Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Sell Fine Art Online - Part 9: Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is such a big part of selling fine art online. How else will people find your artwork online? Search Engine Optimization refers to the act of designing or changing a website in such a way so that the website is more likely to be indexed or found by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and so on.

SEO usually refers to the how well the text, links, and code are written and formatted on a given website. When someone does a search on a particular subject or "keyword", search engines want to return with the most relevant web results possible. Search engines use links and "back links" to validate the worth of a given webpage. Google also considers a websites code— is the code up to date and how well does the website load?

When it comes to text, it's better to just to be honest and thorough with your content. Think about the perception of your site visitors — search engines do. If you are an artist who paints realistic oil paintings of Colorado landscapes,,, where is the text that talks about it. While image examples of your work are great and search engines do pick up on images, you should still have some textual content that goes into the details of your work.

Be very specific and detailed with how you write. If you're writing your biography, write it in the 3rd person. Writing in the 3rd person does 2 things:
  1. It sounds much more professional.
  2. Your name is more likely to be indexed by search engines. How is a search engine going to pick up on your name if you're constantly using the word "I".
Fresh content is really important too. Search engines like to give users the newest and most up-to-date information possible. That's why events pages, news pages, and blogs are so valuable.

Links and back links are very important. Search engines like to see that other webpages are linking to you. They also rank the value of the links that are linking to your website. The more relevant and popular a website is that links to your website the better.

Search engines consider code carefully. They don't want to send users to a website that takes forever to load or has a bunch of page errors. Broken links or links that take users to non-existent pages are also bad.

Finally, there is no such thing as instant gratification when it comes to SEO. If someone is promising you fast results they are lying. Long lasting results take time and persistence. It usually takes a few months or more to get to the top and it's usually pretty bumpy in the beginning. In the first couple of months you'll probably see some ups and downs. Good seo requires constant updates and new back links to valuable sites.

Interested in a search engine friendly artist website? Learn about our artist memberships.


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