Have you ever thought about the number of visitors, or lack thereof, that come directly to your art blog from the search engines? And if so, did you ever stop to consider the importance of those visitors for your art business?
When a person uses a search engine (like Google, or Bing) to look for a specific type of art, you WANT to be the artist they find. Even better, if they are able to discover your art blog within the first two pages of the search engines results, their guard will be down and they will be more inclined to buy.
Why is that? Because they found you naturally. . . without someone, or some type of advertisement, trying to push you on them. Of course, it could also simply be because they were in the mood to buy and they saw that you had exactly what they were looking for before the got to another artist’s website!
Below are 7 simple steps for getting the search engines to take notice of your art blog.
1. Stay on topic
The search engines like it when they can easily figure out what your blog is about, so stick to the topic at hand—your art.
Talk about why you create, where you create, and how you create. Talk about your clients and why they purchased your art. Talk about your sales venues: galleries, art fairs, online markets. And if you want to share something personal, find a way to relate it to your art business.
2. Create strong blog post titles
The title of your blog post is the first things visitors see when searching the web, so don’t focus on writing something cute or witty. Instead, create titles that are clear and concise and tell readers exactly what the post will be about about.
Remember to put keywords relating to your topic in the title of your post, too. . . those keywords will help search engines understand what the page is about, and improve the chances that people will see your blog post titles in the first place.
3. Write keyword optimized posts
Sticking to a single topic for each blog post makes it easier for the search engines to figure out what your post is about.
If you can be even more specific, and use a single keyword, or keyword phrase, multiple times in your title or text, you’ll have a much stronger chance of getting on the first page of the search engine results. The trick is to make your blog posts easily-readable for humans, too.
One popular rule of thumb is to use your keyword, or keyword phrase, at least once every 200 words. There are other considerations too, however. (Learn more about keyword targeting here.)
4. Optimize your video pages
Set up a channel on YouTube.com, then optimize that channel by writing text that talks about your art and links back to your art blog in the description area.
5. Optimize your social networks
It’s not enough to join social networks and forums, you need to tell the community where to find you (your website) and when you do, you also tell the search engines. . . thus giving your art blog a little more credibility.
6. Ping the search engines
Beyond writing search engine friendly content, it’s also a good idea to let the search engines know you exist. The more links you put online through guest posting, forum posts, and social media the better, but there’s another method, too:
You can sign up for a pinging service, a service that automatically notifies the search engines that you’ve written a new post. One such place is Ping-O-Matic. Another is Weblogs.com.
7. Submit your art blog to directories
Human edited directories, like Dmoz (at www.dmoz.org), may not bring your art blog a lot of visitors, but the search engines still love them. That’s because these kinds of directories are still curated by a real live person, who visits your website and makes sure your description of the site is accurate.
If everything checks out, they add your website to the right directory list, and this sends a clear signal that your art blog is on the up-and-up.
No matter what your goals are for your art blog, the simplest and easiest way to get more visitors is to learn a little bit about search engine optimization, and then apply that knowledge to your blog posts, your guest posts, and your social networks. You’ll be glad you did!
This post may contain affiliate links.