If you’ve read the EmptyEasel articles on describing artwork for Google, or the one on getting links to your art site, you know that there’s more to having your art found online than just putting up a blog or website.
So here’s another SEO tip for artists: write unique “meta descriptions” for every article or artwork you put online.
Meta descriptions are simply short sections of code (invisible to human readers) which explain your article to the search engines. If you examined the code behind a webpage, the meta description would look something like this:
<Meta name=”description” content=”A short explanation of the webpage goes here.” />
The best meta descriptions contain a short paragraph that uses the same words and phrases that appear in the title and the text of your article. Mostly it’s just another hint to the search engines that they should send visitors based on those words, but many search engines will also show that paragraph in their search results pages.
Of course, since free blogging programs are set up to be as simple as possible, adding a special bit of code to each blog post usually isn’t allowed. (And I wouldn’t suggest trying it unless you know what you’re doing.)
But there are two reasons I decided to write about meta descriptions anyway:
First, because it’s likely that some of the more popular blogging programs like Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and Typepad.com will eventually make this really simple and allow bloggers to write an extra paragraph along with every article. That paragraph would then become the meta description automatically.
And second, because at least one blogging program out there already has an easy meta description tool, and you may want to try it out. It’s the program I use, which is a full version of Wordpress installed on my own domain.
To use Wordpress yourself, you’ll need to register a domain name, pay for hosting somewhere, and download a free copy of Wordpress. If you’re interested you can read more at Wordpress.org.
Now, it’s not worth switching from another blogging program to Wordpress just for the meta descriptions. They’re not that important.
For example, Katherine Tyrrell has a very successful art blog through blogger.com, and there are no meta descriptions for her pages.
In the end, meta descriptions are just another little piece to the SEO puzzle—if you can use them, do. If not, focus on other SEO tips here and don’t sweat it too much.