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Getting Seen 
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines.
Typically, the higher a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
SEO takes account of what people search for, and how search engines rank web sites. Optimizing a web site involves editing its content and coding to increase the relevance to specific keywords.
Keywords
Keywords are a set of single words and/or phrases that best describe the content of your web site.
The critical stumbling block to excellent keyword selection is that the Internet has become flooded with competitors for every target audience. Contender web sites will replicate the most commonly used words (artist, artwork, art, etc), or attempt to find alternative phrases that are simultaneously unique, yet frequently used in searches. Keyword selection has become a paradox.
In the field of visual arts, it is a matter of fact that hundreds of thousands of sites use art related keywords, yet the number of daily searches made using those key words and phrases is perhaps only in the hundreds. Appropriate keywords are relatively easy to select, but great keywords are tremendously difficult to find (see the Resources section below for keyword selection tools).
Using your Keywords
Once you have determined the best possible set of keywords, Search engine optimisation requires the saturation and emphasis of those keywords throughout your web page.
Key words should be used in you <HEAD> tags ( <title>, <keywords>, <description>). Take care not to "SPAM" your keywords. If a word is repeated too often in the Head tags, this will count against you. Do not repeat a single word more than 6 times (e.g. dog portraits, cat portraits, horse portraits, donkey portraits, rabbit portraits, duck portraits, etc).
Text content should be modified so that your key words appear with the greatest possible density. For example, if your key word appears once in 100 words, it will have little prominence (1% density). If it appears 10 times in 100 words (10% density), it starts to become more noticeable, and so on.
Deciding how many keywords to use creates a further dilemma. Use very few, and word saturation is more easily achieved, but this is a high-risk strategy focusing on few search choices. Use more keywords and you cover more word search options, but the key words begin to compete with each other. If you have 20 keywords, and use them equally, each word can never exceed 5% density.
If a keyword is in bold, or wrapped in a heading tag (<h1>, <h2>, etc), it becomes more prominent, not just visually, but the coding (what a search engine reads) identifies that word as being more important than other un-tagged text.
The position of words determines their importance. As with natural speech, if asked what we do (our job for example), we would normally respond with a descriptive word or phrase followed by any necessary qualification. Similarly, in natural speech we may often close explanations with a summary, reiterating the most important points. SEO observes the same “rules” and requires the placement of key words at the beginning and end of a body of text.
Key words can also be repeated in “alt” and “title” tags on images, and “title” tags on hyperlinks. Further more, file names should use keywords. Essentially, you need to take each and every opportunity to repeat your key words, and increase the saturation those words in your document.
In summary, how, where, and when (frequency) you use your keywords gives them increased significance.
You should quickly realise that making a web site search engine friendly has the possible consequence that presentation and content become compromised. You will face dilemmas. Do you employ word repletion to achieve density in preference to eloquent and rich language? Do you change that fancy graphic banner at the head of your page to a less visually impressive “h” tag that a search engine can read?
Recommendations
By all means study and employ the principles of SEO, but do not substantially compromise site design quality merely to attract visitors in greater quantity. It is better to have one visitor genuinely looking to buy a local landscape painting, or commission a portrait, than 10,000 just browsing artwork.
SEO can be used to focus and narrow the appeal of a site, rather than compete for a wider audience, and it is hit quality that counts, not visitor quantity. Modern thinking on keywords seems to favour using only 3 to 5, and narrowing (rather than widening) the appeal of a web site.
Recognise that SEO is an iterative process. You often have to sit back a wait (months) to see if your efforts yield performance improvements.
At the end of the day, SEO can only ever be a best guess effort. Google’s search algorithm is a trade secret, and continually changes. Similarly, the moods and behaviours of the surfing public are in a state of flux.
Resources
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Web CEO is a free web site optimisation software package that includes: keyword research, search engine optimisation, search engine submission, etc. |
Getting seen (part 2) - Link Exchanges
Article writing
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Article date: 02 September 2009 ¦ Suggest an amendment or a new resource
