Back in my college days, when I was still learning HTML, I created my first online art portfolio. It was a simple gallery of clickable thumbnails, but I was very excited at the possibility of thousands of people viewing my drawings. That excitement quickly faded though, as the weeks and months passed and no one (aside from me) visited the website. I knew there were millions of people viewing art online, so why weren’t they visiting my website? I didn’t know the answer then, but I do now. Because they couldn’t find it.
It’s a common story: you shell out hard-earned cash for a beautifully designed gallery website that doesn’t get any visitors. That’s because many newcomers to the web make the same mistake that I did when creating my website: they overlook search engine friendliness.
Search engines send huge numbers of art lovers to millions of websites every day. So what can you do to make it easier for them to find your site?
Get a Clue
Search engines like Google and Yahoo use a series of clues to decipher the topic of your website and decide what searches it should appear for. Some of these clues are in the text and HTML code of your web pages. If you fail to include them (or don’t create them properly) it will be more difficult for people to find your website when they search. No worries though, this is a relatively easy problem to remedy with just a basic knowledge of HTML editing.
Get On Target
The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t done so already, is to decide on the focus of your website. Are you selling art or creative services? Are you promoting shows or new projects? Maybe you’re just interested in sharing your creations with the world. You’ve got to decide. Who are your clients, fans, or customers and how would they search for you? Your marketing efforts will be far more effective if your goals are clear.
With your goals and target audience in mind, you need to figure out what phrases people might search for when they’re looking for artwork/services like yours. For example, if you’re selling landscape paintings of Arizona sunsets, you might want to show up for searches like “Arizona landscape painting”, “buy landscape paintings”, or “sunset painting”. If you’re promoting graphic design services in Philadelphia, you’d benefit from searches like “graphic designer Philadelphia” or “logo design PA”. The lists go on and on, with every logical permutation of these phrases possibly getting searched. These phrases are called “keywords”, and they are an essential part of your online marketing efforts.
With a little bit of time and some special online tools, you can find out what’s getting searched in your art-niche. Google offers a great free tool that can help: the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool will tell you which phrases people are searching for, how often they are searched, and how many advertisers are competing for them in Adwords. Here’s how you use it:
Create a “seed list” of phrases (each should be 2 words or more) off the top of your head that you’d like your website to show for in a search.
Paste them into the form in the Keyword Tool.
Now you’ve got a much bigger list of terms that are similar or related to your seed list. Sort through the list and keep the phrases that make sense. Remove phrases that are irrelevant or never searched. (this list can be exported to Excel)
When deciding which keywords to use on your website, there are a few things to keep in mind. Some searchers are looking for art or creative services, and others are just looking for information. A search for something general like “fine art” is probably an informative search, and not likely to yield any art sales or client referrals. However, a more specific search like “graphic designer Atlanta GA” could be a potential paycheck. If you’re selling artistic services within a specific city or state, keywords that include them are ideal.
Make sure the keywords you choose are relevant to your website…don’t be tempted to use broad terms just to capture more visitors. It’s better to have a small stream of visitors buying your arts and services than a large river of visitors who just end up leaving your site. A quality visitor is someone who is interested in your art or service, so focus on quality over quantity.
Now you’ve got a long list of focused “keywords” that you can use to target your pages at people who are interested in your work. Review these and pick out 5-10 of the phrases you think are most important for your website…these will be your “core” keywords.
Making Headlines
With your keyword list in hand, take a look at the pages on your website. You need to decide which phrases in your keyword list belong on which pages. Group keywords with similar themes and assign each theme to a page (or group of pages) on your website. Each page should focus on one or two core terms and one or two of the less important terms on your list. Make sure the keywords you assign are related to the content of the page.
Adding these keywords on your website pages increases the odds that your site will appear when people search for your keywords on Google or Yahoo. The most important part of your webpage for keywords is the TITLE tag in your HTML.
Each HTML page in your website needs to have a unique, descriptive TITLE tag that ideally includes one or two of your core keywords. It should be short and tell a potential visitor what they will find on this web page. Put your most important keyword phrase at the front of the description, and don’t clutter it with unnecessary words.
Say It With Words
Ideally, your website pages should include some of your keywords in the text on each page. Add keyword phrases to the text on your pages in places where they make sense and read logically. You may want to rewrite some of the text on your website to include more keywords, but don’t go overboard. Avoid repeating the same keywords (unless it makes sense to do so) and make sure that your sentences sound natural. Don’t try to cram too many keywords together…one or two per page is best.
If you don’t have much text on your pages or you can’t fit your keywords in, don’t sweat. Continue reading and you’ll learn a few other places that you can use to leverage your keywords. Again, bear in mind that you don’t want to have your pages saturated with keywords…too much repetition will sabotage your efforts. Use each phrase on your page only once or twice. Your pages should read naturally and accommodate the needs of your visitors.
Missing Links
Another clue that search engines look at is the links ON a page (that take the visitor to other web pages within your site or someone else’s) and the links going TO a page (from other pages within your site or someone else’s).
Each text link on your website shows itself to visitors as a clickable word or phrase. If the clickable text links on your page include some of your keywords, it tells Google that your page probably has information on that topic. When linking to other pages within your own website, take every advantage to use keywords in your links when appropriate. For example, your home page might link to your photo gallery with the keyword “Portrait Photography” instead of “Click here to see my gallery”. Links like these allow the search engines like Yahoo and Google to correctly categorize your website pages and show them to the appropriate searchers.
On the Menu
If you’re using text links for the menus on your website, then you have another opportunity to include keywords on your pages. Since menu links usually appear on every page of your website, they help define the way search engines see your pages. As with the other links on your site, make your menu text short, descriptive, and include keywords where appropriate. Visitors to your website should be able to easily understand the contents of your website with a glance at your menu.
Let’s suppose you’re a graphic designer and your website has a page with an overview of identity design services. Instead of creating a menu link that says “Services”, you’d want to use your core keyword for that page: “Corporate Identity Design”. Because the keyword is in the linked text, Google will associate that web page with that search phrase (and possibly related phrases).
Map Quest
Google (and other search engines) actually discovers all of the pages on your site automatically by following links on the web. Sometimes, though, it can get confused and miss a page or two. So your best bet is to have a “sitemap”.
A sitemap is basically a web page containing a categorized index of all the pages in your website. It should contain links to every page on your website, if possible. Make a link to your sitemap in an out-of-the way spot on your homepage where it will be easy to find. This is a useful feature for search engine friendliness and a good tool for your visitors.
What’s In A Name?
Each HTML page on your website has its own filename (e.g. index.html, gallery.html). You can use your core keywords in these filenames to reinforce their connection with your pages.
Your home page probably needs to be named index.html or something similar (depending on how your web server is setup). But the rest of your pages can be named whatever you decide. Use your core keywords to name your pages, separating the words with hyphens (dashes) like this:
Phoenix-portrait-painter.html
Corporate-identity.html
Again, keep these names short and on-topic. Make sure each of the main pages in your website has an accurate, descriptive filename.
Everything in Moderation
Keep in mind that each of these suggestions are optional, you don’t need to use every single one on every single page. However, you should try to use a few of them on the most important pages in your website. The key is not to overload your page or your site with too much repetition of the same terms. You should have more than one relevant keyword on your list for each of your pages. Switch them up: use core keywords in the TITLE tag and on menu links and some less important keywords in the body and H1 tags.
You can design your website and its contents so that they are easy for visitors to understand while still providing the clues search engines need to bring visitors to your website. Be sensible in your use of these clues and Google might find you some new fans or a paycheck!