SEO for Artists - which factors help or hinder?

Does doing something help or penalize an artist's website or blog? This post is the last in this mini-series about SEO for artists and the factors which influence how a site ranks in search engine pages in response to a query - based on the results of the 2007 SEOmoz survey Search Engine Ranking Factors v2

It follows on from:

• 5 positive ways to help your art website rank well in Google
• 5 more ways of helping your art website to rank well in Google
• 5 approaches to avoid on your art website or art blog

Victoria - a work in progress #4
8" x 8", coloured pencils on Sennelier HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

What are the controversial factors?

The SEOmoz survey in 2007 - Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 - identified some controversial factors (you can find a list at the end).

Below you will find three of these identified - while others were covered in earlier posts. I'm trying to identify those where there might be implications for artists and/or relevant to most artists' websites or blogs.

All of this, of course assumes that you actually want your website/blog and your artwork to be found!

Relevance of Site's Primary Subject Matter to Query

The topical relationships between the full content of a website and a user's given query

The reason this factor is controversial is the fact that Google searches sometimes throw up sites which have no obvious relevance to the query. A number of reasons are advanced for this in the comments on this factor - one being that old and trusted websites have an advantage over newer websites. Then there are the websites which you would think are relevant - and yet fail to appear. A classic example of the latter is the art society website which should have a lot of content which is relevant, lots of artists' (whether or not they are members) and other authoritative websites linking to them - and yet they fail to rank in Google.

Another way in which a site may not surface in response to a query is if it is a blog rather than a website. It's very difficult to tell how Google treat blogs as opposed to website and I've observed practice varying over time. My own personal theory is that as blogs exploded they started to swamp the Internet and search query results. I'm now very inclined to think that they don't get listed unless they are very relevant and/or very old and/or perceived as very authoritative - however that's just a personal view. In other words it now takes longer for your blog to have an impact.

You'd think that 'relevance' of a website's primary topic would obviously help your website or blog if that's what it's about. However, that rather depends on:

• whether the topic has been described in text on the website in a way which matches closely to a query - because Google search works on words not images
  
• whether the site description and keywords have a close relationship with the query
• whether the site in question is a website or blog
  
• whether or not the website or blog is actually clear about its primary focus and topics which are covered.
  

From my travels around the net, my guess is that there are a fair few artists who are missing out on visits because they've uploaded a lot of images but not paid too much attention to the topics, keywords or text. Or they've really sweated over their artist's statement - but not paid as much attention to describing what their art is about (as opposed to how it comes about).

That's fine if you're only interested in sending visitors to your site via people you've approached or personally given your card. However if you'd like to find casual site traffic you have to do a bit work to get your website or blog to rank. Being topical is not enough!

Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links

The basic principle is that Google tends to respond negatively to practices which seek to manipulate SEO and page rank. This is a controversial factor as some commentators suggest that it only matters if you get caught - while others suggest that deceptive practices are a very high risk strategy.

Some site owners attempt to "buy PageRank™" in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.
Google - report paid links

Google has a page for people to report paid links. Google suggests has a number of excellent suggestions around quality control of your website or blog:

• make pages primarily for users not search engines
• avoid the use of any tricks designed to improve page rank (eg buying links)
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
  

I think the difficulty here lies with confusion over what are paid links. I think we all know intuitively that anybody who says "pay me a £1,000 and I'll give you links that will make a huge difference to your website" might well involved some trickery which may cause a negative impact. However, an advertisement is a paid link so there must be some way to differentiate between the two - and Google suggests what that is below. Also below you'll find how Google defines the link schemes and paid links that it doesn't like

Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

..............Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google - Link Schemes

The artist's perspective: Every time I see a scheme for reciprocal linking I wonder if people are aware of the potential risks. By all means link to other art blogs and websites - but I'd suggest being selective and looking long and hard at all schemes which require reciprocal links. For example, does it involve excessive exchange linking?

Also don't think other people know better than you or that things stay the same. I've joined blog directories - and then removed my blog from those same directories. In my view they had become bad neighbourhoods - they were full of poor quality sites and sites which seemed to be trying to manipulate page rank

Every time I see an advert placed by an artist I wonder if paying for the placement of that advert is backfiring on them if it's not had a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link/image tag by the website which hosts the advert.

I never ever allow anybody to post a link on this blog which is cloaking a spam link - mainly because I don't know whether that site which is being deceptive is also part of a bad neighbourhood. That's why all my comments are moderated - and this mini-series has managed to attract quite a few comments (all of which have been rejected) which were presumably written by people who don't read my warnings!

Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)

Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating

This factor is a bit like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We'd love to believe in it but first we'd have to be able to know where it exists! If content is king why do the cut and paste splogs (spam blogs) do so well? That's essentially why this factor is controversial - and the comments make interesting reading. In principle nobody has a problem with quality of the document content being influential. In practice. the issue is about how this can be measured effectively - and weed out all the scrapers and spammers.

The artist's perspective: One commentator also asked who gets to define "quality" and how it is measured. I think that's a very good question. Goodness knows we know how jurors can vary in their views about what is 'good art' and what gets juried into a show, so how on earth can we ever hope that Google will be able to tell the difference between very good artists and those who not so wonderful? What it means is that artists who pay attention to refining the presentation of content from their website may do better in response to Google queries than those who are much better artists.

