If you are an emerging artist, you should think of creating a personal website along with profiles on social media platforms. This is very important as online presence is highly recommended if not obligatory for business, art, and sports. To present your art website to the masses, you have to promote and optimize it for search engines. This article explains how you can boost your website ranking and provides more details on backlinks as the most powerful method to achieve that.
Art website: first steps
Before bringing the website to the top of searches, you should create a stable base for it. It is necessary to select a reliable site builder and assign a suitable domain name to your art online platform. This sets up a decent base for future optimization of the website.
Select website builder
While there are many website builders these days, you should rely on the most convenient and credible ones. It is not enough to proceed with the one that appears high on the search results. You should take into consideration the pieces of advice of those people who have also used website builders for creating their art websites. The website building platform should guarantee that your website loads fast, you can select the preferred domain name, and apply search optimization activities without any constraints.
As a rule, most website-building platforms offer a set of predefined templates for art websites. You could select the preferred one and adjust it to your needs at any time.
Select domain name
To reinforce the optimization efforts for your website, set a clear and recognizable domain name. There are lots of services like GoDaddy and Namecheap where you can verify whether the preferred domain name is available. Also, you can buy the domain you like and reserve a place for it on the hosting platform.
The introduction of the .ART domains in 2016 was an ingenious way for artists to differentiate their websites, from the average website domain, and to emphasize their artistry. To search .ART domains, click HERE.
Art website advancement
As your art website is designed, created, and tuned up, it is the right time to apply SEO techniques to it. In particular, you should consider investing much time and enough resources in link building.
Gain backlinks
The fastest way to make your website highly visible on the web is to gain backlinks from other online resources. Various techniques allow you to do that in different modes, though the objective remains always the same.
One of the primary methods for link building is outreach to other websites via email or other communication tools. That might not always be easy, though you establish cooperation with different instances that way.
Another popular backlink-gaining procedure is by using an automated link building service on the web. Find a credible provider that has a large database of various online platforms and websites that would gladly link back to your website.
If you are keen on writing an article, you can also gain links via guest posting. This is a reliable approach to gain traffic to your art website as well as to increase awareness of your art brand.
Control on-page SEO
Besides link-building practices, it is also crucial to guarantee that your website functions properly. Use dedicated tools for controlling the page load speed on your website, cleaning up your website code, and checking other technical characteristics. This will help to make sure that users stay on the website for long after they find it on search results and follow it.
Analyze website performance
Your website ranking progress can’t be properly estimated in case you do not use proper analytic tools. One of the most popular and effective ones is Google Analytics, which is free to use. There you will be able to see all the characteristics and user behavior statistics on your website, Based on that data, you would be able to derive what could be done better on your website to boost its ranking further.
Create e-shop
Even though the art website optimization is crucially important, you should also consider creating your small representation instance on world-known platforms for selling art objects. These could be Etsy and Artspan - the art marketplaces offering creative people the possibility to set up their online storefronts.
Art platforms for creators have embedded optimization mechanisms that allow your art products to be visible on the web by embedding certain keywords. Also, you can insert backlinks to your website from there, thus linking back from credible resources and improving your website ranking.
Mary Hunter is a successful American freelance lifestyle blogger with advanced writing skills. She is currently working for linksmanagement.com. Mary has experience in editing, marketing, and her works appear in different publications and website articles.
Read more helpful art career and marketing articles in our archives HERE.
As an artist, you want people to see your work. After all, the more people get to appreciate your art, the more you can advance your career as an artist and ideally sell more art. One way to do this is by marketing yourself online, either on your own or with someone’s help. Read on to find out the top 10 marketing tips and trends you can use to increase your art website traffic.
#1 Master SEO Basics
Start by learning all the SEO basics. You need to know how to perform keyword research and how to use these keywords in your content. Learn about on-site optimization to further improve your website (e.g. proper navigation, creating a sitemap, etc.)
#2 Optimize Visual Content
Pay special attention to all the visual content you publish because it is crucial for you as an artist. Your images and videos need to be of high quality, but you should also add all the right details to them for SEO (e.g. alt tags for images, descriptions and keywords for videos). Don’t forget to add social sharing buttons to let your audience share your artwork elsewhere.
#3 Start Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to get more backlinks to your website. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, there are professional writing services you can reach out to for assistance. When you publish your content on someone else’s website or blog, you can include a link to your own site which will guide their audience to you.
#4 Develop Your Link Profile
In addition to getting more backlinks, you should also develop your link profile by using both external and internal links in your website content. Internal links will help you keep users on your website longer while external links (especially to the sources of the facts or statistics you used) will help you look more reputable in the eyes of your audience.
#5 Utilize Social Media
Social media is essential for marketing you and your art. Create your profiles on different social media platforms and regularly remind your followers about your website. Don’t forget to use social media marketing techniques to successfully promote your content on those platforms (e.g. hashtags, tagging, locations, commenting, live streaming).
