SEO Question: How do I promote my art site via SEO and search? I want to drive traffic to my site from Google.

SEO Answer: I have been asked this question in various formats more times than I can count.

How I would Have Marketed Art Years Ago:
A few years ago when I was far greener to marketing I would say get links with the anchor text you want to rank for. Make sure those words are also in your page title and page content. Then mix in a few quality links by submitting to the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and vertical authority sites that are related to your field.

My very first SEO client was an artist by the name of Gregory Christeas who was also a photographer. A couple years ago I used very low level uber spammy techniques and his site started ranking in most of the search engines for "headshots" within a month. I charged him maybe $100 or so and then within a month he had already got a lead that gave him thousands of dollars in profit. He is the one who sorta made me become an SEO...although I sold no services at the time he was demanding that I helped him and so I did. I still thank him to this day for that. SEO has probably got a bit more complex since then, but I digress...

A couple years ago he moved overseas to Greece, his native land. Before he moved I had the chance to meet him and he is probably one of the top 5 most spiritual people I have ever met. He still has an art site. Years ago he used some of my low level SEO techniques I used on his art site and now he ranks at #3 in Google for abstract artist, but the site looks like dog crap compared to how amazing his artwork is. In fact, I think it makes his art look far worse to be on a site that looks like I designed it.

Mindshare is Key to Promoting Abstract Ideas:
Some of my friends think Paris Hilton is really ugly from top to bottom from the inside out. But she gets lots of search volume because she has mindshare and media coverage. Many people think she is this or that because they are told what to think of her and given enough repetition they start to believe it. I guess the theory I am saying here is that if enough people tell you something falls into a certain frame set or category then eventually many people will believe it.

What is beauty? The more abstract an idea is the more inclined we will be to rely on others inputs to formulate our own opinions.

Commodity Artwork:
Now if a person is searching for Pablo Picaso prints, in spite of him being an amazing artist, that is a bit of a commodity and maybe that is a good thing to optimize for since there is low commitment in products with low cost.

Somethings do not make sense to push algorithmically, and some leads have very little value. I don't think SEO is a real solution for most live artists. SEO doesn't really get too many people talking about you.

Artwork from an Amazing Live Artist is Not a Commodity:
Take for example my friend Gregory Christeas. He hid out on the streets of France while in exile from Greece. While living as a street bum / artist without a home he made art out of whatever he could find...coffee grinds, aluminum foil, whatever. His site looks piece meal at best, yet if you hunted about you could find the story about how he met Pablo Picaso.

About two years ago I tried putting his art in a database and tried moving him to become a blogger before I even knew anything about blogging. I don't think I sold him a convincing story though because I didn't really know anything about blogging at that point. Eventually though I would love to work with Gregory to help him do better web marketing because he is a great guy and his art work is amazing. Or maybe I think it is better than it really is because I feel I know, trust, and like him?

It's all about Feelings:
And I am not saying that I am one of those asshats who thinks that blogs will save the world or whatever. What I am saying is that story telling matters. Giving people a reason to come back and learn more about you and get to know you matters. Letting people feel they can know you and trust you and know what your motives are is really just about the cheapest for of marketing you can come across.

In the same way that SEO as a standalone bolt on product has largely died and is dying I think walls blocking off distribution to artwork will prevent many artists from succeeding.

Being Different:
At a place in SOHO I saw the expression on my artist friend Gregory's face when he saw this literally hairy pink and lime green pokedotted striped piece of artwork on the wall. He was pissed at the idea of art teachers telling people to be provacitive without reason.

We are all different, and if we express who we are in what we do that will only work to our advantage. But people run into issues if they try to be different just for the sake of trying to be different.

Create Connections & Tell Stories:
If you can find ways to make people talk about you then you win. The more levels you can connect with fans on the greater you will win.

The Importance of Conversation:
While search engines seem to be pushing many content production models to the lowest common denominator I believe they are pushing artists to become story tellers.

As Cory Doctorow recently posted:

Today there's the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else's, somewhere, and if you're to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity.

You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience. JMS kept Babylon 5 alive by hanging out on fan newsgroups. Neil Gaiman's blog is built almost entirely on conversing simultaneously with thousands of readers. All the indie bands who've found success on the Internet through their message-boards and mailing lists, all the independent documentarians like Jason Scott, comics authors like Warren Ellis with his LiveJournal, blog, mailing list, etc.

So how would I recommend marketing art?

• Research to see what others have done to become successful using the internet. Maybe don't copy them, but consider how their ideas have spread.