It seems likely that content comes into play if a site can first demonstrate that it has authority. All I can say is I've noticed big jumps in page rank status for this site has it has met and crossed specific thresholds for links and numbers of visitors.

I guess the analogy goes something along the lines of create great content - whether that's text, blog posts, new artwork or daily paintings - and people will sign up to receive updates form your site. Regular updates of your site also indicates that a site is active and lively which Google also likes. Posting daily paintings is a jolly good way of leading people towards your larger paintings, exhibitions and other places where they can find your work for sale.

As your authority increases Google starts to get more interested in the content of that text, those blog posts, and those images of new work and daily paintings.

What are the controversial factors?

1. Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site Google is occasionally suspected or accused of applying manual manipulation to a domain or page (note that this factor refers specifically to positive ranking manipulation)
2. Relevance of Site's Primary Subject to Query - see above
   
3. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links - see above
   
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages - see 5 approaches to avoid on your art website or art blog
5. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site - 5 more ways of helping your art website to rank well in Google
6. Quality of the Document Content - (as measured algorithmically) - see above
   
7. Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc) - in broad terms, some links (ending in edu or gov) provide an indication of whether a site has weight, is influential and can be trusted - but this is much less likely to be relevant to the vast majority of artists' websites and blogs. It might account for why so many art student sites pop up in search queries.
   
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots - see 5 approaches to avoid on your art website or art blog
9. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites - see 5 approaches to avoid on your art website or art blog
10. TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk etc...) - as for 7

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I'm going to try and pull all the relevant information together in a new site I started today - SEO for artists - and I'll let you know when that's been published.

5 approaches to avoid on your art website or art blog

It's very difficult to get everything right in terms of an art website or blog. However, it's a lot easier to avoid doing things which are going to have a bad impact on your art website or art blog.

This post is based on the survey done by SEOMoz in 2007 which you can see in Search Engine Ranking Factors v2. What I've done is try and translate the top five negative factors which they identified into what they mean for artists who have a presence on the Internet.

This post follows on from:

• 5 positive ways to help your art website rank well in Google
• 5 more ways of helping your art website to rank well in Google

The series is accompanied by a work in progress. This is a portrait drawing of Maggie Stiefvater's daughter Victoria. Today's picture is where I got to when I did the third scan.

Victoria - a work in progress #3
coloured pencils on Sennelier HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

SEOmoz provide a Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization for those looking for more help with sorting out their websites and blogs.

How to get into trouble

There are two ways you can get into trouble

• either by doing something inadvertently or without appreciating the impact it will have
• or by seeking to deceive

I've reordered the approaches identified by seomoz as ones which should be avoided so that they now moved from the silly to the stupid!

Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots

Internet bots are software programs which perform automated tasks - like crawling your website or blog to see if you've updated it. This feeds into updating how your web or blog pages are included in the search engines.However if your website can't be accessed it can't be ranked.

It pays to:

• have a decent host with easily accessible servers
• design/create your website or blog so that it can be crawled easily

Examples of things to avoid doing

• DO NOT have images which are much bigger than needed - which means that the page takes ages to load.
• DO NOT bloat your code unnecessarily. (You may be very surprised just how many sites have code bloat!) Bots speed through code which is not bloated. Slow them down and they'll index and/or update fewer pages
  

You can check out how long it takes to review your site and how much of the site is being updated by reviewing Google's Webmaster Tools/Statistics/Crawl Stats.

The artist's perspective: I've had problems in the past with this blog being slow to load. However I tend to reflect that this is probably a temporary problem and will be sorted and that it's likely to be sorted far quicker by Google/Blogger than I could achieve if I moved to another host!

However I did look at ways in which I could reduce the load on this very heavy weight art blog (in terms of posts, words and pictures). Here's a summary of the actions I took

• Switched off the Blogger blogroll images in the blogroll - that made a big difference
• Reduced the number of posts on display from seven to five
• Eliminated all unnecessary widgets and any which seemed to be slow to load - no matter how nice they were!
• Continued to keep all images posted to no bigger than 500 pixels on the longest dimensions and no bigger than 100KB @72 dpi

Plus I try to be a good neighbour by always contacting a website owner if their website is slow to load and let them know. Do you?

Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index

It's a mistake to duplicate blog posts or websites without being careful to make sure that only one shows up in the Google Index. This is what Google has to say about duplicate content . It's worth reading in detail as you will want to avoid the following...........

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

Duplicate content is filtered into the supplementary index. If pages on your website or blog are perceived to be duplicates they'll stop receiving any visitors or visits.

Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Search engines are primarily interested in unique documents and text, and when they find multiple instances of the same content, they are likely to select a single one as "canonical" and display that page in their results.
seomoz Beginner's Guide - Critical Components of Optimizing a Site

Your website or blog will be crawled if you have duplicate titles or meta tags - however it's unlikely that all the pages will rank well in Google and you may well miss out on keywords that you could or should be ranking for.

The simple fact is that Google does not like duplication and wants all snippets to accurately represent the web result. Consequently it will leave out pages with page titles or description meta tags which are identical to one already indexed.

Google Webmaster Tools includes a tool called content analysis that you find in the Diagnostics section. Reviewing the results of this analysis helps you to identify if you've got any duplicate page titles or meta tags description issues.

TIP: If you want to see how many of your pages are indexed and HOW they are indexed remove the "http://" from your domain name and replace it with "site:" and then use this as a search term. Site:www.website.com will show you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google - but it won't tell you anything about page rank.

