Although it’s not as big of a powerhouse as it once was, Flickr remains a popular photo sharing service and photos hosted on Flickr often highly in search engines. One key to having photos be found easily is effective use of tags (also called keywords in other environments, but Flickr uses the term tags). Here are some tips for better tagging:

• This one is almost too obvious, but always tag. Add some keywords so that folks will find your photos!
• Add some “concept” tags. Think of the emotions, feelings, activities, or general concepts that might apply to a photo. Does the photo depict happiness, reading, or the idea of busy? Add those as tags.
• If there’s an overriding color in the photo, tag with that color. Stop signs are red. That summery sky shot is probably blue. You get the idea.
• Be consistent with plurality: Choose car or cars. Choose airplane or airplanes. Choose flower or flowers. Pick one method and stick with it, rather than some of each. Or better yet: use both.
• Understand spaces: You have two choices to deal with spaces in tags. Either surround the tag with quotes like this: “new york” or simply remove the space and use newyork. If you simply type new york into a Flickr tag box, you’ll end up with two separate tags: new, and york.
• Avoid this pet peeve: If you’re uploading a group of photos, take the extra couple of minutes to correctly tag the individual photos. If your batch of 10 photos contains 2 that have rainbows in them, don’t tag all 10 photos with rainbows — folks will get frustrated as they wonder why photos without rainbows are showing up under your rainbows tag.

By following some consistent guidelines, you’ll result in more exposure for your photos on Flickr. Feel free to comment with any other tagging tips.