#6 Promote Word-of-Mouth
Word-of-mouth can easily spread the word about you, but instead of waiting for someone to start talking about you, you can promote word-of-mouth yourself. Reach out to your fans, followers and collectors of your work and ask them to provide a review or testimonial of your work. Then, you can post these on your website and share on your social platforms to get people interested in your art.
#7 Connect with Other Artists
Instead of relying solely on your own efforts and being a lone wolf, it’s a good idea to reach out to other artists like yourself and promote each other. You can partner with other artists to create unique art, host giveaways, and promote each other in different ways. Having these connections will also play a role in helping you advance your career.
#8 Engage with Your Audience
Engagement is important not just for your metrics but also for connecting with your fans. Encourage discussions in the comment section on your website and social media profiles, reply to comments, and so on. All of this shows that you are a friendly person who is happy to engage and connect with their audience.
#9 Make A Posting Schedule
To stay consistent, you will need to create a posting schedule for all the content you publish on your website or social media profiles. This way, you will always have a steady stream of content for your audience to discover and consume.
#10 Measure Performance and Improve
Last but not least, don’t forget to measure the performance of your web content and your website itself to improve your future digital marketing activities. Your updated strategy needs to have the necessary changes that will improve your metrics. Take into account everything – traffic, average session time, conversion rate, comments, social shares, and so on.
Wrapping Up
There are quite a few ways you can successfully reach a wider audience, but the most important thing is to be consistent with your marketing activities. Use the tactics in this article to help you generate more traffic on your website and find new fans and, ideally, buyers of your art.
Anna Medina is a specialist in different types of writing. She graduated from the Interpreters Department, but creative writing became her favorite type of work. Now she improves her skills while working for the writing services review websites like Best Writers Online with content of any type, but, mainly, assisting students all over the world.
Driving more traffic to their art websites is the number one challenge for new and emerging artists who are just starting out. However it can be done. It's not difficult but takes time and commitment and it can be free.
Having an art website does not guarantee artists will sell their work since an art website will not sell art by itself. An art website needs targeted traffic which is the real beginning of the overall sales process. The following are eight free methods in which artists can begin to bring more traffic to their art website.
Promote on Social Media – Artists need to at least have the following social media sites: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Besides being a member of each network, be active, have a full and interesting profile and join as many groups as possible. Network inside the groups and post interesting content.
Guest Blogging – Offer to create and share new and interesting content to other bloggers in the art industry. At some point, a blogger runs out of content ideas, time to create or both. Offer your services and give them some ideas that would fit with their target audience. Find out what their article specifications and parameters are. Also, have a 1 paragraph biography, along with your website URL for all guest articles that you submit.
Responsive Website – Estimates indicate that more than 60% of all search traffic is from a mobile device (Phone or Tablet). Is your website responsive? A responsive website automatically resizes pages, graphics, and images to the device which is being used by the visitor. This allows a website visitor to read and navigate your website and content properly. If your site is not responsive, you may be driving 60% of your visitors away by having an “unresponsive” website.
Post Content to LinkedIn – By being active and involved on LinkedIn through their groups, this a great platform in which to post your own content and other interesting posts created by others. By doing this consistently, you will not only increase your professional network but also your visibility.
Commenting – If you see and read an interesting art blog post or article post and you have a positive opinion or something more that you can add to the content, do so, in an upbeat and positive manner. Add your website with your name. This will create an active link and hopefully more traffic back to your website.
YouTube Video Channel – 25% of all Google searches are through YouTube. If you do not have a YouTube Channel you are missing out on a very large percentage of visitors. As with all social networking, make sure that the profile page is attractive, done well and is complete. At every chance, have a link back to your website, along with links back to your other social networks.
Directories – Research and join as many art directory sites as you can. These sites offer various ways in which to promote your art, art website, art blog, art events, etc. They also have many ways in which an artist can network.
Post to Pinterest – Pinterest is a perfect platform for visual artists. What do you see when you go exploring on Pinterest? You see beautiful pictures of everything, especially of art. Besides posting your own blog posts and art, whenever you see something beautiful that you think that your networks would enjoy, post and comment. Also, be sure to like and comment on other’s postings as well.
Bonus Ideas:
Search Engines - Make Sure Your Site Can Be Found on Google, Bing, Yahoo – This will cover 97% of all Search Traffic on the internet. Each search engine will tell you how to submit, register and have your website indexed.
Facebook Groups – Much like the paragraph on LinkedIn (see above), join as many groups as possible and be an active and positive member. In doing so, you will eventually attract new viewers to your art website.
As you can tell from above, there are many ideas and all do not have any cost to them in terms of driving new or more traffic to your art website. The only expense involved is the artist’s time and effort.
If you are serious about the art business and about creating more traffic to see and buy your art, then all of these ideas mentioned above will help.
If lack of time is an issue in doing this, here is a post that will help you discover platforms which can help to get your posts out to multiple sources, “21 Tools To Help Distribute Your Content.”
