 If you receive free products for review, you're going to want to read this and make sure your links to products you review are set as "no follow". What are "no follow" links? This tells Google (and other search engines) not to pass on "link juice" (which is like reputation, energy, and recommendation all rolled into one) from your website to the website you are linking to. Why does it matter? Google's ultimate goal is to give users the best experience possible (which makes them valuable and useful and makes them lots of money). Which means - if someone is giving you a product with the hope that you'll give a link to their site...this stops that. This has been an unofficial "best practice" for awhile. Why do links matter? Google used to rely heavily on words (and we've all read terrible blog posts that stuff a phase into sentences over and over!). Now they rely on lots of things including: words, phrases, other on-site things, and off-site things (like links back to your site). It used to be that lots & lots & lots of links to your site meant that your site probably had good information and was something users would want to see. But...when everyone catches on to that....it gets exploited and and link farms (pay us $50/month and we'll give you 300 links to your site) and crappy, random guest blogging happens. How did it work? Product A sends samples to 500 bloggers to review their product. The bloggers do their thing and dutifully link back to Product A's website. This makes it look as if Product A is suddenly much more useful and valuable than maybe it actually was. In addition to that, let's say 85% of those 500 bloggers are just in it for free stuff, so their review isn't great, their copy isn't helpful, and overall it drags down the usefulness of Google search (because the algorithm is being misled by all of those links). So this is Google's official "don't do that" warning.
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 How do I get more traffic to my site?
This is the question every business owner, blogger, and site owner asks themselves. I wish I could tell you the answer was simple, quick, and easy. I really wish I could tell you it is something you only have to think about once and then never again. But I can’t do that. I like to think of search engine optimization (the blanket term I use when describing how to attract people to your website) in two ways: a recipe and process similar to baking a cake AND a process similar to planting a garden. Yes, really. Bear with me. Have your cake and eat it too! Making your site both user friendly and search engine friendly is like a baking recipe. Too much of one thing and it doesn’t work. Too little of another thing and it won’t work. The goal is to find the balance where things work together to create a tasty end result. If we’re baking a cake we need eggs, sugar, flour, milk, butter, and a few other things depending on the type of cake you are baking. Too many eggs or not enough flour and you might get something resembling a cake, but it might not be something you want to eat. Of course, Google doesn’t give us the exact recipe to make your site irresistible to search engines but there indicators and ripples that point us in the right direction. Plant You Garden and Watch it Grow I love gardening. I love the research aspect and the chance to understand what each plant needs to thrive. Clearly, I’m a research geek! If you plant a garden in hard, clay soil, the plants will have shallow roots. You’ll really need luck to grow root vegetables in hard soil (hello, stunted carrots!). If you toss up your website without doing a little research first, you’re basically planting in hard soil – and making it so much harder on yourself. But what if you did a little research into how people look for your products? Which words they use? What kind of information are they searching for? All of those answers help you loosen the soil and make it more likely your site will thrive. Both baking and gardening are all about mixing the right ingredients to get the right result. Driving traffic to your site is the same concept. So what ingredients do you use? 1) Lay the Foundations Onsite optimization including title tags, description tags, optimizing your images. I covered the five basics in my SEO 101 for Artists series Install Google Analytics and Google Webmaster. These are free tools that will allow you to stay up to date and catch any glaring errors before they happen (or at least before they get catastrophic) 2) Talk about Yourself You need to get comfortable with marketing yourself. You even need to fall in love with it a little bit. Are you talking about your business online? Are you using social media effectively? Are you reaching out to other non-competing businesses to expand each other’s reach? Social media is so much more than talking about yourself or shilling your product. 3) Be Useful and Helpful Are you blogging? Are you sharing information and being helpful? I know, I know. Not everyone wants to blog. If you hate it, don’t do it. If getting search engine traffic to your site matters, you really need to consider it. Blogging adds more entries to your website, which means it gives you the opportunity to have more visitors. At home, if a visitor came in through a window, it would be a little bit odd. But online, the more entrances to your website the better. However, like everything else, there are best practices when blogging. 4) Putting Your Name Out There If you are a local business, have you claimed all of your local citations? These are things like the yellow pages, Yelp, and other online directories. It helps Google understand your business and your location. Have you reached out to other businesses to share information and resources? 5) Planning for the long term Attracting people to your website isn’t a quick fix or something that can be done once and never again. SEO is an ongoing process that is always changing and evolving based on how real users interact with your website. Ten years ago, who would have thought that mobile phones would be the go-to device for so many users? Five years ago, a mobile-friendly site was nice, but not necessary. Now, it is necessary if you want to be competitive and user friendly. Things You May or May Not be Able to Control Site speed Search engines (and users!) want fast websites. If yours is pokey, it could cause issues. Age of your site No, it isn't necessarily fair, but it is the way things work. Search engines tend to see older sites as being both more established and reputable. After all, a search engine stays in business by returning the best possible matches to its customer. Things That Used to Work, But Don't Anymore Meta keywords Do keywords matter? Yes (although, like so many things in SEO, there are qualifiers to this). Does the "meta keywords" section of your website pages need to be filled out? 99.9% of the time the answer is no. Keyword Stuffing The thinking likely went something like this - if saying "perfect Hawaiian vacation" once works, then repeating it 10 times per 250 words must be the answer to fooling Google and getting to the top! Once upon a time that may have worked, but now it can actually penalize your site. Also? That kind of writing is painful to read and provides zero value. Buying links One of the factors Google considers important when looking at a website is who else is linking to it. The idea was that by paying a directory to link to your site, you could fool Google into thinking your site was more popular than it was. Don't do that. Earn your links. Wrapping up, be a good internet citizen. Make friends, be helpful, and don't rely on any ONE method of marketing to be the solution.  You know your website is important, but you might not realize how important it is. Your website is like a movie trailer - it lets your clients and customers know what it would be like to work with you. Everything from the images you choose to how easy (or difficult!) it is to navigate your website reveals information about your business to potential clients. When was the last time you updated your website? When was the last time you clicked on every link and reread every page? Common issues:
In many cases, your website is your customer's first interaction with your business. Your website only has 10 seconds to make a good first impression. That is how long it can take for someone to scan your website and either find what they are looking for or click away. In fact, those first 10 seconds are so important, that Google Analytics uses that as the first time marker when looking at how long someone stays on a website. The next marker is 20 seconds, and then 30 seconds. But those first 10 seconds? That's the first big hurdle. If your website is cluttered, difficult to navigate, feels dated, or simply doesn't match the customer's expectation of what your site should look like, they will hit the back button and search for a better match. Take care of your website and it will take care of you!  Part one, Introduction - click here Part two, Title and Description tags - click here Part three, Keywords and H1 tags - click here Part four, Images - click here Part five, Social Media and More - click here Things I didn't cover (on purpose) Link building - like keywords, this is a nuanced topic and it tends to make people crazy. Rule one - don't buy links. Its bad and it won't help your site. Rule number two - if your work is featured at a gallery or other public place that has a website, ask them to put a link to your website so people can find more of your work. Guest blogging - until recently, this was *the* way to get links. Recently, Google has decided it doesn't approve of this method in most cases because there were so many cases of opportunistic and bad matches that were done *just* to try and game the rankings. Don't do that. However, you can and should look at guest blogging as a way to expand your audience because you have something great to share. What does that mean for Sally? Guest blogging about her art for a carpet store? Doesn't make much sense. Guest blogging for a vet clinic? That makes sense because it is a good way to reach real people who might be interested in her work. Wrapping it all up Will making these changes put Sally's website on the first page of Google? Absolutely not. If someone tells you they can put your website on the first page of Google, they are scamming you. No one can guarantee that (at least not for a phrase someone is actually using). So why bother with SEO? Even if Sally's website is only accessed by people who are already looking for her site (that is, typing her website directly into the address bar), by making her website more appealing to real people, Sally increases the likelihood that her site will be visited and shared. If someone has to wait precious seconds for Sally's website to load or they can't easily navigate it, they may assume it is a dead end or not worth visiting again. By making her website more appealing to search engines, Sally increases the likelihood that Google will find her site to be a match for someone's query. And, of course, once someone is on her site, they will find is easy to use and worth sharing.  Part one, Introduction - click here Part two, Title and Description tags - click here Part three, Keywords and H1 tags - click here Part four, Images - click here Part six, Wrapping it All Up - click here Social Media sharing Whether you love it or hate it, social media can be a great way for artists to be seen by new eyes. But you need to do a little work to make your website preview look beautiful when it is shared. Right now, Facebook's "Open Graph" or "og" tags are the best method available. After installing "og tags" you will be able to choose which image is shared from a page as well as what the title and description look like. Pinterest, like Etsy and YouTube requires its own post, so I won't go into it here. Contact information Your name and contact information is on EVERY page of your website, right? Either at the top of the bottom and easy to find? A modern looking website OK, so your best friend designed your site back in 2009 and it would hurt her feelings if you changed it. The problem is that a site that looked "fresh" a couple of years ago now looks dated and clunky. When someone finds you online, and wants to buy something from you, it is in your best interests to make sure your website makes you look respectable and professional. This falls under "first impressions," and if you don't make a good one, your new potential clients will go somewhere else. Blog Not everyone has a burning desire to use a blog. But if you do, it is a great way to provide Google with fresh content (Google says "yum, yum" to fresh content) and connect with your audience. Stumped about what you might write about? Sally could write about:
Depending on how often Sally wants to blog, the above list could be as much as six months' worth of topics. There is a lot I could say on SEO for blogging (and I'll probably get to that in a future post), but for now I'll just say it is one of the best ways to get noticed and utilize different keywords that might attract someone to your site. List your prices Don't make someone work to find out how much your amazing creation costs. Flash/Splash pages and music that plays automatically No. Just no. Spelling and grammar check Yes. Always yes. Next - Wrapping it All Up  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  Art and SEO?Here are three things I've heard from my artist friends about SEO:
I’m not an artist (unless crude stick figures count), but I do understand SEO and I know that good SEO can help an artist’s site. Actually, I believe SEO benefits any website, but for this post, I’m just focusing on SEO for artist websites. Before we start, this isn't meant to be a comprehensive list. My goal is to make SEO more accessible to artists and creative types. You should also know I don't handle SEO in a typical way. I happily blur the lines between:
Now that you know where I'm coming from, let's get started. Imagine the internet as a giant ocean, websites as little islands in the ocean, and a search engine as a plane flying high above it all. Think of SEO as a way to send signals to the plane that say “Hey! Hey! Over here!! Look here!!” For this post, I'm going to use an imaginary artist named Sally who's passion is painting miniature pet portraits on duck eggs. I don't know if that's a thing or if there is a real Sally, but that's the example I'm using. The most basic of SEO basics or The Five Things You Can't Skip Part Two, Title and Description Tags Part Three, Keywords and H1 Tags Part Four, Images Part Five, Social Media and More Part Six, Wrapping it All Up |
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