So, for example, if you do this search on my portfolio website (ie put site:www.pastelsandpencils.com into Google as a search term) you can see how I spent hours going through each individual page creating individual page titles and meta tags for each page. (That's hours as in 'it's a big website'!). Each page on the website has its own individual summary set up as the web page description. No pages duplicate.

Google's advice about what you should about page titles and tags is as follows

Good practices for page title tags

Accurately describe the page's content - Choose a title that effectively communicates the
topic of the page's content.
Avoid:
• choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
• using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1"

Create unique title tags for each page - Each of your pages should ideally have a unique
title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Avoid:
• using a single title tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages

Use brief, but descriptive titles - Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too
long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.
Avoid:
• using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
• stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

Search Engine Optimization

The description meta tags you provide are really important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages when indexing that page in Google - which is certainly what happened for all my meta tags. The words then become 'bolded' when they turn up in a search query.

You can Improve snippets with a meta description makeover. This is a blog post from 2007 on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Google also has very useful advice in Changing your site's title and description in search results

Here's a summary of tips for page titles from the Google download (pdf file) Search Engine Optimization which I used when refining my website.

	DO	AVOID
Page Titles	Create unique accurate page titles (can include the name of your business) Make the title brief and describe what's on the page Create unique title tags for each page	very long titles vague titles the same title running across the whole site a title which does not reflect page content
Description meta tags	Accurately summarize the page's content Use unique descriptions for each page use keywords appropriately	a single meta tag applying to all the pages on the site stuffing descriptions with keywords which are irrelevant to that page (although this tactic has been ineffective since 2005)

The artist's perspective: Now after all the techie stuff - what are the issues for artists?

I kept reminding myself all the time I was writing my description meta tags that I am not the only artist who used pastels or coloured pencils and who drew/painted trees/still life/whatever. Here's a suggestion - when you've drafted a description meta tag, take a long hard look at it and ask yourself how many other artists could say the same thing? The quick way of making it distinctively yours is to include your name. Here's an example which comes straight from the site:www.pastelsandpencils.com query.

Pastels and Pencils - Drawings of Trees and Leaves by Katherine ...
Original fine art drawings of trees and leaves by Katherine Tyrrell in soft pastels and coloured pencils .

Things to note:

• Title:
  
• generic front end to title which relates to name of the portfolio website - it's the same on every page of the website.
  
• middle section relates to what's on the page
• end section includes my name
• Description meta tags:
  
• the snippet says exactly what's in the description meta tags
• the meta tags include all the words which describe my work (and me) - it's original fine art, the artwork is drawings, the subject matter is trees and leaves, the media used is soft pastels and coloured pencils, the art was done by me
• it's not the same as the text on the page
  

So four things to think about when writing descriptions:

• precisely what type of art is it
  
• what type of media
• what's the subject matter
• who produced it

This is where people who have galleries of mixed works in various types of media lose out in a major way.

Frankly none of this is rocket science. Anybody who can access the description meta tags (may be called "page description") for their website will be able to address any weaknesses with their current set-up. It doesn't involve code and it's not difficult. It just requires you to be methodical and systematic and capable of doing a very boring job!

SHORTCUT TIP: If you want to gain an insight into the description meta tags of successful sites which rank high in Google, view the website using as the page source option in the View menu item. Somewhere near the top of each page of code you will usually see both the page title and the description meta tags.

External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites

Who you link to always matters.

If you link to low quality sites you're assumed to belong to the same neighbourhood. If you link to a spammer the search engines may assume you are a spammer too. If you link to a link farm you can do your site some serious damage.

a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group....A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing).
wikipedia - link farm

Wikipedia has an interesting article about different forms of linking between websites.

The artist's perspective: The question for artists essentially boils down to working out which are good quality sites and which are low quality sites. That's not easy - but it does pay to look quite carefully at how they operate before you link to it.

I've seen a few website owners in the visual arts arena attempt exercises to enhance their page rank. One way is through a meme. It never involves the site owner in much effort and it always involves people in having to link to the site. I refuse point blank to reference any site where the nature of the exercise is nothing whatsoever to do with what it's ostensibly about and everything to do with getting links to one person's website so that the 'meme/wheeze' owner can enhance their advertising rates.

TIP: If you suddenly see a banner for a website on everybody's blog but it's nowhere to be seen on mine then ask yourself these questions

• Does it require everybody to link to the same website?
• How much effort does the site owner have to make to earn that link?
  
• Does the site owner generate a fair bit of good content (as opposed to scraping the input of others)?
  
• Does the 'host' website have advertising?

Now I hasten to add there are legitimate group activities which are OK - but if your answers to the above questions are Yes/Not a lot/No and Yes then you have your answer to why it's not on my site!

Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

The general consensus in 2007 was that sites were more likely to be ignored than penalised if they stuffed their websites or blogs with targeted keywords. This is a definition of keyword stuffing. You know it when you see it so don't do it!

Besides which Search engines now employ themed, related keyword techniques to interpret the intent of the content on a page. If your titles and tags don't match the content of your page you'll have a problem.

The artist's perspective: For artists, the best approach is to know what keywords are relevant to the topic you are writing about and to use them sensibly and appropriately. Avoid overuse just because they happen to be legitimate for that topic.

