Digital Art demonstration with free art software

We have been going on about SEO and Art marketing stuff for a while now. There is still much to come about keywords, backlinks, site structure and why a CMS (content management system) like WordPress or Joomla will out perform a website most of the time.  All of the time if, like me, you are a mere mortal and don’t want to take the time to be a webmaster and learn coding and all of that mess. Wrong side of the brain for me.

So, that being said here is a cool video from David Revoy. What I like is that this is produced from open source (read free) art software. We will be looking at some of these in the near future. The other thing I particularly like is the process in which David works. I learned digital painting from a variety of master painters and still am learning more chops each day. One of the things in my work-flow a bit different than some is I use what I call chaos, (Andrew Jones coined it…I think) Very similar to the “muck-up” phase of painting just a tic different. David Revoy employs chaos here as well. Don’t worry if you are not a free hand artist, you can still employ chaos in the workflow of painting from photo reference. Enjoy.

Digital painting time-lapse : Lezard from David REVOY on Vimeo.

Digital Painting SEO Keywords part two

Finding Keywords for your art business is really not hard now days. It is actually kind of fun. There are many free keyword research tools, here are a few you can use: Google’s Wonder Wheel, Keyword Tool, Google Insights, Wordtracker’s Lab tools; and my favorite Market Samurai.

If you are going the free route, check them out and compare the results. I use the paid version of Market Samurai and it the best software investment I have made, including the digital painting software and digital imaging software like Corel Painter, Photoshop (Adobe Master Collection), Paint Shop Pro…you get the idea.

Market Samurai cost 149.00 and I use it daily for all kinds of task’s related to running my online art and information businesses. You can get a free trial at the link listed above and once your trial expires you still can you the three tools specific to keyword research, those are; rank tracker, keyword research and SEO Competition.

The best bet to learn how to find your unique keywords for your digital paintings, portrait commissions, pet portraits or whatever, is to get your free trial from Market Samurai. After you download it go through their video’s on keyword research. I can tell you I have personally spent 1,000’s of dollars for courses to learn this. Many of those courses did not have as good of training as the video series.

One thing I will talk about here that is not in the videos is what is called Geo-targeting. Most artist and digital photographers especially want to dominate their local market first and then spread from there.

To do this is really not all that difficult with your blog. With your flash website…maybe impossible. Lets say one of your studio’s primary target markets is heirloom children’s portraiture. You find a few keywords that support that and one of them is “Childrens Photography”

You can see below that there are 325 searches daily for this keyword and there are 205,000 competing pages.

Now if you live in Arizona and used “Children’s Photography Phoenix” it will narrow the searches to …not many. The good news is also narrows the competition, usually to 0. So you will begin to capture the traffic from the “local” group of potential buyers looking for Children’s Photography.

Next up-what do we do with these crazy keywords anyway?

Here is a video on using wordtracker. NOTE!!! This has music, if you are at work turn down the volume first, he he he.

Digital Painting SEO tips-Keywords part one

We are going to take a quick peek at keywords.  First, what are keywords?

Keywords are the words or phrases that a potential client types in the search engine to find you. These keywords are what the search engine algorithm finds to deliver the desired content to the person seeking information.

So if you are a digital artist specializing in children’s portraituresome of your keywords might be, children’s portraiture, commission a portrait, children’s paintings ect. The idea here is to figure out what your client base would put in the search engine search box to find you.

Using keywords is critical. Search engine spiders rely on these words to find your site.  This is one of the big challenges to using a cool looking flash site. They sure are pretty but a very simple site with lots of content,  that is, copy that will answer your potential clients’ questions will smoke a pretty website in terms of traffic. As visual artist that is a challenge. We need a site that is representational of our work but still has lots of content. That is one reason you really have to have a blog. Dump the flash website and replace it with a site that you can add plenty of keyword rich copy. Hard to swallow I know.

Using the proper keywords is just as important. For example if you are an artist  I probably would not use artist as one of my keywords. Why? It is way to competitive and you really don’t stand a chance of anyone ever find you when they type in “artist” in the search engine box. It is way to competitive. A better way for you to do this would be to narrow it down. Use “Children’ s Portrait Artist, Denver” instead. You will have a much better shot at someone finding you with that keyword.

So ideally you want to use high traffic and low competition keywords.  And the only competition we should ever be concerned with are the websites in the Top 10 of the search engines. Outside of that is pretty much useless.

So how do we find keywords and where/how do we use them?  That will be the next post. Then we can get back to backlinks again. Bored?  Check out some of the tutorials or brushes on the resource pages.

Why do we want to learn SEO and optimize our blogs, images, videos or websites anyway? What does all of this have to do with my art?

Great question. If you just want to create awesome digital art or learn to use some of the best painting software, you don’t have to trouble yourself with any of this boring stuff. If you want people to see your latest digital masterpiece, fantasy art, children’s portraiture or to commission  more work using the internet, it becomes critical.  The good news is that many simple little steps can make a huge difference for you. Also in terms of the marketplace, you will have an advantage over those who you compete with.

So hang in there with these articles, they will be short and simple. They have to be as I am certainly NOT an SEO expert.

In the last post we addressed the question of backlinks, that is, what are they?  In the next few posts we can determine if they are important and why.

The question is; are backlinks necessary for a high search engine ranking?

An easy answer is, maybe. We haven’t really talked much about keywords yet but the backlink question is directly related to how competitive the keyword is that you are talking about ranking for. If you are trying to rank for a super competitive keyword, you will have to have a ton of backlinks for that keyword.  If, on the other hand you are trying to rank for a less competitive keyword, the backlinks in that case may not be as important. Learning to optimize your web-page properly could be enough to get you there. We will be talking about some ways to optimize your web pages and blogs down the road.

Also, don’t fret. We will definitely have much more in terms of digital painting tips and techniques, digital painting software uses and reviews as well as some digital painting video tutorials. Hang tight this stuff will be worth it.

Digital Painting SEO tip #1.

I am currently having a blast teaching some classes at our local community college. Also I am currently taking an SEO class online. I want to post a short series on SEO (search engine optimization). This will be pulled from questions that come up in the classes. The class I am teaching is a beginner’s class and like always has a variety of levels of understanding.

My titles of the posts will be optimized for what we do here on Digital Paint Magazine Blog, but the tips and techniques are obviously good for any web based business. Some will be items to implement other questions will be vocabulary type questions.

The first is. “What are backlinks?”

Great question Backlinks are a clickable link on one site that points to another site. Hhhhruh?

Okay if you check out the links area on our blog you will see links to John Derry’s Pixel Art Blog, a link to Marilyn Sholin’s  Digital Painting Forum and many other’s on the side bar here. Those links on this page are backlink’s  for whoever it is pointing to. So there is a backlink for John and a backlink for Marilyn using the example just from the sidebar on our front page.