If you are unhappy with the number of visitors to your art website, here are some free online directories you should immediately have your art website listed on. Today, being listed with online directories is a necessity for any artist, who would like to drive more traffic to their art website and to grow their art business.
Online directory listings not only spread the word about you and your art through increased publicity, but they also help search engines find your listing. In addition, the listing creates a link back to your art website, which helps with your page rank too. These benefits result in more website traffic and potentially more exposure and art sales.
Below are 10 free business directories on which your business listing and art website should be listed;
1. Bing Local
3. DMOZ.org
6. Local.com
9. Yahoo Local
10. Yelp.com
Additional benefits of having your art website and business listed on as many directories as possible are;
1. Free publicity for you and your art.
2. Being listed in directories helps to gain and surpass the competition in your art niche.
3. Directory information is easy to edit as events and your art business changes.
4. Listings bring free targeted traffic to your website.
There are literally hundreds of free business directories in which to get your art listed. Type “Free Business Directory” in the search feature of Google and start registering your art business. To make the listing effective, complete the entire listing. The contact data is the most important. Always have a profile picture or profile logo to help your listing stand out. Good luck!
We have all done it. In our rush to post our art to our art websites, we upload the image of our art without optimizing that image, in order to help search engines to find and index that art. Why is this important to an artist? If you want to attract more visitors to your art website, it is essential that your art images be optimized for any of the most important search engines such as Google, Bing, and AOL.
How can an artist optimize their images for search engines? First, an artist should always label their image file names with a keyword rich title. Let us assume that we love to paint different trees. Our website contains images of trees and we want the world to discover our website and our paintings of trees. How can we upload and label our image files properly in order to be found by the search engines? An image file name should be as descriptive of the image as possible. A file name of DSC_00254 will be ignored when indexed but the file name Watercolor-Florida-Palm-Tree will be indexed, as it contains descriptive searchable keywords.
In addition to the file name being searchable, all images should also have searchable titles. A searchable title would contain a short description and incorporate using keywords in the title. An example would be Oak-Tree-Leaves, rather than Tree-DSC_00254.
Any uploaded images should also contain a description of the image or what is known as “Alt Attribute” or “Alt Text”. Since a search engine cannot “see” an image they need a reference device which describes to them exactly what the image is. This is known as an Alt Text or Alt Attribute and it provides to the search engines with important information when they crawl your website and index that image. Therefore, an Alt Attribute should be crafted with care, be brief and contain a keyword rich title and description of the image. For example, an alt attribute of Tree is better than DSC_00254. An alt attribute of Maple-Tree is better than Tree. An alt attribute of Old-Maple-Tree is better than Maple-Tree.
Other things that you should be aware of and which will enhance your chances of having your image indexed, is that any of the text on the page that the image appears should be related to that image. It is extremely helpful if the text also has some of the same keywords that the image title and image description contains. Any links on that page should also be related in some form to the image as well.
Finally, if possible, if the actual image contains a link to another page related to that image then the rank for that image will be much higher than a non-linked image.
Try the above suggestions and when taken together and incorporated when posting images to your art website, the chances of your art being discovered increases dramatically. Also, if images that are already posted on your website are not described, named and titled properly, go back and take some time to bring your images up to date. By accomplishing this, you are doing one more thing that most artists are not doing when it comes to marketing their art and increasing the number of visitors to their website.
If you are not familiar with or have not used Google Alerts to find art opportunities, this article can be a very important new tool for you to use on a regular basis. Google Alerts will help you monitor very specific sections and segments in your area of expertise or it can be a great research tool for areas and subjects that you would like to be involved with in the future.
Google Alerts will monitor all, or separately the following areas of the Internet; news, blogs, video and discussion groups and/or there is an “everything” tab which includes all of them. The alert is based on your query, term or subject and the results can be provided to you as it happens, once a day or once a week. The alerts can be received in an email or in an RSS Feed. To benefit from this, you need to have a Google account (it is a free account).
Here are 6 ways to use Google Alerts to help find new art opportunities and to push your art career to the next level:
1. Content Monitoring
Google Alerts provides an artist with a way in which they can monitor their article content once it has been published on the Internet. This monitoring can be employed in order to see if anyone is using their article content elsewhere. Possibly it is being used somewhere else on the Internet and the artist is not being given the proper credit for the article or the links back to the artist have been disabled in this content. The way in which this is done is to put into the alert section a sentence of the article and Google will match that sentence or parts of that sentence and provide the link to you. Google Alerts provides an excellent way in which to oversee and monitor the artist’s written works.
2. Monitor Who Is Linking to Your Website & Blog
By placing your domain name in Google Alerts query (example: www.yoursitename.com) anytime someone were to link their site to your website you would receive an alert. Why have they done this? Find out and do some research, as they may have clients/customers that you would also like to have too. It is time to find out what everyone is doing out there, don’t you think?
In addition, there may be linking opportunities for you to link your website in order to help your page rank.
3. Keyword for Research in your Art Niche
With Google Alerts the artist can monitor several keywords that are used for and about their art or for their art business. The keyword alerts will provide to the artist with interesting links to what other artists and related professionals are doing. In addition, the alerts will also provide the artist with ideas and hints for other keywords, subjects and related topics that could enhance the marketing and selling of their art too as well.
4. Monitor Art News and Opportunities in your Art Niche
As an artist who specializes in a specific art form and who are looking for opportunities, Google Alerts is a great tool to use. Assume you are a photographer and you are looking for art galleries and photography competitions where your photography may fit. For example, the artist could set up Google Alerts for “photography art galleries”, “photography competitions”, “photography exhibitions”, or “photography gallery opportunities”. These search terms and phrases can all be further refined to geographic areas if required.
An artist, depending on what they are after, will need to try different terms and experiment with different phrases and queries in order to make this process effective. This process is no different than an artist refining keywords for a website or for a PPC campaign. See what works or does not work and further refine as you go along.
5. Target Keywords to Find Customers
I have a friend who has always been interested in art for hospitals, art therapy, healing art and evidence-based art. She set up several Google Alerts for art in hospitals and for art therapy programs. Every day she receives alerts that provide her with ideas, information, news, and opportunities in her specialty of hospital art.
6. Reputation Management
By placing your name or company name, and even with misspellings, the artist is able to monitor what is known as “reputation management”. This would provide the artist with alerts whenever that name showed up or was used on the Internet (good and bad). If something was being said about the artist in any group or forum, then the artist could take the appropriate steps to combat this because of this alert. Google Alerts are almost “real time”, depending on how this feature is set in terms of notifications.
What is your area of interest in art? Where are your opportunities to sell your art? Where are your prospects and potential customers? Try Google Alerts to beat your competition, discover new opportunities and to find trends in your art niche.
Stay ahead of the curve in your art niche by using Google Alerts. http://www.google.com/alerts
