Tag: tips

SEO for Art Websites

Have you applied any SEO for your art website?  You have probably heard the term and have even been contacted by some SEO company promising to get you to the top slot in search engine results – HA!

First off I should tell you what SEO for art websites is, we’ll get back to my “HA!” in a minute.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, where one optimizes their art website to make it not only search engine friendly but, first and foremost, visitor friendly.

This entails everything from incorporating keywords, (which are actual short phrases), into headings and content, to adding Alt and Title descriptions to links and images.

To have your art website indexed by a search engine, basically, what happens is that the crawler, robot, spider, what ever you want to call it, follows links, gathers info, and adds that info into the search engine database. As you know, Google is a search engine, as in Bing, and Yahoo, etc. In essence, crawlers find web pages, read what’s on them, and index that info into their database.

Search Engines index your art web page with the information you provide. Since the Internet is mostly a word-based medium and art websites consist mostly of images, and robots can not read images, and the only thing on your home page is an image, well, you can see where we are going with this.

A lot of art websites’ home page consist of either a single image or a slide show (they can’t read slide shows either). Robots can see that there is an image because they can read the image tag in the source code, but they have no idea what the image is about. It is true; search engine robots do not know that the single image on your home page is a blue landscape. You have to tell it by filling in the alternative and title attributes for each and every image on your art website. This is the way to have your images properly indexed, the way you want them indexed, by Google or any other search engine, for that matter.

Here is a list of what needs to be done to help index and rank any art website:

#1: SEO Friendly Images

Traffic to your art site can grow substantially with proper search engine indexing of your images. Using the Alt and Title descriptions is the way to do this and have your images indexed how and where you want them to be. Your images should also have your name and the name of the artwork in the title of the jpg. Like so: ©your-name-art-name.jpg

#2: Meta Descriptions:

Meta data tells search engines what your site is about and it shows up in search results, which in turn tells people what your site is about. You can hand craft this 140 character sentence, otherwise the search engine is just going to grab what ever text you have on the page, that is if you have any text on the page.

#3 Keyword Placement

Keywords are not actually single words, but groups of words or phrases. They pertain to the content and subject of the page and are what you think people will enter into search queries to find the information on your website. The higher up on the page the more prominant they become and subsequently more weight is assigned by the search engine.

#4 Using Heading Tags

If you have subheadings inside your post, make sure you actually tag them, and tag them according to a hierarchy. Search engines add value to headings but that doesn’t mean every paragraph gets a heading. On this page, for example, I have applied the H3 heading tag to this list as each item talks about a specific topic.

#5: Linking Strategy

Every time you link to a page, post or other site, you are passing “SEO juice” from every single page or post you are linking from. Having other sites link to your site also increases your relevancy in the eyes of search engines.  “SEO Juice” is internet slang referring to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much ‘SEO Juice’ and pages which link to highly ‘juicy’ pages acquire some reflected ‘SEO Juice’.

#6 Use a SEO Plugin

A good SEO plugin can help cover your butt for those pages that you do not optimize by simply filling in the master template. There are a number of them out there and if you use WordPress for your art website, I recommend either All in One SEO or WordPress SEO by Yoast, both are free from WordPress.org.

The SEO for Art Websites Tutorial at the WordPress for Artists School, covers all the above topics, along with instructions on how to apply the techniques using WordPress.

 There are SEO companies that will promise to get your website to the top of page one in Google. Typically they are using an obscure keyword, making it easy for them to increase your ranking for just that one keyword. But what good is it if nobody searches using that particular keyword.

Creating good content and optimizing your images for search engines is a way to provide SEO for Art Websites. Adding text to your images pages and sprinkling your content with good keywords is a bit of work, but if you write naturally, with a bit of practice, you’ll provide your site visitors with meaningful content and a memorable experience when they visit your art website.

You Don’t Need a Home Page (per se)

Your Home Page can be any page that exists on your WordPress site. For example if you have a important event that you want to publicize you can set that page to be the landing page of your site. When the event is over change the “Home” page to your Artwork, Bio or anything other page you have.

So the “Home Page” doesn’t have to be an actual page called Home or Welcome with content developed specifically for it. It can be any page or even your blog if you have one.

To set the “Landing Page” a.k.a. Home Page go to Settings in the WordPress admin and under the Reading tab select the page you want. There is a Tutorial & Video at WordPress for Artists D.I.Y. site.