The one aspect I'm not clear about here is the repeated use of the type of media for each painting on the gallery page of a website (ie 20 paintings = 20 uses of 'oil painting'). Anybody got any comment about this aspect?
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The next post in this series will be about the controversial factors - those where people disagree about their impact on your website or blog.

Feel free to comment about any aspect of this post. As I indicated yesterday I'm somebody who tries to keep myself aware of the issues re SEO, rather than an expert. All I'm trying to do is work out what's important to know if you're an artist. Helpful comments are always appreciated!

5 more ways of helping your art website to rank well in Google

Following on from Monday's post 5 positive ways to help your art website rank well in Google here are five more ways to have a positive impact on the way your art blog or website ranks in Google.

This is based on the survey done by SEOMoz in 2007 which you can see in Search Engine Ranking Factors v2. What I've done is try and translate each factor into what an artist can do to improve the way they present themselves and their art on the internet.

Victoria - a work in progress #2
coloured pencils on Sennelier HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Frankly I'm SEO aware as opposed to being an SEO expert and things may well have changed since 2007. That means I'm not clear as to whether the factors described below are still part of the top ten factors! However in an intuitive sense it seems to me that logically they should still be very relevant.

See what you think. Plus do let me know what you think as well.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.
Google - Webmaster Site owners help - ranking

Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to site

The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword

This factor relates to whether or not the links to a specific blog or website come from very similar/relevant sites. Trusted topical sites with high quality content will carry more weight.

For artists, you need to ask yourself whether any major sites which link to you are similar to your site or not - and whether they are high quality or not. For example, an art forum might be very relevant while I think I'd have to query whether some social networking sites have the same sort of relevance.

Art Societies: Sites with a very high degree of similarity and mutual relevance around a particular keyword tend to be those belonging to an art society and its artist members. This is particularly the case if the art society specialises in some way around a genre (eg portraits) or media (eg pastels) or a style (eg realism).

One of the ways art societies can provide a very nice benefit for their members who have websites is to provide a link to those websites (eg see CPSA's members' websites/blog page ) and/or to have a gallery page on the website for each member which lists that member's website and/or blog (eg see UKCPS Members' Galleries). Similarly, the more art society members that link to their art society website and/or blog the more important each site will become over time. Truly a case of mutually beneficial back-scratching!

Art Societies which run blogs can also be very nice to their web-aware members by

• providing a link to their website if posting about that member's activities or achievements for any reason.
  
• including a blogroll with links to members blogs.
  

If you're a member of an art society which hasn't yet addressed the issue of links between the website and members (and let's face it some society's haven't yet got round to having a website!) why not ask the webmaster if this could be considered. It can be a bit onerous getting the links to members websites up and running if theer are a lot. However this is an area of the site which isn't going to change much over time so this is essentially a 'one-off' exercise plus a tiny bit of maintenance for new members and any domain name changes.

Blogs are even simpler - it takes me about ten seconds to add in a member's blog to the blogroll of the art society blog which I look after.

If you're an art society member and your art society has a blog don't forget to provide the URL links to your website and/or blog if supplying information for a news item on the website and/or blog.

Art Forums: Many art forums do allow people to post links in a general way to their personal websites in their member's signature area even if they won't allow active marketing (ie advertising!) of members' art. If you are a member of an art forum, do make sure that you take advantage of what's allowed by way of links (check the terms and condition) and posting from time to time can keep that link active and relevant.

Art Marketing sites: Other relevant sites include those which are involved in marketing and selling art on the Internet - particularly ones which categorise art and focus on the same sort of keywords as you do. This is an area where - in my view - a link from an Etsy store is going to carry more clout than a site like eBay which is very generic and where many artists have given up having stores because of the cost.

Etsy: Number of visitors each month (last 12 months)
Source: compete.com

Cautionary notes:

1. The people who run heavy weight / good quality sites know that people want links from them. I know I've often felt like I've been measuring the success of this blog by how often I get asked for a link for a new service/product and how many times I get people trying to surreptitiously slip in a link to their site which has got some sort of connection. (Spam is smacked on this blog!). What happens when you run a site which can become subjected to abuse is you start to tighten up a lot of how people can post links. So don't abuse popular sites!
   
2. Sometimes a site's marketing can give a very strong impression that it's got more weight than is in fact the case. You can check out how they rate in the USA by checking domain URLs on compete.com. For example, if you look at all the sites in Resources for Artists - Selling Art Online you'll see that I provide up to date annual charts of the relative importance of different websites - which might be worth checking out. See, for example, Online Art Galleries and Stores - Resources for Artists and Print Art on Demand - Resources for Artists

Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community

The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world

The global link popularity factor (discussed on Monday) relates to how many links a site gets from all sites across the Internet.

This factor essentially boils down to how sites rank relative to one another in their own area of interest - the topical community. The link weight of your website depends on the link weight of the relevant/topical websites which link to yours. This is where links from the more popular and relevant sites can help. On average, people agreed that this factor is helpful.

Now the interesting thing for artists is to try and identify what exactly is the relevant topical community they need to think about. Here are a few examples:

• all art sites
• all fine art sites
• all visual art sites
• all drawing sites
• all painting sites
• all daily painting sites
• all coloured pencil sites
• all artists living in the UK
  

See what I mean? I don't think there can be one right answer or a "one answer fits" all sort of approach.

