Jo O'Brien

How To Tag Your Work

Tags Tags Tags.

They help people find your work, improve you chances of being featured, and google search will love you more. So learning to do it right is a great idea.

Excessive tagging does not work in your favor. You should only use tags that are obvious keywords that would connect a searcher with your work.

Let me give you an example…

Here is an image of a calculator (courtesy of google search)

A good set of tags would be: calculator, numbers, mathematics, maths, buttons, machine, white, photograph

A not so good set of tags would be: calculator, numbers, integers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, +, -, /, add, subtract, divide, mulitply, square root, screen, buttons, grey, black , white, maths, mathematics, science, finance, bookkeeping, nerd, office, administration, machine, technology, digital

Why is the second set the weaker one? Because most of the terms tagged there only have the tiniest little thing to do with the image. This then goes on to pollute the searches of people who are actually looking for an image of a + symbol or an image of a nerdy caricature . The more polluted the search is, the more times people will just give up and go elsewhere.

Anyway, hope that is some good general information for you.

drcochran, 5 months ago

Thanks, Jo
karolina, 5 months ago

Very good info! I think a lot of people on here will benefit from this post.
LisaG, 5 months ago

I never tag – I’ll give it a try, thanks for the info….
drcochran, 5 months ago

Redbubble is really indexed with Google. I search my name, drcochran and come up on the first page of my search…
Randy Monteith, 5 months ago

Jo – I have seen people on here tag their work with

” the, a, me, and .... ” and all kinds of small words like this
Nicholas Averre, 5 months ago

Cheers Jo!
gordontant, 5 months ago

this should go in the howto group jo, thanks
Suzanne German, 5 months ago

yep google likes redbubble that’s for sure!

thanks for this Jo – really good of you to help us out so much…(still embarassed about the other day lol! – you were so helpful!) -sg
Walter Strength, 5 months ago

so Jo. Why doesnt my search on google list my taged photo? I dont think google is even picking up our tags.
Jo O'Brien, 5 months ago

I’m not even going to try to pretend that I understand the nuances of how google searches work, but my understanding is that redbubble gets a lot of love from google. For example when I search you name, your redbubble portfolio comes up on the first page. That’s pretty damn good.

If I search: o’brien self portrait -one of my redbubble works is the first hit. Again, that’s pretty damn good (I think anyway)
drcochran, 5 months ago

drcochran, first page on google thats great…
AllyL, 5 months ago

AllyL first entry on google Oz. Woohooo!
ginnymac, 5 months ago

mine comes up also ….spooky love tags too. thanks for wonderfull info .
Walter Strength, 5 months ago

Thats funny none of mine work.
Jo O'Brien, 5 months ago

Huh? You’re on the first page when I search for you Walter
Walter Strength, 5 months ago

Yea but it only lists one of my photos.
Jo O'Brien, 5 months ago

I guess my thinking is that redbubble has me on the first page when I google myself. But if I was doing it on my own, promoting my own site, I wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar. I think that is brilliant.

when did this stop beign about tags and become about google?
Kerry McFarland, 5 months ago

Makes sense, thanks.
Walter Strength, 5 months ago

Ok yea i figured it out. you have to put your name in the search field as well. Im so sorry Jo.
Carlos Solorza, 5 months ago

very cool. thank you.
Christopher E..., 5 months ago

great info jo..and you’re right, but i do wish our work would show up better on google, think there is any way to fix that? i just checked, only alittle bit shows up..on the 3rd page!! of a google search!! other sites i have decided to let go..are on the front page!! grrrr any idea of how to improve that?
Firedrake, 5 months ago

So many people don’t use tags, it’s madness.
I’d also really love it if painters would put ‘painting’ or ‘watercolour’ or ‘oils’ etc into their tags. If you have a painting of a flower and tag it ‘flower’, sure it will come up when people type ‘flower’ into the search. But so will a gazillion photographs. Sometimes people search for a media/kind of art as well as just the subject matter.
Firedrake, 5 months ago

Christopher, search engine optimisation for a site as big and complex as RB is a massive job and can cost lots. I just tried your name and your RB journal entry comes up 2nd.
Damian, 5 months ago

Good info Jo. I get annoyed with keyword spammers who add millions of tags just so they appear everywhere.

And also good for those who have yet to use tags!
Christopher E..., 5 months ago

thanks drake..when i did my name (christopher ewing) it came up on third..and i totally understand the masses, you think google would give us a discount! lol i appreciate you checking as well, at least ive moved up a page! lol still great info jo..thanks for sharing
Kath Cashion, 5 months ago

Works on RedBubble are optimised for ranking well in Google for their title’s – helped of course if you repeat these words in the description and tags. Christopher, try surreal barn for instance
mlgkats, 5 months ago

i tag mine but i don’t know,but thanks for the i do i will see what wrong with mine
genevieve m, 5 months ago

thanks, helpful. I tag mine but not heaps I’ll add a couple after this.
yanmos, 5 months ago

...good info!
Deri Dority, 5 months ago

Really good information Jo. Thanks for posting this.
MuscularTeeth, 5 months ago

yes ive noticed people will tag totally different words to their art…
say a picture of a bird might include; leg, fire, hot.. and so on.. things not related to the topic at all…
annoys me a lot.. cheap way of getting interest…
Durotriges, 5 months ago

I often wonder whether it would be better to have a preset list of tags so that people are restricted in the tags they use. Not sure whether this would result in greater consistency for searches or not, but I have seen it done elsewhere with reasonable success…
Richard Veal, 5 months ago

Nice one Jo. I have seen work where there have been in excess of 70 tags.
Adriana Glackin, 5 months ago

Tags are very useful! Still looking for an image uploaded by a RB artist – obviously not tagged, and I’ve been searching for it ever since. I’ll give up looking for it one day…

Tags definitely help buyers, whether they’re RBers’ or general public looking for a particular type of image – eg, purple vintage= , but it does help if the tags are relevant to the subject.

I hope that by bringing this to everyone’s attention, more people will tag their work.

=D
Kelly Boyle, 5 months ago

I can never think of which tags are BUZZ words. Would there be any chance of providing tick boxes for tags. These would be for the main tags with a further box for any additional tags that artists would like to add?
Angi Baker, 5 months ago

Thanks for the helpful info Jo…~A
Christina Martin, 5 months ago

Thanks for the advise, will need to work on tags
bmthour, 5 months ago

Good info, thanks.
chasingsooz, 3 months ago

Tagging is something I learnt about since joinging red bubble. At first I thought it was some sort of virus but then I went to the forums and worked out that it is only a virus if done incorrectly. LOL
Seriously, if would be great for new RB members to have a link to this entry when they hover over the tag section for too long, wondering what to do next.
Kathleen Hill, 2 months ago

Thanks Jo, have never tagged, thought about it, but now will do it!
HydeSide, 2 months ago

Well, I so want google to love me more…
I will tag better from now on.
imageworld, 2 months ago

google love sounds good, thank you for the advice with tags
desginbynicole, 2 months ago

very cool thanx