Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a webpage in organic search results. SEO requires both analytical and methodical thinking which tend to be characteristics of left-brain dominant people. Visual artists, however, are imaginative and intuitive, and the phrase “search engine optimization” or even the acronym “SEO” are non-starters for most right-brain dominant creative thinkers.
With this in mind, the topic of SEO is one in which I will tread lightly on the surface and try to synthesize into a simple 4 part to-do list that can be completed in under 2 hours from start to finish.
As a visual artist, at minimum you should aim to successfully rank your online portfolio at the top of search engine results when your name is searched. To help Google index your website you will need to familiarize yourself with meta tags and use relevant keywords.
Keywords are the words and phrases that people type or speak into search engines to find information on a topic. Simply put, keywords describe what your webpage is about.
Meta tags: page title and description
A page title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage in 50-60 characters. Your page title should accurately describe the content of the page because it will be displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result. This makes the page title especially important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. A page description tag is an HTML element that provides a brief summary of a webpage in 50-300 characters. The page description tag often appears underneath the page title on a search engine results page (SERP). As a simple exercise, take a moment to study the page title and description tags in the box below and try to identify the focus keywords. Page Title (50-60 characters): French painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor | Henri Matisse Page Description (50-300 characters): Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Were you able to correctly identify the following focus keywords?: “henri matisse”, “french painter”, “draughtsman”, “printmaker”, “sculptor”, “french artist”, and “painter”. Your objective for your own page title and page description tags is to associate your name with your chosen medium and geographic location (if you hope to be indexed for local search). Your keywords should be included once in your page title and description meta tags and once in the content of the page itself, if possible. Our Made, Eero, Milo and Eames themes feature space for a short description, which is ideal for SEO. Page speed Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads. It is important because a site that loads quickly offers a better user experience. For ideas on how to improve the page speed of your online portfolio, refer to my post on 5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Performance. Mobile optimization Mobile optimization considers site design, structure, and speed to determine whether a visitor accessing your online portfolio from a mobile device is likely to have a positive or negative experience. Each of our WordPress portfolio themes has been coded to handle images efficiently, and each has been responsively-designed to automatically adapt to the size of a user’s screen, which means your theme is built to perform well on mobile devices. 👏 Image optimization The masonry and thumbnail galleries included with our Made and Eero themes allows visual artists to take full advantage of image search optimization (i.e., ranking individual images in search results). These gallery templates are uniquely designed to assign a dedicated URL for each image in the gallery. Consider the following tips to help search engines index your portfolio images: – Image size (1500 pixels on the longest side – 72dpi – JPEG format) Helpful Tools and Resources Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack are the two most popular WordPress SEO plugins with 1+ million active installations each. Either plugin (choose only one) will allow you to easily edit your page title and description tags for each page and post of your site. The Yoast SEO blog is also an excellent resource for those interested in gaining a richer understanding of search engine optimization, as well as for those of you who are feeling up to the task of learning how to rank for high intent keywords (i.e., keywords which signify a strong intent on the part of the searcher to conduct a transaction). If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it. And of course, if you have any questions about SEO for artists or thoughts of your own to share, please leave a comment below to start a discussion.
– Image file name (include relevant keywords)
– Image caption (include relevant keywords)
– Image description (include relevant keywords)
– Image alt tag (include relevant keywords)
