Keywording your images is one of the most important things you can do. If an image is not keyworded correctly, neither you, nor anyone else searching will find your images. However, it is also extremely important that your images are not keyworded with the wrong words or they will appear in search results from words which do not relate to the content of the image and will not be what people want to see.

The best keywords to start with are those which exactly describe the content of an image. The description of the image should be these sort of words, e.g. the name of a person, a place name or country, a description of the activities happening in a picture and the actual contents, whether animate or inanimate. So you could type "A boy and his dog" or "Jimmy Smith with his dog Spot". Both would be valid ways to describe the picture, and all the words would be valid keywords. However, naming the person is more interesting from a captioning or description point of view, so you should use that as a basic description but add "boy" and "dog" as additional keywords in the second field you will find on the adding information page once you upload an image.

You don't have to stop there though. Any additional relevant words that might apply to the picture should be added in the keyword field. Sometimes it is best to start with more generic terms. For example, a boy is a child and a dog is an animal, so there are two more keywords for you to use. You can also look at the relationship between the boy and the dog. The dog is his pet, so you have another keyword to add since people might search for boy and pet or boy and dog.

You can also look at general categories such as industry, transport, sport, medical, or food. Someone looking for a man playing sport, would be happy with a man playing football or golf, so adding sport as a keyword to a man playing football as well as playing and football means your images will show regardless of whether someone is searching specifically or generally.

If you add a keyword to an image, consider whether you would be happy seeing the image in a search you made, using that word. Would you think that the image was a valid result for that search? If so, then it is a valid keyword. If you think otherwise, then it is probably better not to use the word.

Also, don't forget that other people will be searching for images and may use different words for the same thing. For example, is a biplane an aircraft, a plane, an aeroplane or an airplane? For the purposes of keywording, they are all valid and worth using.

There is a date field for the actual date of the image, however, people often search for date periods rather than a specific year, for example, 1950s family, 19th century fashion, sixties cars. It is often useful to add in numeric and textual versions of the decade when it is from the 20th century, and then the century if it is 19th or earlier.

Plurals are a difficult one. When you search for "women cooking", do you mean lots of pictures of a woman cooking or more than one woman cooking in the same picture. Often people look for one of something search for the plural because they are looking for many images. In which case, if you only keyword the singular when there is one of something in the picture, and only the plural when there is more than one, you may find images are not coming up in searches because people are searching using the wrong terminology. Some people like to keyword both the singular and the plural of the main subject of an image. This is not necessarily wrong given common usage of search terms, and as long as you are happy to see images of one woman and more than one woman in a search for "woman cooking", and the same for "women cooking", then you should consider doing this.

There is a huge amount more to keywording, but hopefully these basics will help you get started. Good luck!