It's highly likely that, as an artist, you belong to a number of slightly different topical communities. For example - I'm an artist who produces fine art and uses dry media - particularly pencils and coloured pencils, really likes drawing and sketching and lives in the UK and likes blogging about art. Now every word or phrase highlighted in that sentence is (I think) a different topical community. So it might be worthwhile to think about which community you identify with most and which matters least.

The best approach for you as an individual artist probably depends on the unique identity of the art that you produce and where you live. The best approach is probably to be aware of all the internet communities and websites which closely relate to your art - and then decide which ones you want to have some sort of formal relationship with. Social engineering for artists if you like?

Remember it's perfectly feasible for an artist's website to outperform the 'recognised' authority website within a topical niche if it has better links!

Keyword Use in Body Text

Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page

This is the use of the keyword in the body text and there's average agreement that this is very important.

This is where you need to include the keyword in the text on the webpage - enough so that's it recognised as part of the core message and not so much that you're thought to be a spammer! So don't talk about your art and leave out all the words which should have some sort of priority connection with your art!

text on artists' websites and blogs - The main issue for me about artists' websites is how many of them lack any text at all which talks about the art! Unless your using alt tags on the art - of which more later, that gallery page is probably not earning its keep!

Having tightly focused pages - in terms of gallery pages on your website or posts on your blog - can help a lot with making text very specific and consistent with whatever theme you are writing about. Again and again I see blog posts where people meander around a number of different topics which may or may no relate to the title so it's difficult to see what the post is about. Similarly I see people slipping in a mention of an achievement without really giving it the weight it deserves eg a dedicated blog post using all the relevant words. It's fine about being shy and not wanting to boast - but don't be surprised if people who don't win the prizes but write better copy rank high than you in Google!

Here's a couple of suggestions of things to think about:

• Do you present your artwork in a themed way - to help make your text focused and relevant?
  
• Do you vary the text on each gallery page to suit the theme?
• Do you write focused posts?
• Do you signal what your post is about in the first paragraph when it's important to marketing (1) you as an artist (2) your art
  
• Try the following exercise.........
  

EXERCISE:

• Think of a set of words which describe your art.
  
• Now rank them in terms of how important they are to describing your art and how you want people to think about your art.
  
• Now take a look at the text on your blog or website and see how much you use your most important words

Are you surprised?

When posting art think about the words which crop up first and which ones need a specific and accurately described link from another site which has your work. Titling images and how you link to where the art is being sold are both relevant here.

One of the things I sometimes do when creating posts or information sites is to think about what my subject is - as a keyword - and then check out how other people think in words about this. Checking out a search term in Google Adwords takes 10 seconds and can avoid some potential mistakes! Getting the term right can really help with attracting the people who are genuinely interested in your subject. I then try to get the phrase into the first paragraph of body text if I can.

When I do my hyperlinks to text I nearly always adopt a very literal anchor text - so that it always 'does what it says on the tin'. I also try to include that important phrase in the first paragraph of text associated with an individual URL. So, for example, my exhibition reviews almost always provide a link to the art society and/or the name of the exhibition in the very first paragraph.

It's helpful to repeat keywords you're using a title again in the opening and closing paragraphs of the text on the page.

Global Link Popularity of Linking Site

Basically the notion here is that the more popular the site is on the internet (the more links it has) the more impact it has on the way your site ranks when and if it links to you. For example, if the New York Times gives you a mention and includes a link to your website then you're really going to benefit a lot.

However two points are important here. Nobody seems to know anymore how important links from heavy weight but unrelated sites are any more. Plus most sites aren't the New York Times" Hence most people disgree about how important this factor is given that it isn't about how relevant the linking site is.

I tend to think of this as a windfall factor - nice if it happens but not worth spending time on!

Topical Relationship of Linking Page

While it is generally agreed that most links are helpful, getting a link from a website or blog which is focused on the same topic is more helpful. How much more helpful is debateable. This appears to be very much influenced by the other factors such as how heavy weight the site is, how good and relevant its content is.

Some have suggested that topic similarity matters more in some search engines than others.
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The next post in this series will be about the factors which can have a negative impact on your website or blog.

Feel free to comment about any aspect of this post.

Note: Victoria continues - and I'm really liking the Sennelier HP paper - which I will on MAM reviews next week. I'm trying to produce the same number of stages as there are posts in this series but may have planned that badly!

The Contemporary Art Bubble and Art Omerta

Last night I watched The Great Contemporary Art Bubble on BBC Four - written, directed and presented by Ben Lewis.

I rushed off to my computer afterwards to find the back story - and this is what I've pieced together! What follows is a combination of my notes, articles I've found on the internet and some comments and thoughts that they triggered.

Who's Ben Lewis?

Ben Lewis is a docmentary film maker and an art critic. He writes a monthly column on art for Prospect Magazine (here's a list of his articles for Prospect) and contributes art criticism to the Evening Standard and Sunday Telegraph in the UK and Monopol magazine in Germany. He also presented BBC4's Art Safari.

He's also the man who was unable to attend the Damien Hirst auction - see Why I was banned from Damien Hirst’s £120m gamble

This is a link to Ben Lewis talking about filming The Great Contemporary Art Bubble - which is very informative in terms of how the market works and the nature of art omerta.

What's a bubble?

Before talking about the programme, I thought it might be relevant to say something about bubbles in an economic or financial context.

