Art Studios Online - Blog

Links in to your website from .gov, .edu, .mil websites may carry slightly more weight because these domains are not available on the open market. Try to get links into your site from place like your state’s art agency or the college where you teach art classes.

Quality inbound links are important. Links should come from well respected websites related to what you do, not random links from unrelated sites or “link farms”.

Meta tags are not as important as they used to be. In fact rep’s from Google have stated that they don’t even look at the “keywords” metatag anymore. This means that the words you use to describe yourself and your artwork in the body of your website are much more important.

Play up your location, people may search for local artists, or for artists in a location they have visited or plan to visit. In addition, if your subject matter or media is local, say coastal paintings in the mid-atlantic or gourd art in the southwest, describing your art in context to your location may result in better search engine rankings.

Describe your subject matter- people may be interested in and therefore search for a particular genre. More specific searches are easier to rank well for than generic ones.

They say no man is an island. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of websites.

When you put up a website, it is usually just that, an island with no bridges to it in the form of links. This makes it very difficult for both people and search engines to find.

So how can you remedy this situation? The best solution is to find other websites related to what you do and ask them to add links to your website. However, do not go out and ask any and every random site to link to yours and never pay a “link farm” for a listing.

Inbound links should come from sites that make sense and are relevant to what you do: other artists you know, art groups you belong to, shows you participate in, your state’s art agency, the college where you teach art classes- you get the idea.

Search engines can only read text. So if you want your website to rank well, you need to actually talk about yourself and your artwork on it.

There are legitimate businesses that specialize in what is called “Search Engine Optimization”. It has been our experience, however, that most of them do not send out random emails to website owners.

Be wary of anyone who claims they can guarantee you top search engine results. No one can do that. Some tactics employed by these unscrupulous companies can even get you blacklisted by search engines.

Rather than paying someone hundreds or even thousands of dollars for search engine optimization, we recommend that you look closely at the content on your website and make sure that it is keyword rich and relevant. In addition, you should seek links from organizations and associations related to your art.

For a while there it seems like every website I came across had all sorts of Flash content, rampant animations, fancy impossible to navigate links, spinning plates and spitting fire (just kidding- kind of).

Unfortunately Flashed based websites are not really great for Search Engine visibility. When Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc get to these sites they basically just  see a line that says “run this flash file”. They have no way of seeing what’s on the website.

In addition, neither the iPhone or the iPad support Flash- that is, they won’t run it at all. So, unless your website has an HTML “shadow” site (and not many do), your website won’t show up at all.

We advocate the use of basic HTML websites- all of our template and custom sites are HTML based.

This doesn’t mean your website has to be plain or boring. Flash and other technologies such as animated gif files and javascript can be use to spice the site up. The key is to use them where they are appropriate and only in moderation.

The bulk of your website content should be in HTML, a language that allows search engines to see the actual content on your website.