Without any technical knowledge, an artist can help their art website to attain a higher page rank with major search engines by simply creating and receiving links from other art related websites. As an artist are you unhappy with the amount of traffic that your art website receives? A reciprocal link building program can help to achieve a higher page rank with the major search engines and thus, a resultant rise in visitors to your art website if done correctly.

When search engines index a website, in order to determine page rankings, they will rank a website on many factors (Google says that there are at least 200 signals that they base their page rank on) in their analysis of a particular website. One of the more important factors in their analysis is the amount and the quality of reciprocal links that a particular website contains. Google will count the number and the quality of the links to a page in order to determine the importance of a website. Google’s assumption is that the better and more important websites will contain related links (related to that website’s content) from other related websites.

As an artist, does your art website or art blog contain links to other art related websites? If not, it should. If your website does, it may also be time to go get some more art related links in order to help raise your page ranking with the major search engines. If your art website contains links from unrelated websites (Your art website contains links to the neighborhood bakery or to the local yoga studio) this may cause your page rank to go down. If this is the case, it may be time to cull and edit these non-related links to improve your page ranking.

Many of us have been solicited through emails from companies and individuals who want to exchange and/or create reciprocal links. Or we may have been solicited by “Link Farms” who promise to create a large number of links, for a price, for our website in order to help achieve a higher page rank. Watch out, as these link farms will create a large number of unrelated links which will ultimately cause your page rank to go down, not up. And you paid for the privilege of having them ruin your website’s page ranking too!

The following are suggested website types for artists who would like to exchange their links with other websites;

1.   Art Organizations.

2.   Art Directories.

3.   Artist Supply Companies.

4.   Art Galleries.

5.   Online Art Galleries.

6.   Other Artists Websites.

7.   Art Magazines and Art Related Publications.

8.   Art Events.

9.   Art Registries.

10. Art Museums.

The best links to have on your website will have the following characteristics;

1.   The links will be related to the art world.

2.   The links will be reciprocal between websites.

3.   The links will be from high-quality websites.

Other forms and ways of creating important links that can help your page rank are;

1.   Forum links (commenting and posting on art related forums).

2.   Blog comments (much like Forums) that are related to the art world.

3.   Internal links within your website (Related Article links).

In future articles, we will elaborate further about external and internal link building and how links can positively impact your website’s page rank with the major search engines.