An economic bubble (sometimes referred to as a speculative bubble, a market bubble, a price bubble, a financial bubble, or a speculative mania) is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”.
wikipedia - economic bubble

A bubble has been described as the product of the economics of mania. They happen when valuations of assets start to disconnect from the fundamentals of their underlying economic worth. I associate them with the "me too" generation and "want it now" attitudes. People compete to have something where they think ownership offers some objective indication of their wealth and standing and that leads to prices rising. So whether it's designer labels in the twenty first century or tulips in the seventeenth century, prices paid have nothing whatsoever to do with value.

To get prices to rise you have to have new buyers with money entering the market all the time - hence the rationale about taking art and art fairs to the people with money............

What's The Great Contemporary Art Bubble?

The majority of the programme focused on what happened before and after the peak of the Contemporary Art Market in May 2008 through to its collapse at the end of 2008. It also helped to highlight the popularity of contemporary art and provided a lot of really quite astounding statistics.

According to Ben Lewis, what we saw last year was the bursting of a bubble in the contemporary art market. A bubble which had grown because

• the contemporary art market had started to treat art as a commodity and
  
• a small band of people effectively stimulated and managed the market and controlled the prices paid.
  

In essence the top end of the contemporary art market began to behave like any other part of the economy which generates bubbles - and experienced rampant and some would say manipulated speculation - while at the same time thinking that somehow it was immune from disaster striking.

Has not the incredible rise in contemporary art prices mirrored the financial hay-making all around that has brought us to the brink of a depression? In the world of the irrationally exuberant, was there anywhere less rational and more exuberant than the contemporary art world?
Financial Times - Can art save the world?

Lewis unpicked how the bubble came about and why it burst. The quotes here are ones I've used before on this blog or articles by Lewis rather than ones from the programme

The modern-art boom is about more than the fact that there are lots of billionaires and there's been a shift in taste towards contemporary art. Its big attraction is that the lack of rules makes it ideal for speculation and manipulation. As a consequence, art has become nothing more than a hotly traded commodity. The boom seems the ultimate symbol of the greed of the rich in the globalised economic good times of the last decade.
Ben Lewis

Here are some of the statistics which were quoted.

• contemporary art art prices rose 55% in 2006/7
• contemporary art art prices rose 800% between 2003 and 2008
• between 2005 and 2007, Sotheby's lending to buyers doubled (bubble always happen when buyers are awash with credit - and in this instance the auction houses were fuelling the credit lines)
• at the same time, there was a 68% increase in guarantees offered to sellers by auction houses
• by the end of 208 Sotheby's declared £60 million in losses and sales which were down in value by 75%
  

Lewis highlighted how one of the abiding characteristics of a bubble is when players stop being agents and start becoming principals. For example, when auction houses stop being a neutral party acting as an intermediary between seller and buyer and start owning stock, defining prices and offering credit - just like any gallery - or high street store.

Prices for contemporary art are apparently now falling faster than for any other commodity.

What's the code of Art Omerta?

As always when you're on to a good thing, some people seek to protect their reputations and financial wealth by not being honest, avoiding transparency and preventing anybody lifting the curtain or shining a light on to what can sometimes be described as "dubious practices" (We have an excellent example going on right now in the Houses of Parliament - can you tell I'm one of the people who are still fuming about the abuse of legislation designed to uncover such outrages?)

Lewis described what it was like trying to film the documentary in

I was constantly impeded by what I can only describe as Art World Omerta. The code of Art World Omerta has three rules. First, many people in the art world simply refused to talk to me. Second, the ones that did tried to deny that the buying and selling of art had anything to do with business. Third, these people maintained the unspoken rule of never criticizing an artist or the market.

One might take the Clegg view that unspoken rules are the reason why pickles like this arise in the first place.

What did I learn that was new?

Tax haven banking sponsors of art fairs: I NOW understand why the banks sponsored all those art fairs. Silly me! It's obvious really. It looks like it's creating brand awareness among the target market - those people with a lot of money. However there's a bit more to it than that. Particularly in relation to the management of finances and "tax haven banking". The suggestion last night was of a fair bit of smoke and mirrors.

This article TAX HAVEN: UBS Move Shakes Swiss Bank Secrecy highlights what happened when the IRS cottoned on to what was going on in UBS - the sponsor of the Art Basek Art Fair at Miami Beach.

MIAMI - The largest bank in Switzerland admitted to defrauding the IRS and agreed to pay the U.S. government $780 million it made by setting up offshore income tax havens for thousands of wealthy Americans - a substantial number in South Florida.............UBS bankers cultivated these customers at venues known for rich and famous patrons, such as Art Basel Miami Beach and the Sony Ericsson tennis tournament in Key Biscayne.
TAX HAVEN: UBS Move Shakes Swiss Bank Secrecy

Failure of offers to the market: I had also previous missed an important point about stockholdings. Lewis reminded us that in relation to stocks which are traded, it's actually illegal to conceal the failure of an offer to the market - however the same rule does not seem to apply to the art world.

However he then highlighted the art inventory of unsold works by Damien Hirst held by the White Cube. This is the art gallery run by Jay Jopling which has represented Damien Hirst in the past - until Hirst decided to cut out the middle man and go straight to market with an auction house. Which left Jay Jopling bidding on pieces in order to protect his own investment. However, on the eve of Sotheby’s auction of over 200 new works by the British artist, Cristina Ruiz and the Art Newspaper disclosed the extent of unsold stock held by his London gallery White Cube in Revealed: the art Damien Hirst failed to sell

It took some time for it to surface that the Hirst's diamond encrusted skull which sold to a consortium (sounds a buit like racehorses doesn't it?) actually included both Hirst and Jopling. It's a curious definition of a sale from where I sit!

