Art News and Updates from Gallereo

Tuesday 09th November 2010Things You Can Do To Make Your Artist or Photographer Website Successful Online

So you've got yourself a new website, you've uploaded all of your artworks or photographs and added in your content. That's phase one of having a successful website - having one that is full of great things for people to look at and read.

The following are our recommendations for giving your website the best start possible for when you are ready to launch:

1) Get Your Own Domain Name

Make sure your website is running on your own domain name, not a sub domain such as www.myartwebsite.gallereo.com. This is important for looking professional and putting out a good image, as well as being important for search engines understanding who you are.

2) Get Involved in Social Media

You might not be a big fan of Facebook or Twitter, but these sorts of platforms can make people aware of who you are and what you do. Create a page or an account about you as an artist or a photographer, and let people know when you have created some new works or have an exhibition coming up. You can then link these into your website so that people who are interested can find out more about you.

3) Search Engine Optimisation

Try and get to grips with search engine optimisation (SEO). The more you can do here, the more chance your website has of doing well. We have written some previous blog posts about SEO, including one on researching your keywords, and also one about on-site optimisation. We always recommend Search Engine Optimization for Dummies as a great book for anyone wanting a comprehensive, but straightforward take on things as well.

4) Set up Google Analytics

Make sure that you are able to track how much traffic is coming to your website and where they are coming from. Find out where in the world they are located and what keywords they are using to find your website. All of these things can help you to develop your site and your SEO campaign accordingly.

5) Google Webmaster Tools

Grab yourself an account on Googles webmaster tools and submit your website. This ensures that the Google search bots make the rounds to your website and start listing your pages in the search engines. You can also find information here about any problems that the search bots have with your site, such as if pages can't be crawled for any reason or your site has broken links.

6) Tell Anyone and Everyone

Possibly the easiest thing for you to do. You have a new website, so don't be shy about it; tell people. The more people you tell, the more people that will look at it and the more you might find people recommending you. The more people that know about your website, the better.

These are just a few things that you can do as your launch your website out into the big wide WWW. If you have any other suggestions, or things that worked well for you when you launched your website - let us know!

Posted on November 09th 2010 on 02:32pm
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Labels: books, seo

Saturday 17th July 2010On-Site Search Engine Optimisation and Gallereo

To come back to looking at keywords and the on-site optimisation of your artist or photographer website, let's have a look at some of the search engine options available with Gallereo and why they are important, not matter what sort of creative website you have.

For the pages across your site there is an SEO Settings tab, which allows you to edit your on-site keywords so that each individual page can be best optimised to draw traffic from the search engines. On these tabs there are a number of key fields, which are:

Browser Title

This is the information that is shown in the web browser that lets you know the title for the page that you are on. This is also the name that will appear if you open a new browser tab or bookmark the page. You should make sure that your best keywords are incorporated here, and try and make each page title a little bit different. These title keywords are one of the first things that search engines look at when they are trying to decide whether your site is relevant to bring up in any given search.

Page URL Keywords

These are the keywords that sit after your domain name: www.domain.com/these-are-the-keywords. It is really helpful to optimise your site with the keywords in your URLs as this is something else that search engines really pay attention to. Aside from the search engines, this also lets visitors know a little more about the page that they are visiting.

Image Hidden Keywords (Alt Tags)

Search engines cannot read images, they can only read text. So no matter how great your pictures are, they don't really mean anything to the search engines....unless you make use of Alt Tags, which are hidden keywords attached to the images on a page. You should add in keywords to describe the pictures on the page, making sure to include your chosen keywords. The keywords can be comma separated, they do not need to be in full sentences.

Meta Keywords

For the meta keywords field, this is where you list your keywords for that page. The browser title, page URL keywords and Alt Tags should be kept fairly short, but here you can have up to 15 keywords. Our recommended limit is 15, the reason being that search engines do not like to see 'keyword stuffing' or the overuse of your keywords. These meta keywords will not appear at the front end of your website, but they will be read by search engine bots come to find out what your site is about.

Meta Description

The meta description is again read by the search engines and will not appear at the front end of your own site, but this description might appear in places such as the short description that follows the website title in Google search listings. For this reason, you want to make sure you use your keywords here, but also make sure you write in full sentences that humans can read!

These are the main fields that you should fill with your keywords in order to optimise your website for the search engines and hopefully draw lots of interested traffic who will become interested in your work. Aside from these fields you should also make sure that you use your keywords in the written content on your site. Search engines love lots of content, and you have a perfect opportunity to really let people know what you're about by creating it.

Posted on July 17th 2010 on 04:49pm
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Labels: seo

Saturday 03rd July 2010Keywords for your artist or photographer website.

We started off last week talking about SEO and how it can really push your website forward by helping you to draw as much traffic as possible. The first thing you should think about when it comes to SEO is your keywords and key phrases. These should be words that represent what you do and what you offer, and they should be as focused and unique as they can be.

The idea is that you will use these keywords and phrases to target your audience, and your audience is people out there who are using the internet to search for the sort of things that you offer.

An example could be that you are a landscape photographer who has a website where you display images of your local landscape, which happens to be the Lake District in Cumbria, UK. A very picturesque area!

The sort of keywords you would be looking to use for your site would be things like:

Landscape photography Cumbria
Photographs of the Lake District
Lake District photographers UK
Cumbrian photographs
Photographs of the Cumbrian landscape

You get the idea. These are basically keywords and phrases targeting the same audience, but slightly varied to cover the varied way in which people may search for the subject matter.

The overall aim here is to use these keywords throughout your website, both in your text and in your on-site SEO settings. This is so that search engines understand, and can see, that your website would be useful to anyone looking for that subject.

A key thing to remember when trying to come up with your keywords is that there are likely to be a lot of other people targeting the same audience. Your job is to find keywords with a lot of traffic but not a lot of competition from other artist or photographer websites.

Google Adwords is primarily a tool for advertising on Google, but you can sign up for free and use their keyword tool to find out things like how many people have searched for a particular keyword and how high the competition level is. This can really help you to narrow down effective keywords.

Our next SEO post will look at how to implement your keywords on your Gallereo website with the SEO tabs that we have created for you and in your site content. In the meantime, happy keyword hunting.

Posted on July 03rd 2010 on 12:08pm
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Labels: photography, seo

Saturday 26th June 2010Artist Websites and Beyond

Most artists, whether they enjoy art as a hobby and want to share their work with as many people as possible, or whether they are cruising to be the next Turner Prize winner, understand the need to have a website to show their work.

A website is the front line of attack for an artist. It gives space to display and sell work, to advertise exhibitions and events and to offer a direct line of constant contact to fans and collectors.

So step 1 - get a website. Then what? What else can you do to make that website a really effective tool?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website more appealing to search engines like Google so that you are listed as high as possible in their rankings, and therefore are likely to get more visitors to your site.

SEO isn't rocket science, but it is time consuming, so to help you out, we're going to be listing basic things that you can do to optimise your website. Keep an eye on the SEO label in the labels box to the right for each of our updates.

Firstly, you may have noticed in your Gallereo admin pages, a tab called SEO Settings. We have made it really easy for you to set up SEO onsite by giving you all of the fields that you need to complete on these tabs. We'll start to take a look at these over the next week, as well as the importance of keywords.

If you're interested in finding out more right away, or want a comprehensive overview of SEO I can highly recommend Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. It certainly helped me to get to grips with everything!

Posted on June 26th 2010 on 12:05pm
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Labels: seo

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