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Digital Painting SEO Tips for Artists Five- Using Your Keywords

Timo — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:32:09 +0000

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 Four-Finding Keywords For your Art Business

Timo — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:01:23 +0000

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.

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Digital Painting SEO Tips for Artists Two-Backlinks Two

Timo — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:10:16 +0000

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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