SEO for artists 9 key tactics

The last install­ment began with  an exam­i­na­tion of  the basics of search engines, how they work and more impor­tantly, their role in your vis­i­bil­ity level . We stuck mainly to what goes on when some­one searches for you and what you as an artist can do to help ensure you are among the results the searcher sees.

While this seg­ment is intended for prac­ti­cal use it is impor­tant to remem­ber that SEO is fun­da­men­tally more art than sci­ence, because in real­ity very few actu­ally know the inner work­ings of search engine operation.

Now, is the time for the prac­ti­cal side, some basic, things you can do to help your work show up in search results.

1. Attract search crawlers

As I men­tioned ear­lier, crawlers highly favor new con­tent when index­ing, so the more your con­tent changes the more likely you will con­tinue to be indexed. This doesn’t mean you need to ditch your sta­tic gallery site, it does mean if you want to sig­nif­i­cantly raise your vis­i­bil­ity to search engines you will need to start using a blog.

Keep your blog as your hub and sim­ply link to your sta­tic gallery from your blog by way of your nav­i­ga­tion menu.

2. Cre­ate qual­ity, orig­i­nal content

If you are a hand­made jew­eler and you are com­pet­ing with all other jew­el­ers (includ­ing big boxes) the more your con­tent empha­sizes your unique­ness the bet­ter your chances of being found. That orig­i­nal con­tent also needs to be inter­est­ing enough to attract atten­tion in order to improve ranking.

For exam­ple, include reg­u­lar posts on your blog that refer to your work, your sales venues and post monthly dis­cus­sions of new work. another exam­ple, is to fea­ture peo­ple who own your work. show and describe how they use it.

3. Relate Con­tent to your brand

Your con­tent should be related to what you do, and how you want to be per­ceived, it should pro­vide an insight into  your unique­ness. This means you’ll the more you share about your vision and your work it be eas­ier to include the words and phrases you want searchers to use when look­ing for what you have. This tac­tic goes a long way in solid­i­fy­ing the con­nec­tion between you, your vision and what you make and the posi­tion of you as a brand in the minds of poten­tial buyers.

As an artist you are your brand for the sim­ple rea­son your work comes from who you are, it projects your vision into the world. The more you empha­size those ele­ments the bet­ter posi­tion you’ll have in poten­tial buyer’s minds.

4. Make your site easy to index

When using images always, always title the image using key words rel­e­vant to the con­tent it is found in. Search engines don’t “see” images they only see text, so if your image has a title of “DSC124.jpg” the search engine hasn’t a clue what to do with it, so it moves on. On the other hand if you label the image “ blue cloi­sonné pen­dent neck­lace with gold chain” and the arti­cle it is in is all about that neck­lace or cloi­sonné neck­laces you make, the image will be linked to the text, increas­ing the page’s index status.

In addi­tion to renam­ing the image you can fur­ther enhance the value of that image by plac­ing the new name or slightly dif­fer­ent but rel­e­vant name in the “alt tag” of the image. This tag is often avail­able in SEO ori­ented Word­Press plug-ins, it was orig­i­nally intended for use by early browsers to indi­cate the pres­ence of an image in case the com­puter being used was not capa­ble of ren­der­ing the image.

The same goes for embed­ded video, so when you title a video do so with key words that con­nect the video to the con­tent it relates to.

When label­ing images and videos increase the label’s power by begin­ning the title with a key word or phrase. The closer that key word is to the begin­ning of the title the more it will con­tribute to your rank­ing. Using the exam­ple above, label the cloi­sonne’ pen­dent by mak­ing “cloi­sonne” the first word and “gold” the sec­ond fol­lowed by “necklace”

5. Cre­ate acces­si­ble content

This refers to con­tent the search engines actu­ally “see” as opposed to what human read­ers see. Mak­ing your site acces­si­ble means increas­ing its’ crawla­bil­ity by using HTML tags, page titles,headers etc. So, using a hier­ar­chy of con­tent head­ings will help, those head­ings are read as HTML title tags, your pri­mary head­line is an H1 tag and sub­se­quent sub heads are h2,h3,h4 etc. Search engines read and rank them in that order of impor­tance, they’re also more likely to rank a page higher if it has good sub­ti­tle struc­ture. If you limit your post or con­tent to only a head­line, your page will likely be ranked lower than if it con­tains many sub­ject rel­e­vant sub-heads.

Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you need to do any cod­ing, just know that good sub­ject header hier­ar­chy helps rec­og­nize orig­i­nal qual­ity con­tent. The code takes care of itself all you need to do is write to include headings.

6. Focus each page on one subject

Every­thing on a page from head­ing hier­ar­chy to images should ref­er­ence and sup­port one sub­ject. If you’re talk­ing about Altered serv­ing bowls then the title should read “Altered serv­ing bowls.…” and the main focus of the page should con­cen­trate on the sub­ject of altered serv­ing bowls.

This doesn’t mean you can’t talk about altered pitch­ers but try to relate the two around the pri­mary sub­ject of alter­ing pots.

7. Use inter­nal links

Include links ( called inter­nal links) on the page to related parts in your site, maybe links to your artists state­ment, your about page or your home page. They can also be links to pages that relate in some way to the sub­ject of your cur­rent post. Word Press han­dles this task eas­ily through any one of sev­eral plug-ins that find and insert these inter­nal links automatically.

An exam­ple of “auto­matic” inter­nal links is  the “related posts” list­ing below this post, which was gen­er­ated using a Word­Press plug in.

8. Pay atten­tion to and use permalinks

These are the actual page titles as they appear in your browser and are used by blog­ging plat­forms, they can be fine tuned very eas­ily in Word­Press and many other frame­works. Don’t change the rela­tion­ship of that title to your site’s URL because it will make find­ing that page more difficult.

A best prac­tice is to use the fol­low­ing sequence:

http://www.your site.com/page-title/date

The sequence above helps read­ers iden­tify the page they are on and makes page index­ing eas­ier because the page title comes after the URL. Another impor­tant rea­son for this is that this for­mat insures that you page title will most always show up in the browser address bar.

9. Make your links count

As men­tioned before, not only are links impor­tant their qual­ity also plays a key role in your rank­ing. They rep­re­sent votes of con­fi­dence by the link­ing site, the link shows that the link orig­i­na­tor trusts your con­tent and wants to share it with others.

But…just any old link doesn’t do much, what mat­ters is the author­ity or impor­tance of the link­ing site in the uni­verse of what you’re sub­ject is. Pop­u­lar­ity is indi­cated by the num­ber of links and trust indi­cated by the qual­ity of the link.  A link to your pot­tery site from your Uncle Joe’s site about cig­ars doesn’t help you, but if your Uncle Joe was a pro­fes­sor of Ceram­ics at Yale or Har­vard, the link would swell in importance.

Uncle Joe’s sta­tus as a renowned pro­fes­sor at a pres­ti­gious uni­ver­sity  helps because his link could pos­si­bly gen­er­ate links from other renowned pot­ters back to your site, thereby adding to your pop­u­lar­ity and trust. Links from a highly trust­wor­thy site hold more weight  because  trust­wor­thy sites tend to be linked to other trust­wor­thy sites.

Also,  Uncle Joe’s renown in the clay com­mu­nity may often carry more weight than just a link from Har­vard or Yale.

Finally, links hav­ing the most value hap­pen organ­i­cally they come from rel­e­vant and high qual­ity con­tent and given freely by the link­ing site/domain. Together with the other fac­tors above organic links can con­tribute more to rank­ing and find abil­ity than those cre­ated inten­tion­ally by you.

Stay up to date with this series fol­low the links below:

• The Sum­mer of Love and the hippie-dippy busi­ness model
• The Age of Confusion
• What I learned from Alice, a Cru­civer­bal­ist and Sputnik
• Your vis­i­bil­ity Tool Kit
• The Heart of Your Business
• A social graph for artists
• SEO for Artists