07.22.06
SEO of art website
After initially publishing version 1 of my web site (now) Portraits With Pets, I needed to “optimize” the pages so “search engines” would pay attention to it (ie. “index” it, ie. put it into their databases), allowing more people to then find it. My initial web pages, although showing fine large quick-loading images, were practically “content”-free as far as search engines could tell.
Because I had created visual “pages” in Photoshop and “sliced” each page up into .jpg (graphic file) “images” for the web page built in GoLive, I had very little descriptive text typed directly ONTO the page. Such text, typed on the page, is the “content” that “spiders” (indexing robots that “crawl” the web) look for. Had I been more experienced in website building or better educated, I would have realized this and built my pages differently from the start.
So I reworked my pages, starting with my home (”index”) page, which is the primary entry point to the site and usually the first one to get “crawled” by the search engine “spider” robots. I typed lots of informative text onto my page. I made lots of “text links” and “button links” for “navigation” into the rest of the site. I pared down and honed and fine-tuned my “keywords” and page “titles” and made sure all my “images” had “Alt text” (pop-up text descriptions) and that each page had all the “meta tags” it needed to provide info to the search engines’ “bots.”
In addition, I built a “links” page with “outlinks” to other websites, and began an ongoing effort to get other quality websites to “inlink” to Portraits With Pets. (When sites link to each other it’s call “cross-linking.”) Google is very keen on seeing other website links “inbound” to your website and “ranks” your site higher when it finds these, based somewhat on how highly Google ranks the OTHER website.
Today my website is in pretty good shape and Google has taken notice. I am indexed well for my niche search terms in Google, also quite well in MSNsearch, and reasonably well in YahooSearch. Many of the smaller SE’s find me. A website is an organic thing and the maintenance effort is never-ending, so now I also have this weblog to share such trivia with you (setting up a “Blog”, now that’s a story for another day.
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Connie Moses, petArtist Portraits With Pets.com and PortraitsWithHorses.com
