SEO FOR ARTISTS, TITLE AND DESCRIPTION TAGS

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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