Thursday, December 14, 2017

How do you get your art ranking in Google? Your NEW Google Guide to SEO

How do you get your art ranking in Google?  That's what most artists want to know when they go online.

These days most professional and many semi-professional artists operate online using a website and/or a blog.

However this is only effective if people can find that website or blog when searching for you or the sort of art your produce.

Many - but certainly not all - artists also know that to enable people to find their website they also need to has at least a passing acquaintance with SEO i.e. search engine optimisation. This is the legitimate process of making your site rank better in search engines.

Yesterday Google launched a launch of a NEW updated SEO Starter Guide (I suggest you bookmark this link - it's important) 

This is the first major update since 2010.

Below I provide an overview of the content and what's different. The main difference is that due to the overlap between the previous Guide (a pdf file) and the Webmaster Academy advice which was online - the two guides to what to do re SEO have been MERGED!
The NEW Starter Guide MERGES
the SEO Old Starter Guide PDF (c.2010)
 and advice from the Webmaster Academy

I'd recommend everybody take a look at the new guide and check out whether they are following all the recommended practices.

The contents are listed below - click any link to find out more about what Google recommends if you want to do well on Google
This guide won't provide any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices outlined below will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

What's different?


I always like those pages which explain what's different in this issue compared to previous versions. Unfortunately Google hasn't issued one! So I went looking to see whether anybody else had detected any differences between previous recommendations and this new presentation.

The differences I'm seeing highlighted relate to:
  • The new guide MERGES the Webmaster Academy and the old SEO Starter Guide PDF (2010) into one resource section online.
    • It can be found under "Search Console Help" - this is the service Google offers to help you monitor and maintain your site's presence in Google Search results.
    • It has much fewer pics - and these tend to be monochrome - and some beginners may find it less friendly than the old 2010 document.
  • The imperative for the update seems to have been MOBILE!
    • the progress in technology and 
    • how things work on mobile devices - which is now very different from how it was in 2010 
    • sites used to have seperate mobile pages rather than using the responsive templates which most modern sites now use.
  • The author of the official announcement chose to emphasise the following
The updated version builds on top of the previously available document, and has additional sections on the need for search engine optimization, adding structured data markup and building mobile-friendly websites.
  • Hence new sections for:
    • the need for search engine optimisation
    • how to add structured data mark-up - (which I shall be reading as I still haven't figured that one out!)
    • building mobile-friendly websites - see Make your site mobile-friendly which emphasise the best practices for creating mobile-friendly websites that can be accessed by all devices. 
I've just checked the latter in relation to my existing advice in How to be mobile-friendly in the Websites for Artists section of my website Art Business Info for Artists - and I'll now be rechecking a load of links to make sure they're accurate and properly descriptive of the new places they're now being redirected to!

Below are some articles which seem to address the issues re. what's changed

The two below essentially say "It's happened" and revise what the Google blog post says! I'm actually really surprised there hasn't been more analysis online by now.

If you have queries please don't ask me! Rather try using the Google Webmaster Forum where you can connected with other webmasters and top contributors in the Google Webmaster Tools forum.

Here also is the new Google Page for Get support for your site.

Google Search Console


Here are the current contents of this Google service
Posted by Making A Mark on Thursday, December 14, 2017
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