Digital Painting SEO Tips for Artists Five- Using Your Keywords

August 31, 2009 by 2 Comments

SEO for Digital Artist, working with keywords part 3

Ok, now you have found some keywords as a part of learning digital painting SEO, what’s the big deal?  What do I need these keywords for anyway?

We will look at a few different areas where our keywords will come in handy.

1-The most important place to be using keywords is in your copy. By that I mean in the content pages you continuously add to your blog or website (if you are using a content management system). I keep coming back to adding content. Search engine spiders love  new content. If you are not adding content frequently you really don’t stand a chance of ranking very high. This is yet another area our cool looking flash sites do us a huge disservice.

Some great places for your keywords are at the top of the page, in the headline and sub headline and try to include the keyword for that page (article, post) in two additional paragraphs, the first and the last would be top choices.

Also realize that search engine spiders are not able to string phrases (yet, that I know of). So you need to use the exact keyword or keyword phrase you want to get ranked for. In the instance of this article you will see Digital Painting is my primary keyword. Also the spiders will read Digital Painting SEO, and Digital Painting SEO Tips as well. What the spiders wont put together is any of the words that are not in order. For example if I was using a keyword of “Digital Painting”  the spiders would not put that together from the title I have used here.

2- You can put your keywords in your ALT tags. Say we add a photo of a young child on our blog. We could include an ALT tag that says, “Anne poses for her baby portrait at 6 mos”, or some other phrase that includes our keywords. ALT tags consist of words. When the search engine spiders read the keywords or keyword phrases within the tag, it increases your keyword usage. Higher keyword usage means a better chances of getting higher positioning. Optimum keyword usage is 3-4%, so if your blog post has two hundred words you should utilize your primary keyword six or eight times.

3-Your domain name is probably already chosen, if not consider using your keywords in your domain name. An example of this is this blog. One of our keywords obviously is digital paint. We use it in the domain of digitalpaintmagazine.com.

4-Another area for consideration is to use your keywords in your page names. Again with a blog this is very simple to do. If you have a flash site it is much more difficult to do unless you know coding. There are a few SEO plugins that actually help make this a simple process for blogs.

Hope this helps.

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Digital Painting SEO Tips for Artists Three-Keywords

August 23, 2009 by 4 Comments

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.

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Digital Painting SEO Tips for Artists Two-Backlinks Two

August 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

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.

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