Over the last few installment I’ve focused on the use of social media as a tool to bring people to your Hub, the operative word being “bring ” by using social media networks as a way to increase the depth of your exposure. The depth I’m talking about is the extent to which your network, both personal and work, overlap with your friends/connections.
So, recalling the Social Graph videos I introduced a couple of weeks ago, you’ll remember the point was to show the extent of our connections both business and personal, because in today’s world they more often than not overlap. So, for example, I have worked to build that overlap with my Facebook account.
Many of my photographer friends are also fans of both my photography page and The ARTISTScenter. This overlap gives me more connection possibilities by giving any particular contact of mine exposure to my network and visa versa. So the better the overlap the better the exposure, with my exposure being driven by my overall visibility strategy of increasing exposure and connection possibilities with visually creative people.
Having well placed overlapping networks is one of the key factors in being found by the people who get what we have to offer. That said, the uniqueness of today’s networks also means, while any given person we connect with may not choose to go any deeper. The possibility that someone in the multitude of networks we are attached to will chose to learn more about us, increases relative to extent our networks overlap . Consequently, we can focus our message more so that it is seen by those our work is for.
Finally, your search engine visibility is aided by network overlap by increasing the number of times you and your work show up. For example, search engines search and index Facebook Pages but they do not index Profile pages. The more activity you can generate on your Fan page, even as simple as a regular feed up date from your blog, the more your brand ( you) will be indexed by search engines. All of this translates to increased findability due to greater exposure of all things related to you and your work, from searches that include your key words and phrases related to your work.
Artists and search engines
Unlike, major brands who only want traffic when there is a good chance you’ll buy, artists on the other hand want both buyers and repeat visitors who will share their discovery with others. As artists, our ability to achieve repeat sales is directly linked to the quality of our connections, i.e. our transparency and authority in everything related to what we make. A key part of our visibility strategy should be positioning ourselves and our work at the top of potential buyers mental lists. That position must include other elements than our name, we need to also be highly positioned by the problems our work solves, i.e. the words and terms most likely used to search for solutions we provide.
Search engine queries related to the problem we solve will help bring new people to our hub where our goal is to give them a reason to return and bring their friends. The work focused on improving our potential for inclusion in the results of searches is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) includes everything related to building a strategy that gives us visibility to our specific group of potential buyers.
Being found…or not
Search engines index information based on what they find when they “crawl” the web looking for new content. If they don’t detect a change in content for a particular page, they don’t index it. This means that whether or not your pages or site get indexed is directly related to the freshness of the content found, old content signals the crawlers to move on.
Moreover, the accuracy and relevance of what we get back from a search depends on the detail we enter and more importantly how finely tuned web sites and sources are relative to their own content. The more key words and phrases related to that content present within a source the more likely the source is to be included in any particular search. So, as a web site owner, the more references to your work that occur within your pages the more potential for being listed in a search result. Let’s take a closer look at the key elements to landing in a list of search results by checking out some of the criteria we need to meet.
A search engine uses two major criteria to find and give you the best results:
- The most relevant and useful to your query
- Ranked by order of importance or perceived value
In the early days of the web, it was enough for a site to simply have relevant words on a page, because search engines didn’t go that deep into a site. Our demands for more precise results evolved into the algorithms we have now, all still built around relevance and importance. Search engines basically attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff and then rank the results according to the two factors above.
To help them determine ranking, search engines have developed complex formulas to help us find stuff and help those competing for our attention get found. Those factors are called ranking factors, things a site needs to have in order to rank high. In order of importance the top five generally are:
Keyword focused anchor text linking to the site from other sites
This means that the actual coded link (below) tells both the browser and the search engine where the link points to. So if Sue wants to end up high on the list of results her link text needs to be as specific as possible.
The easiest way to help this happen is to make sure the link from the page listing all of the necklaces to this particular set is titled like the anchor text above. Any links from that page would automatically contain that anchor text.
External link Popularity as measured by quantity and quality
While links count, just any old link doesn’t count as much as a link coming from a site that already holds a high popularity ranking. The example below is a graph of links to my photography sites, the size of the “bubble” indicates the quality of the linking sites. As you can see, the largest is Facebook, followed by the ARTISTScenter. It is also obvious that I haven’t spent much time developing quality links for my photography sites ( I’m having to much fun here).
Diversity of the link sources
Besides being popular the links to a site need to come from many sources, the more diverse the links the more they count in final ranking. Going back to the diagram above you can see that I have a moderate amount of diversity, clicking on each of the sub nodes reveals another level of links. A closer look shows that a couple of the larger nodes are spam sites which don’t help my diversity.
Key word use in title tags
This is the page title as it appears in the url window of your browser. The closer to the start of the title your key words are the more effective they are in ranking. To illustrate this, I copied the title from “An Artist’s Social Graph” post, of a couple of weeks ago, into Google, the result was #2, #3 and #4 placement on the search page, entering simply “artists social graph” put the listing in the top spot. The use of the key word phrase “artist’s social graph” is what resulted in the high placement, because they were the first words in the title, simply having the word “An” first was enough to drop the results to #2 position.
Trustworthiness of the liked page
Generally this means that the page content containing the link is what matters when considering “trustworthiness”. So, receiving a link from the home page of the highest authority site in your industry is far more important than receiving a link from a home page about my dog, unless of course my site is considered to be of high authority among sites about dogs
Now that you know how search engines work and how they determine where you fit amongst all the other sites and pages that address the same subject matter, you’ll be able to better understand what to do when. The next parts of this series will aimed at what you need to do as artists to improve your visibility to search engines.
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