One of the primary focuses of ExposureRoom is providing you, our members with Exposure. Towards that end the system does a number of things to help (behind the scenes). However, it is important that you understand some key concepts so that you can best benefit from this strategy. There are many things we do to help, but in this post I’d like to talk about Title, Description, Tags and Equipment (collectively called attributes).

On ExposureRoom Photos, Videos, Music, Graphic art etc. are collectively called “Assets”. Blogs, Tutorials, Articles and Reviews are collectively called “Journals”. All assets and journals have a title, description, tags and equipment (assets) and categories (journals). The following is an attempt to help you understand how best to use these attributes so as to gain the most benefit while at the same time help other viewers (members and visitors) better find you and their assets and journals.

As soon as you publish an asset or journal entry, the system publishes your asset/post with global search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.) and over 60 blog directories and various portals. Within moments search engine spiders and crawlers start to crawl your pages in order to index your asset or journal entry. The ExposureRoom search engine does the same. Now all search engines have a few things in common.

1. They love text. Loads of text. The better you describe your assets the more they love you for it. They feel they’re indexing something worthwhile and they lap it up. But be careful, they also seem to be really good at figuring out if all the text is nonsense.
2. They hate duplication. When they see duplicate keywords they think you’re somehow trying to fool them and they stay far way. You don’t want that.

Keeping these two important aspects in mind the following is our recommendation for setting up your assets and journals posts. Remember, these are recommendations and not rules.

Title

Provide a title that best describes your asset or journal post. The length of the title should be such that it does not wrap in the space provided on the Asset display page. This is the page where you see a singular asset or journal post. Note also that the title you see in search results pages for search engines such as Google is the same as the title you see in the browser window while viewing an asset on ExposureRoom. This title contains your name as well.

Description

Describe your assets such that it is interesting to the viewer. Provide background information, intent, difficulties, how you achieved what you wanted and things to look for and other points of interest. The description should include “keywords” from your title as well as tags you tag your asset with and equipment and software you used in order to create your asset. If you are crediting other members in the credits section it’s best to describe their role or interesting things about the collaboration that will interest your viewers. What’s important to remember is that your title, tags, equipment and credits are really the keywords that should be found in the description of your asset. Having just tags and equipment is almost go without a description to go along with it.

On ExposureRoom we breakdown search tags into two different areas in order to further improve searching. Asset search keywords are broken down into Tags and Equipment, while journal search keywords are broken down into Categories and Tags. Your name is always included in the list of search terms so don’t include it in your tags (remember, search engines detest duplicates). We break down your search tags into tags and equipment (for assets) so members and visitors interested looking for assets made using certain equipment or software can find those easily.

Tags

Besides wanting to break down search terms for assets into tags and equipment for the reason explained earlier, we also wanted equipment names to be consistent as correct as per the maker of the equipment. That way when people search for equipment that you’ve included as part of the attributes of your asset, they’ll be found. So if you've added equipment in tags instead of in Equipment, your assets won't be found in our search by equipment pages. So please be mindful of this as the search by equipment pages are one of the most common pages on ExposureRoom.

Breaking down Tags/Equipment

Another aspect to note is that, when a Tag contains multiple words or the name of the equipment (or software) you use contains multiple words, we break these down further and include them as search terms. For example, if you listed the Canon XH-A1 as one of the items in your equipment, the search terms that actually get associated with your asset are:

1. Canon XH-A1
2. Canon
3. XH-A1
4. XH
5. A1

Similarly if one of the tags you associated with your asset is New Mexico the search terms that actually get associated with your asset are:

1. New Mexico
2. New
3. Mexico

Synonyms

Certain keywords (be it tags or equipment) also have synonyms associated with them and these synonyms are also associated with your assets as search terms. For example if you’ve used the Letus35 Extreme in the making of your video and you’ve listed it as part of the equipment we include the synonym 35mm Adapter as part of the search terms. As a result this synonym gets further broken down into the following search terms:

1. 35mm Adapter
2. 35mm
3. Adapter

Flagging a Video as HD

If you flag your video as an HD video then we include the following synonyms (HD, HDV, High Definition, Hi Def, High Def, HD Video, High Def Video, High Definition Video, 720p or 1080p depending on the dimensions of the video you uploaded). You can image what each of these synonyms break down to.

I hope this post helps you understand the way things work behind the scenes as regards tagging your assets and journals.