 Part one, Introduction - click here
Part two, Title and Description tags - click here Part three, Keywords and H1 tags - click here Part five, Social Media and More - click here Part six, Wrapping it All Up - click here Images This is an important piece of the SEO puzzle for artists' pages because they tend to be image heavy. Here's the thing - Google can't see images. Not yet. So we need to tell Google what an image is AND we need to make sure images load quickly. Today, most users would consider even four seconds too long to wait for a page to load. Google takes page loading time into account when ranking a webpage. A fast loading page is more interesting to Google than a slow loading page. Image compression - Make sure your images on optimized for the web. This means they are compressed to take up less space, but still look nice and are a good size for viewing. It is important for images on any website, but if you have a gallery of many images on one page it is vital. A few important things to remember
Alt img tags - This does two things - it is a way to tell Google what an image is, but it is also what displays to e-readers or users who have images turned off. Image file names - Yes, Google knows what you name your files. Make them count. Titles of art - You can use titles to tell Google what your art is about. I'm not saying you have to, I'm just saying it is an option. Back to Miss Sally and her art. Let's say she has a lovely duck egg with an orange tabby painted on it. The file name is "0787.jpg" . She has named that piece "Cat," and gives "cat, painted" as the description. A better method would be to give the file name and title descriptive names. For the description, give as much detail as possible. Not only the materials used, but also what is represented in the image. This would even be a good place to mention techniques, unusual challenges, interesting facts, or any other information that might help someone connect with and remember your art. Next - Social Media and More
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 Part one, Introduction - click here
Part two, Title and Description tags - click here Part four, Images - click here Part five, Social Media and More - click here Part six, Wrapping it All Up - click here Search engines are making really neat leaps forward in something called "semantic search". That means, as the search engines "learn" they are able to figure out that Sally does something with painting even if "Sally is a painter" isn't expressly written on her website. So do keywords still matter? Yes! Because they help people and search engines understand what is on a page. H1 tags "H" stands for headline, which is another way to tell search engines what your page is about. Each of your webpages needs an H1 tag (and only one!). Headline tags go all the way down to H7, but they get a little confusing, so I'm leaving them out of this post. Just stick with a single H1 tag for each page. H1 tags are a great place to use keywords (as in one or two, not a bunch of them strung together). For example, Sally could use "Custom Pet Portraits" as an H1 tag on one of her pages. How do you change H1 tags? You can do it in the coding - look for <h1>your text here</h1> - or the settings or via plugins - depending on your comfort level and which site creator you use. Keywords We haven't talked about keywords yet. In my experience, keywords freak people out. They get wrapped up in the keyword stuff and miss the point of writing readable content. That's ok. Breathe. Don't panic. Keywords let search engines know what your page is about, but if you just write naturally, you'll end up using the right words 85% of the time. That other 15%? 10% is phrases you didn't think of because you aren't stepping back far enough. Do notice how often I'm using the word "portrait" to describe Sally's work? If Sally was a client, I would dig into keyword research to come up with other words people might use to describe her work. The other 5% are terms people use to find your site that you didn't think of yet. That's where analytics comes in, but that gets complicated quickly and my goal is to make SEO interesting, not terrifying. Next - Images  Part one, Introduction - click here
Part three, Keywords and H1 tags - click here Part four, Images - click here Part five, Social Media and More - click here Part six, Wrapping it All Up - click here Welcome to part two of "SEO for Artists" or "wow, SEO is really useful for every kind of website!" In this post, I'm just talking about Title tags and the Description tags. Ready to start? Great! Take a look at the image below. The purple highlighted portion is the title tag and the the regular text area is the description tag: Title Tag This is the first half of your listing on a search results page. It shows as bold text. You have roughly 60 characters to use. Anything longer than that and your text will be cut off. Let's say Sally, the duck egg painter, has a three page website with a "Home" page, an "About" page, and a "Gallery" page. If she leaves the titles as Home, About, and Gallery, then she's missing at least three chances to be seen. 1st chance: Sally's work isn't something someone necessary searches for, but some combination of words causes Sally's website to pop up when someone searches for "unique pet portraits". But Sally's page title just says "Home." It doesn't grab the interest of her potential customer, and her site gets passed over. 2nd chance: Someone clicks on Sally's site and immediately falls in love with her work. Not only that, they love it so much they decide to share her website on Facebook or somewhere else on social media. But when the link is shared, it just says "Home" and nothing else. No one knows what the link is about and it doesn't get very many clicks. This is also part social sharing, which I'll explain further down the page. 3rd chance: Someone loves Sally's work and wants to save the page for another time. They bookmark her site, but the title is "Home". In two weeks or a month, Sally's new fan won't remember what the "Home" site is about and they aren't as likely to revisit Sally's page. How can Sally make her site more enticing from the search results page, easier to share, and easier to remember? Home becomes Miniature Pet Portraits: Art by Fabulous Sally About becomes Fabulous Sally: Painter of Custom Pet Portraits Gallery becomes Pet Portraits on Duck Eggs by Fabulous Sally Description Tag This is the other half of your listing that shows on the search results page. Here, you have roughly 150 characters to describe your page. This is 150 character chance to encourage someone to click through to your website. Anything longer than 150 characters or so and your words get cut off. If you don't specify the text you want used here, then Google will simply scrape what they think is relevant and plop it in this space. That applies to search result pages and sharing on social media. This is a great chance for Sally to stand out and connect with her audience (in 150 characters or less). Next - Keywords and H1 tags |
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