Tagging: Making the Most

To help you make the most of the tagging system, one of our developers has put together the following guidance:

What counts as “garbage tags”?

Examples include: affordable, painting, photograph, cheap, premium, unique, as well as repetitive or redundant combinations such as blue cat, Blue Cat, cat blue, cat painting, unique cat painting, one‑of‑a‑kind cat painting, house cat, sleeping cat.

Why are these examples problematic?

Tags like these increase what’s known as term frequency. If a word such as painting appears in the tags of every painting on the site, it does very little to narrow down search results and becomes less relevant. Similarly, overly specific or repetitive combinations don’t improve search accuracy. Instead, use a small number of meaningful tags such as cat, kitchen, and blue. Any additional details belong in the artwork description.

Remember: we search the description too

A well‑written, descriptive artwork description helps create uniqueness in search results. Avoid adding single‑word “tags” into the description in an attempt to boost visibility, term frequency is cumulative, and this can actually harm your ranking. Instead, write naturally about your inspiration, process, and the story behind the piece.

The auto-complete search behaves differently to "see all" out of necessity.

The “search as you type” feature is designed for speed and prediction. It runs two quick searches, one for artworks and one for artists, and therefore uses fewer fields and prioritises speed over precision. This means results may differ from those shown when selecting “See all”.

How keyword search results are ordered

When a user performs a keyword search (e.g. forest painting), results are ordered by relevancy score. This score is determined by the search engine based on several fields, including:

• Product name
• Artist name
• Product description
• Tags
• Category (e.g. painting, print, relief)
• Subject (e.g. landscapes, nudes, architecture)…along with a few additional factors.

In summary

Because category, subcategory, style, and subject are already included in the search, many of the tags artists add end up being redundant. Using concise, meaningful tags, and a strong, descriptive artwork description will always produce the best results.

You can read more about other best practises here.