Open a Second Browser Window

You login to your WordPress site and want to open a second browser window or tab open so you can view the front end of your site while working in the back-end. This is very handy because while you make changes to your content you can just refresh the other window with out opening your site over top the window you are working in.

Here is a really cool tip to open the front end of your site in another browser window or tab directly from your dashboard.

In Mac Cmd + Click
Command key icon (Command key) – On some Apple keyboards, this key also has an Apple logo (apple logo)

In Windows Ctrl + Click
The Control key is right below Shift on most keyboards.

If you click your site title alone, your site will open over top in the same window or tab. But if you depress the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key on your keyboard while clicking your mouse on the title of your site it will open in a new window or tab.

 

Cool eh!

Comments or not

How comments work with WordPress.
Love them, hate them, disable them.

With WordPress.org or any blogging platform there is an area where visitors to you site can leave comments on your posts. It is usually found under the post with a form your visitors fill in with their website address, email (which is not published) and their comments.

I think one reason why people may shy away from blogging is because of the dreaded “no comments”. It’s like no body is coming to your party. I don’t get a lot of comments at artbiz or my fine art site. What I found is that if someone wanted more information they emailed or contacted me directly. Some visitors are also not comfortable commenting publicly.

BUT the thing about leaving comments on blogs is that it’s a way to link to your website and we all know how important back links are to your search engine rankings. Before you go out leaving the comment “thanks that was interesting and informative” in hopes of getting people to click-through to your website; stop. Even though it is nice to compliment the author it doesn’t really give people a reason to click-through to your website. You should have something relevant to contribute to the dialogue.  Say something more thought-provoking on the other hand will have people wanting to know who you are and gives them a reason to click-through.

All comments go through an approval process, meaning they are not published to your site until you approve them. With WordPress you can by-pass the approval process for someone who already has an approved comment if you want. WordPress will also notify you by email when someone leaves a comment for approval.

You can expect spam comments so you should have a spam blocker like Akismet (comes standard with WordPress) which will put the comments into a spam box like your email does. Here you can review the spam just incase there is a legit comment and mark it as such.

Whether you allow comments or not on your blog is up to you. You can disable comments on a per post basis by un-checking the Discussion box in the post editor. Or disable them globally in your themes loop.php file by changing true to false on this line of code
?php comments_template( ”, true ); ?

Blogging is about building relationships so don’t be shy leave a comment.

Website Check Up

The Website Check Up list relates to how well your website performs overall. Use it to review your own site to ensure that it is efficient and logical.

In my post “Make Your Site Stronger” I talked about how to make your content stronger. In this post I am referring to the structure of your website as well as a few more content related items.

1. Header
a. If you are an artist your name is your brand please use it for your site title.
b. If you are an “artisan” and have a business name other than your name proper – use that and be consistent in building your brand.
c. Consider using an optional tag line for descriptive text for what your site is about. For example: Fine Art Acrylic Landscapes by Jane Doe

2. Navigation Is it easy to find information on your site?
a. Your landing (home) page should tell visitors, at a glance, who you are, what you do, and how to find what they’re looking for.
b. Is your navigation consistent and on every page of your site? Your visitors should be able to follow a logical path to learn more about your art and view images.
c. Organize your portfolio images in a logical way either by series name or use descriptive page titles for yearly archives.

3. Usability refers to how easily site visitors can use your site.
a. The best measure of usability is feedback from users – the people who visit and try to navigate the site.
b. Are all the links on your website working?
ii) First make sure any links between pages on your site are directing site visitors to the correct page.
iii) Check all of your links to other websites, too; the webmaster may have renamed the page or removed it altogether, and those dead links will make your site look unprofessional and frustrate your site visitors.
iv) If you’ve removed some of the pages from your own site, set up a custom 404 page that redirects your visitors to your home page (or a search page) when they try to access a page that no longer exists.

4. Speed Does your site load quickly enough in the viewer’s browser?
a. Artist sites typically have a lot of images. Are your images re-sized for the web?
b. You have about Eight Seconds, meaning no site visitor should have to wait longer than eight seconds to view the opening page of your website. After eight seconds have elapsed, chances are good the viewer will give up and go elsewhere.

