Lemme tellya a thing or three
You have a website, or perhaps a tumblr or blogger or wordpress. Marvelous. You even update your resume as new shows and reviews come in, and you add images of new work and inform the public on sales. You’re rocking this web thing. But is anyone seeing it? Can anyone find you?
I’m kind of obsessed with tags and key words these days, because I’ve come to see how essential they are to sorting through the mass of information that is the internet. I was trying to look up information on a Philadelphia artist the other day, and I was shocked to find that searching their name and the word artist lead me to Art in Bars, which you know, isn’t so helpful since AiB was who was trying to find more information.
A buzzy skill these days is search engine optimization. Now, I have barely functioning coding skills, and if you’re not a code monkey yourself, you are in some ways limited as to what you can do, but never say never. If you have html knowledge, you already know how to create metatags for robots and keywords. But there’s always room for improvement in what you input as your keywords.
Imagine you are an artist in Philadelphia named John Circe. You do pencil drawings based on photographs of your friends wearing animal masks.  You also make sculptures out of pencils. This is your shtick.
It’s easy enough to get a handle of making sure your full professional name (John M. Circe) is included with any show you take part in,¬† or any image of your work you put on the internet. So if someone knows who you are they can find your website by searching your name, perhaps with artist or art if it’s a common name. But let’s imagine someone saw your work in a group show three months ago, didn’t write down you name, but has been thinking about how much they liked that art and wants to track it down. This is where key words become your best friend.
You need to think about how people who know you, who know your art, and have no idea you exist will find your art. Key word combination that should lead to you. Think specific. Of course use the terms Philadelphia, artist, drawing, pencil, art, but also think of the kind of drawings, the subjects, the materials and add those. Make up long strings of words someone might use to describe your work – weird drawings people masks, hipsters animal mask, Philadelphia drawing mask people, and flatter yourself.¬† Best Philadelphia drawing, really cool pencil sculpture, interesting drawings masks, new artists pencil really good. Always assume you want people to find you who don’t even know who you are, who have an idea of art they would like to see, and make sure your work comes up.
This assumes you have access to code to embed keywords. Let’s say as fancy as you get is a blogger site.¬† You have no idea what I’m talking about with keywords. Tags can be used the same as keywords, and should. Even if you post one image of a painting in progress, tag the hell out of it. Your name, the materials, the subject, the location. The robots of the internet use these words to find your page and suggest it to people who are searching the terms. The robots do not see pictures, they see words (this is why one can make an argument against artists having flash websites) then they look to see if the words in your tags or keywords match other words nearby (so you’re not lying about the content.)
The unsolicited advice: always when you put an image of your work on the internet, attach words to it. Lots of words. Specific words. And then the robots, and the art lovers, can find you.
