ART BUSINESS SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Come back soon, this page is updated every week
We all want to promote our art related business, an important step is getting good placing in the search engines. If you already have a good search rank then you know how important it is to keep your hard earned place. We help your site in several ways, to get started simply list in our directory.
Our listings are completely FREE
So how do we make money? This site was not started to make a profit, it was started as a promotional tool for art related businesses. As the resource grows, it becomes more important to the search engines, and more useful to visitors.
NEWS
Shock horror! Most of your inbound links might just be worth nothing as far as your search engine ratings are concerned!
New expert opinions show that it is not just a case of getting lots of inbound links any more, neither is it just a case of getting quality or relevant inbound links - it is becoming more important who YOU link TO.
What does this really mean: In a nutshell search engines like Google will value your site more if it also provides good solid reputable information for your visitors, and not just because a load of other people are pointing to it. They might all be idiots as far as google is concerned, or they might all be meaningless directories. That worked in the old days (before 2008) but search engines and SEO evolve. What was acceptable and good last week, can penalise your site this week. The only exception to this is "proper" linking, and old school style promotion. If you are in the ART business, you need to be in a listing that is related to ART at the very least, link TO art sites, and get links FROM art sites. Thius can include photography, digital arts, visual and video art, picture framers, galleries, etc.
People have played the "SEO game" for years, now it is coming full circle. The internet is about information, Google and other search engines are all about good quality information and content. Now sites which are written for people instead of search engines are back in a big way. Inbound links cant do you any harm, and they might do you a little of good if you have enough of them. But these days it works both ways. This is the SMART way to promote your web site, make it useful to your visitors.
So what's all this got to do with your art business?
Three of the best art related sites we have seen lately all have one thing in common: they GIVE free information, they point to genuinely USEFUL art related resources, and they all keep cropping up in the same link "clusters" as "relevant" to art, photography and crafts. One is internationally known and a household name, one is a big supplier of artists materials, and the other is truly in a niche of its own selling online framing and picture mounts from the far south west from a shop with a web site! One has about 300 pages, one has about a thousand pages, and one has literally hundreds of thousands of pages and 60 or 70 million visitors a day. And each of these them will allow you a FREE reciprocal link which is valuable in a different way. One other thing these businesses have in common is that they use the internet to PROMOTE their business, not SEO to promote their SERPS.
From what we can find researching visitor estimates from Alexa and other sources, the smallest of these sites has between 600 and 1000 unique visitors/page views a day, all buying a couple of specific art related products. At the average hits/purchase ratio of 3 percent, this shop must be shifting a lot of goods online. Now that is food for thought. And one seo tool even points to it as probably an "authority site" for a certain key phrase. (Now that's also the sort of site you want a link from and to)
We will be profiling various relevant businesses, and their web strategies for you soon. So bookmark Art England before you go!
Google and the other search engines are getting pretty sick of "SEO experts" trying to manipulate their results. Its not what they are about, it frustrates the average internet user who wants to search for something and find it. Then they stop using the search engine, or trusting it at all, and then the people who advertise on the search engine (pay per click, adwords or whatever) lose revenue, stop advertising, and the search engine makes less money. Google and the search engines are about content, truth, and accurate searching. That's what they do best. If your site needs dodgy techniques for people to find it, maybe you are either in the wrong line of business, or you need to tweak your site to make it search engine friendly.
So Black Hat SEO is persona non grata. (Black Hat seo is basically anything which cons or tricks a search engine into listing your site in a search through techniques like keyword spamming, gateway pages (not to be confused with landing pages) etc. We wont even list all the black hat techniques on this page. But take it as read that the webmaster of this site has been around long enough to have grown up, changed his hat from black, to grey, to white. Poacher turned gamekeeper. If you use black-hat, you might shoot up the listings, but you WILL get shot down. Don't do it.
One thing to remember. You are a tiny speck on the internet, unless people are looking for you, they wont find you. If people ate looking for you (or some information you have, or something you have to sell) Google wants to point them to YOUR site. The internet might seem like a huge place. If you are in the art business it might be hard to appreciate that you are still in a "niche", and a tiny one compared to the universe of the internet. But this is not a bad thing, this is really quite a good thing. Once your web site has a "footrprint" (or fits into a niche) you will start seeing relevant traffic. After all, you do not want or need people looking for online casinos or viagra on your site (unless you are an online casino or an internet drugs baron), neither do you need or want worthless links from irrelevant sites.
Ask yourself which is better. 100 hits a day and 3 sales, or a thousand hits a day and one sale. If you have targetted traffic (like one of the sites listed above) for a niche product, you may expect up to ten percent sales to hits.
When you add your site to our list you are showing other webmasters in the art business world that you have a site that is worth them linking to. Some will link to it because its useful. Some will put your site in their online newsletters, specially if it contains useful info, some directories will pick it up and list it. We are not pretending for one minute that the general public who are interested in art come to our site even rarely, if ever at all. So your link here is not an advert, or a directory listing. Add your Link!
If you want to submit to directories, you can do a lot worse than trying the TOP ones. These are the "authority" directories, some take a long time to review your suggestion or submitted URL, so the sooner you have worked your way through them the better. Don't keep re-submitting. At best you go to the bottom of the queue again, at worst you get blacklisted for spamming them. Our list of 200 important internet directories which are FREE to submit
Save time and effort on directory submissions by using a professional directory submission service!