagging will get your proper hits.  There are a mind boggling 60,000,000 sites out there with information on how to do this properly, so I am not re-inventing the wheel here.  Just adding my 2 cents to the topic.

I ran a test with the above photo on Flickr this week.  Among the tags, I added “sexy,” “naked” and “porn” as a play on words for this lens.  (I am also adding those tags to this blog to see what traffic is driven here).  I got over 100 hits in the first few minutes of posting the image.  Triple what I usually get in the first few hours! Sure, I got some pissed off people who were expecting to see Danica McKellar from The Wonder Years who just did a half naked photo-shoot with Maxim, but I also got the people that were searching on the legit words like “Nikon” “85mm” “portrait” and “lens” to stop by.

These are the guys I want to check out my work, leave comments on my stream and possible begin to follow me.  The ones that got here under false pretenses are not going to leave any constructive criticism – other than perhaps a few choice words about my mother.

By using proper tagging, you are making it easy for people to find your work.  You are making Google index your photos properly.  You are not being a pain in the ass.

For those that got here on my misleading tags, I apologize.  It was just to prove a point.  But I did give you links to the Maxim spread above!