Matts Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, discusses tips for improving your search engine ranking in this YouTube video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GK0aQrCDEo. The video is a few years old but still relevant. His suggestions are simple, non-technical and can be implemented by any website owner.
Posts Tagged: Website Tips
SEO Tips from a Google Insider
Thursday, September 22, 2011SEO Quick Tip #6
Wednesday, June 1, 2011Links 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.
SEO Quick Tip #5
Monday, May 16, 2011Quality 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”.
SEO Quick Tip #4
Saturday, April 30, 2011Meta 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.
SEO Quick Tip #3
Thursday, March 24, 2011Play 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.
Keep the Content of Your Website Focused
Wednesday, March 2, 2011Lately I have run into a number of rather unfocused websites. It seems the owners of these websites work as accountants by day, teach yoga at night, sell cars on the weekends and, oh yeah, in their free time they are artists. I know that many people enjoy a multi-faceted life, but really, if you want to be taken seriously as a professional in any of these fields, they shouldn’t all be included in the same website. I’m not sure if this is an attempt to cut costs but maybe they should save their money altogether. A website is a business tool and should be approached in a professional manner. You wouldn’t try to cram all of these activities into the same office space, would you? Of course not, you’d look ridiculous. So why would you do it on your website?
Try to keep your site focused and relevant. Now of course if your love of dance informs your paintings, it is perfectly reasonable to include this reference on your website. I am speaking of sites where all the disparate parts have no relation to each other, with separate menu items for getting your taxes done or balancing your chi. If you run two different businesses, they should each have their own website. Of course as artists our outside interests and hobbies effect our work, just try not to veer so far of track that visitors to your site are confused as to what it is your website is all about.
SEO Quick Tip #2
Wednesday, February 16, 2011Describe 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.
Build Bridges to your website
Tuesday, February 15, 2011They 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.
SEO Quick Tip #1
Monday, January 24, 2011Search 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.
Be careful of your email program’s spam filters
Friday, January 14, 2011Spam filters on email are great time savers; they weed out a lot of garbage that we don’t want to see. But, they also trap a great many legitimate emails too.
If you use a spam filter, make sure it is not set to “auto delete” messages- have it put them in a junk or bulk mail folder. In addition, before you permanently delete the messages your junk mail folder, peruse through them and make sure no legitimate emails got caught in there.