Virginia Boulay - Bryant Creek, 20" x 50", acrylic on canvas

Here are some ideas to increase the traffic to your website (If you don’t do it who will?)

• People need to know that you actually have a website. Tell them, publish your website address on everything include adding it to the signature of all your emails.  I know one gallery who’s business card has only their website address on it and nothing else. Certainly this may drive traffic to their site if only to retrieve their phone number and address. You may not want to go to that extreme but do put your website address on everything that goes out  including on the back of your paintings.

• An artist I know keeps prospects and clients informed of new work by creating a postcard that announces new work on her website.  The postcard cover always includes her website address as well as an image of the new work. The message on the postcard back encourages her clients and prospects to visit the site. This sends the message of her continual success to her client/prospect base and brings more visitors to the site. VAAA has a great postcard printing program for their members.

• Another artist client of mine includes an image of her work in all her emails. Clever girl!

• Artist websites tend to be heavily weighted with images, as they should be. But search engines (Google and the like) are looking for text and will not extract text from a jpeg (just so you know).  Consider writing a short statement on your gallery page that briefly outlines what that particular body of work is about.

• Search also engines like new and fresh content. If you have something to say consider writing a blog. If that doesn’t appeal to you create a news page and post your upcoming events or even create links to your favorite art sites and tell us why you like them.

• Links are also important especially one way links that point to your website. Try listing your site in some art directories like artistincanada.com

• Submit your site using Delicious.com or Stumbleupon.com. Both of these social bookmarking and discovery sites are an excellent way to get links pointing to your site.  In fact I finally did this for Artbiz and “liked” all my client sites.