5. Compatibility
a. Will your website display correctly for most people regardless of their computer hardware, operating system, browser and monitor resolution?
b. If any features of your website require certain browser plug-ins, provide a download link.
c. Remember that not everyone will have JavaScript enabled and that graphics can be turned off by the user; make sure your site will still work without them

I will expand on some of these items in future articles. In the mean time if you have any questions or things to add please leave a comment.

Make Your Website Content Stronger

A list of ideas to implement and make your website content stronger.

Looking at artists sites I see one thing that strikes me as odd.

Artists are visual people right, image is worth a  thousand words and all that. What I see a lot, are blog posts with out images and portfolio images with out descriptive text.

 

Make your site stronger by:

  • If you are writing about a process to create a work of art show us images of the process.
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  • If you have an image or group of images on the landing page or anywhere in your portfolio tell us in a few sentences what we are looking at. This can be an excerpt from your artist statement and will go a long way in satisfying lay people. 
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  • If you are writing a blog post about a specific body of work provide a direct link to your portfolio page that contains all the images on the blog post where you discuss this work and vs
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  • If you are posting announcements to events and ask us to go to the event site for further information please provide a link to that website. Also if you list up coming exhibitions please provide us with a link to the gallery.
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  • Redundancy: If you had a “News” page but are now posting your news to your blog you can safely remove the News page and transfer the content over to your blog.
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  • Try to be more creative than using “Uncategorized” as a blog category. It is the default WordPress category use to catch those posts that do not have a category assigned. If you don’t want to use categories then consider changing the name of “Uncategorized”.  Some clients have used “In General”, “Studio News”, “The Artists Life”. Just go to Categories and rename it.
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  • Have you added descriptions to your gallery images; name, medium, size? What if an interior designer visited your site and saw the ideal painting for a client but there was no size and nor could they contact you and ask the size of the piece because there was no name. Um, third image from the left, two rows down is not good.
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  • Forgot how to add images to your gallery and stacking single images on top throwing off the entire layout of the page? Please review “gallery management”
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  • Most artist sites will have a page called “Events” or “Exhibits” used to list current or upcoming shows. In WordPress your pages can be removed from the menu if there aren’t any current events. Better not to have it in the menu than have people land on a blank page.  If you don’t want to remove it from the menu stick an image on the page and tell visitors that there aren’t any events at the moment and invite them to check back.
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  • Has the same image been on your home page for 3 years? Returning visitors may think you haven’t created any new work and your site has become stale.  Switch out your images from time to time – keep it fresh.
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  • Consider using an image of yourself on your Biography page. Yes as an artist you identify with your work but your collectors and potential collectors want to know the real you. It doesn’t have to be a professional portrait, a shot of you in the studio is pretty cool. 
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  • Thought that you would really get into blogging or use the blog to post news but haven’t posted anything since December 2008.  Get rid of the blog and just use a page and call it News.
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  • Do you have a new and exciting announcement like an instructional video. Use your home page to create a link and say a few words. Rex Beanland does this well.
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  • Calendars on your blog are meant to highlight the days that you have created new posts. Consider removing the calendar from your sidebar if your post frequency is rare and there aren’t any highlighted dates on the calendar.
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  • Use your home page to promote an upcoming show complete with an image and show details. This is good use of your home page, keep it fresh with new content BUT remember to remove the event when it is over. People coming to your site will see that the exhibit was 6 months ago, that is stale content.
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  • Typically I set up your portfolio with generic names if you don’t have proper series names. It will mean more to your visitors if you categorize your work and name your galleries accordingly.
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  • If you have exhibition images with people in them post them. It’s great to see people interact with your art. Have a look at Liz Sullivan’s site as an example. Liz uses a page called Recent Exhibitions but you could also do this in a blog post.
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  • Do people have at least two ways to contact you? Email and a phone number.
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  • Is all your contact information on your contact page? Where are you in the world? It is called the World Wide Web after all and you will get visitors from everywhere would it not be nice to tell them where you live. It doesn’t have to be a full street address but why not something like: “Jane Doe Artist works out of her studio in “city name”.
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  • If you use archives which lists the months and years that you have posted to your blog and you only have 2 and they are two years apart consider not using archives in your sidebar.
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  • Have you remembered to resize your images for the web? You have 8 seconds before your visitor gives up and leave because your image is taking too long to load.

Your readers will appreciate it and so will search engines. Really!

If you have any questions I’d be happy to help. Email me