Mutual back-scratching with publicly funded museums: A cogent argument was put forward about something I sort of knew - but hadn't really thought through - in terms of the cost to us as taxpayers

• collectors donate their work to museums to get tax breaks (which have to be funded by somebody else - that'll be you and me)
• the value of art by artists whose work is in museums is enhanced as a direct result
  
• when that artists's works are traded in art auctions they now attract a premium because of the assocation of the artist with the museum
• the very high prices paid for art make people want to see it - to see what all the fuss is about - hence museums want to show it
  
• the cost of such art becomes beyond museums' purchase budgets - hence they become dependent on collectors to donate art (and so it goes on............)
  

It's all a bit incestuous. It might be legal but is it right? Can it be defended when we have a recession? If they stopped granting the tax breaks what would that do to the value of the art?

More people go to art galleries than football matches in Britain today

I was scribbling all the way through but omitted to note down the source data for that quote.

This 2007 article Masters of the Universe: Who is being served? by Vanessa Smyth describes typical activities relating to relationships between business sponsors and museums

Who gets hurt by this sort of art bubble?

There was a classic quote in last night's programme

"it's just rich people scamming each other. It's not a big deal"

I think the real victims are all those who kept their integrity intact at the same time as others were "losing their marbles". They're now being tainted with the aspects of the bubble which were less than honest and straightforward.

Plus the people who have lost a lot of money when the bubble burst are those who were very greedy and those new to the market and/or very naieve. As I quoted back in February

“There are a lot of embarrassed people who bought art that is now not worth what they paid for it. For the past three or four years it’s been a very, very thin market, with just two or three buyers pushing up prices by bidding against each other. Unfortunately, a lot of people knew the game. So those people who did not know are realising it now. It’s almost a fraud. I would never advise my clients to buy contemporary art.”
David Nahmad in Contemporary art is a fraud, says top dealer

For those who missed it, The Great Contemporary Art Bubble is being repeated on Sunday night/ early Monday morning at 01:10am on BBC Four and is available to watch now on the BBC iplayer.

Below you will find links to Ben Lewis articles about the contemporary art crunch.

....this is a crack that runs through the world's most popular museum of modern art. Just as Hirst's diamond-studded skull symbolises the pinnacle of vanity of the contemporary art bubble, the crack symbolises its imminent collapse.

In the past 10 years, prices paid for art have rocketed, often by a factor of 10, and an army of mediocre artists have been hyped beyond all reason. Last week, Sotheby's share price dropped 37 per cent after an unsuccessful modern art auction.

But the quake has only just started - it'll measure 12 on the Gerhard Richter scale - and the earth is set to swallow up some of the most famous names and sacred tenets of contemporary art.
Seismic cracks in the art world by Ben Lewis (reviewing Doris Salcedo's crack - and the art world in general) 15th November 2007

Links:

Articles by Ben Lewis. They are also available as pdf files

• Looking for life after Hirst (May 2009)
  
• A second tulip mania
• Doubting Damien (2007)
  

For those who'd like to read what I've had to say on this topic previously my earlier posts about the impact on art and artists of the changes in the economy. You can also see the record of what happened to the art economy - week by week - in my regular references to articles about the art economy in my regular weekly post 'who's made a mark this week?

• What should artists do about marketing their art in a recession? (23 January 2008)
  
• What should artists do about marketing their art in a recession? - Part Two (3 April 2008)
• Fine artists in decline in the USA? (3 July 2008)
  
• The art of economising - on art materials (22 July 2008)
• Taking action after the bubble has burst (30 September 2008)
• Government seizes control of Singer & Friedlander (10 October 2008)
• What happens to artists in a recession? (16 October 2008)
• Bright spots in the gloom and doom (October 2008)
• Selling art online - 10 benefits of a recession
• How does a recession impact on artwork and art jobs? (Februry 2009)

5 positive ways to help your art website rank well in Google

Creating a website or blog is only the beginning. Many artists then want to know how to help people find the art on their website or blog.

How to help a website or blog rank well in search engine pages is a challenge - but it's also rather interesting. Everybody has an opinion on how this can be done well while ranking art in Google adds to the usual complexity of the issues involved.

Victoria - a work in progress
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

There's also a fair few myths around and about in relation to "what works" in terms of optimising your website for Google searches.

That said, the number 1 priority should always be about creating content for the people who you'd like to visit your site. (Which is why you're getting an image of a work in progress as well as words about ranking factors!) Nothing which SEO suggests should get in the way of that. All that SEO does is make sure that the right sort of people arrive at your website - whether they stay or not is entirely due to the content you've created. If it's good they'll probably stay and take a long look round.

The SEOMoz Search Ranking Factors v2

There's some consensus that there's one study which provides a lot of the answers. The SEOmoz’s Search Ranking Factors V2 was devised in 2007 and continues to rank top! 35 well-informed contributors ranked different SEO factors according to how important they were - in either a positive or negative way. The survey also measured the extent of agreement about the impact on a factor - one where there was a lot of disagreement being termed ' controversial'.

The analysis divides the factors into:

• the top 10 positive factors
• the controversial factors
• the top 10 negative factors

I'm going to start looking at how these factors apply to art websites and blogs. To do this I'm going to consider them in a series and look at a small number in each post to help keep this digestible (probably five at a time)!

