Increase Your Site's Search Ranking

Tweaking your Keywords and Title Meta Tags:

Art sites are sometimes hard to find on the Internet because there is a mismatch between the the most commonly used search engine (Google) and sites with primarily visual, non-textual content. Google and other popular search engines are text-based, and consequently have difficulty finding sites with little textual content.

Just think of a robot who would be blind to pictures, trying to find things by words alone, looking over your site, and you will get the idea. You have to provide some words to get higher ranking in the search results.

Slide show galleries are wonderful, but they must be supplemented with some textual matter, either in the meta tags in the site head, or in the body of the site, or they will be missed by most searchers.

Some sites are heavily visual with jpgs or gifs, and offer little text for the search engine to read in the body of the site. More on this in a later post.

Meta tags in the site's head help the search engine interpret the site content. Some sites have no meta tags, or poorly written meta tags, a detail which lowers the site's placement in search results. If you have poorly written or missing meta tags, you can fix this in your html.

To tweak your site's meta tags, search online and find a site like yours, but one which shows up higher in the search results. You will probably be able to read the source code of the site to find suggestions for your own meta tags in your site's head section.

To reach the source code, right click on the page you want to analyze, and choose "View Page Source" or "View Source". Take a look at their meta tags labeled "title" and "keywords" found near the top between the commands "head" and "/head".

The "title" tag for any site shows at the very top of your browser, and is the wording which shows in the bookmark of your site. Besides reading the textual content of your site, search engines read these tags to decide what your site is about, and decide whether to include you in search results.

Simple changes in these tags in your site html can improve your ranking in search results. However, it is not nice to just copy some other site's meta tags. Your art is unique, why not make your meta tags unique, too?

Search online for "meta tags" and investigate which keywords and are more popular or common for the goods you sell. Ask yourself, do you want to use a niche description, and come up at the top of more specific search results, or go for a result a little further down in an extremely popular category? It's up to you.

Then redo your meta tags "title" and "keywords". It might make a real difference in your site's search results ranking.

More to come in later posts about some good words to use for the body of your site.

If you would like to find a selection of search engines to test your site's visibility, try some from the list at How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory from the site Internet Tutorials.