Below I've highlighted the top 5 positive factors for how I think they might apply to an artist's website or blog and artwork generally. I'm studied a number of these recommendations in the past - but I'm no sort of expert on this. Consequently I welcome anybody who can see where I've said anything wrong or misleading to correct what I've said.

All quotations are the definitions for that factor as stated on the SEOMoz site.

The top five factors to aid ranking in search engine pages

Keyword Use in Title Tag

Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page's HTML header

Virtually everybody agreed that this is a top rated recommendation. It's your best chance of getting a visitor to both arrive and stay - if you describe your content well.

The notion here is that you should include the keyword which is closely associated with your content in the title or domain name or URL of your website or blog.

Starting your title with the word you want to be associated with works best. Clever blog/website titles will never beat those which 'do what it says on the tin'. This is where generating a name for yourself and then using it for the title of your website really pays off. Brand names work in the same way if you build them over time. No daily painter is ever going to beat Duane Keiser's blog for they keyword phrase "A Painting A Day"!

People who remove the html title code from their blog and substitute with a really nice banner which includes the title of their blog embedded in the image are missing a very big trick! Check your blog template and/or the banner image to see whether your title code is still in tact.

On Blogger, each individual blog post has an individual URL. If you include relevant words in the title of your blog post you are helping people to find that post. I find that some of my very boring blog titles continue to get consistently good traffic (even when they're 2-3 years old) because they say exactly what people are interested in and are trying to find. This is the reason why all the reviews on MAMReviews have very boring blog post titles which say very precisely what they are about!

The same applies to art. Really interesting and clever titles for artwork might look good as a blog post or as the title under a painting - but might do nothing to help your art rank in Google. You therefore need to think about how you can work round this in other ways.

Anchor Text of Inbound Link

This is where you tell people precisely what the link is about - and there's consensus that this is exceptionally important. Google apparently likes people who say exactly what they mean. This is why it's not a good idea to use phrases like "click here".

I tend to be very literal on this blog in terms of anchor text for links although I can only speculate as to whether or not it has helped this blog.

If you're going to send people to another site to purchase your artwork why not make sure you describe it accurately? Example Visit my Etsy store to purchase this (whatever)

Global Link Popularity of Site

The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity)

A very high proportion of commentators agreed this was very important.

However, it's not the quantity of links which count so much as whether the links you get are credible and good quality. In fact having lots of links from sites which are low ranking and/or irrelevant sites can work against you and you may well incur penalties from the search engines.

What counts in terms of credibility and popularity is whether or not the people linking to your website have:

• 'clout' in terms of how their sites is measured in terms of quality and popularity
• relevance in terms of similarity of content to your site.

You can influence this yourself to some extent. For example, if you participate in an art forum or social network and then link from there to your own website and/or blog and/or sale sites via your forum signature makes a lot of sense!

Never ever make the mistake of paying for a link! It'll rebound........

You can also benefit from being 'found' by relevant sites - particularly those with domain authority. This explains why I get so many emails from people wanting me to feature their new product on my blog! (You see a very tiny proportion of what I get mail about!) Making A Mark has grown in popularity in the last three and half years and now boasts a fair few in-bound links. Getting a link from this blog to another art blog now 'counts' in a major way. However that means that I also need to keep my blogroll links under review and ensure that they remain relevant.

Age of Site

Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership)

Google likes fresh content but it also likes old and reputable websites and older domains get a slight edge in site rankings. Basically this means that the older your site is and the more reputable it is the more likely it is to be in search engine results pages (SERPs).

What this also means for all artists is that if you get your domain name for your website or blog right first time and and then stick with it you will derive a benefit over time.

Making changes as to the domain names of your website will not help you in the short term as you need to start building up your credibility and popularity again from scratch.

Link Popularity within the Site's Internal link Structure

Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page

This relates to how many relevant internal links point to this page on your website or blog. It speaks to the overall consistency of your site. The view is that this is only slightly less important than the quality and popularity of external links - and yet this is an aspect which many people ignore.

There are two key points here. First this is an important factor and second you can control your own internal link juice. Internal links are within your own control. If your artwork is part of a series or you've written about previous related posts then linking to them will create a body of content which carries more weight. That in turn might have implications for titling blog posts or artwork.

You can read the comments from SEOMoz contributors to see what they recommend.

I'm afraid my brain always wants to see things in terms of connections and consequently I've been developing internal links on all my websites for years! I didn't even know it was doing me any good. It just seemed sensible in terms of providing jumping off points for people interested in artwork or a topic. So - for example:

• if you go to Pastels and Pencils - my portfolio website my website, the gallery pages are all set up in groups and include links to all the other relevant internal links.
  
• On my squidoo sites I've created logical groups and have also included links to other related sites on each information that I've produced.
  
• On this blog, if I start a project I link to all related posts for that project in each post.
• I think (but am not sure that) intelligent use of labels for categories also helps to create internal linkages of value.
  

I'm convinced it's probably a way of thinking and an attitude of mine which probably comes a lot eaiser to those who tend to think in terms of structures.

The next post in this series will consider the next five positive ways which can aid how your art website/blog ranks in search engine pages.

Note: The work in progress is a coloured pencil drawing of a young lady called Victoria. I'm trying out some new hot press paper in a block, made by Sennelier. There'll be a review on MAMReviews in due course.