• Make sure your site design and format sells the same story you want the content to.
• Don't be afraid to mess up. Many of my past posts are garbage. Many of my future posts will be as well.
• Don't try to connect with everyone. The world is a big place. If you try to be interesting to everyone then you will be interesting to nobody.
• Don't be afraid if sometimes people take things the wrong way or derive an alternate meaning. If people can't get multiple meanings from something how can it be good art?
• Make sure you give people reasons to talk about you regularly.
• Don't be afraid to be opinionated. Isn't art just an open expression of opinions and interpretations anyway?
• Give stuff away. If people really want it they will find a way to access it. Piracy is a form of progressive taxation. Further consumption of your artwork is just going to lead to further consumption.
• Give stuff away. Many artists have made their names by being the first or only person in their field to give stuff away in the format that they give it away. Helping others makes it easier to feel good about the day. Also imagine what type of great marketing it is for a person or a brand to donate to Amnesty International or other cool charities.
• Go where the conversations are on and off the web. If I were an indie rock musician I would try to find a way to get to Coachella.
• If I were any type of artist I would probably go to Burning Man.
• If you want to try to also use search for marketing think laterally. Connect yourself with important ideas and ideas which matter to people you would like to appeal with.
• Probably more stuff, but I don't yet know lots about art and it is early in the morning.

Disclaimer: I have not an artistic bone in my body and I may be full of crap, but I believe the stuff in this post. ;)

Update: Shepard Fairey explained how he marketed the famous Obama poster.

SEO Question: Lets say I have a web service company (sales) site and a blog about proper web design at domain.com/proper-web-design/ Then lets say I have a blog about hot design sites at domain.com/hot-sites/

If the blogs becomes successful would it help domain.com in Google serp rankings?

SEO Answer: In a word, yes.

Quality links to any part of your site make it easier for the rest of your site to rank well. So long as you use good internal navigation your link popularity flows throughout your site.

Although you didn't ask the questions, as to weather your blogs should be 2 separate blogs or 1 blog and as to weather it would make sense to keep them both on your main site it really depends on what your goals are and how much effort you put into them.

If you market your main products or services too heavily on a blog it can become a bit harder for people to want to link at your blog. If your content quality is amazingly high you can probably get away with a good bit of marketing without it hurting your linkability too much, although I would recommend keeping the blog looking really pure and non commercial off the start in most cases to make it easier for people to want to like your site, subscribe to your feed, and link at your site. After a while you can flip the switch and make some bank :)

Also keep in mind that even if your main site did not rank better your blog may help establish you as a known expert in your field. Even without marketing your services on your blog some people will want to hire you based on what you write on it (I so am living proof of that concept). You also are more likely to get better leads from people you would work better with by taking leads from friends or working for people who like to read your blog than the lower quality leads search would provide you.

For higher end service based businesses I do not think search yields very high quality leads as compared to word of mouth marketing, building trust over time, and brand building activities.

Many people also do not realize how lucrative proper contextual ads can be in some verticals. In web design contextual ads may not be too great because most of your traffic is going to be people fairly savvy about the web. My mom is learning blogging and has a weight loss blog. She has been blogging for maybe 2 months now and already has got some organic links from other bloggers. Just yesterday, in spite of putting an affiliate ad in a post and three contextual ad units around it, my mom got a decent link from another blogger. Another friend of mine also recently got some great link love from a high traffic site with a rather plain looking blog because he had one of the few blogs in his vertical.

I think I have updated Link Harvester twice since I last posted new source code. It now allows you to grab link data via Yahoo! or MSN.

On top of allowing you to search for links at a specific page or links to anywhere in a domain it also has a third function called deep links which allows you to get a sample of deep link data without grabbing links pointing at the home page. The theory is that many good sites get deep links. Looking through the deep links may give you a better view of how they were acquired or if they are all garbage scraper links, etc.

By looking through the deep links you can

• check the quality of links pointing at inner pages.

• know what URLs you really need to redirect if you are changing your content management system.
• know what URLs are important to redirect if you buy a site and want to modify the content or gut out pieces that were causing duplicate content or other problems

Another useful feature of looking at the deep link profile is that if you look at the links pointing at sites that were not actively marketed via SEO techniques it can help you see what natural link profiles look like.

MSN tends to give some weird numbers with their backlink count sometimes and typically shows fewer backlinks than Yahoo! so by default when Link Harvester gives link counts like

Showing 421 unique domains from the first 250 results of 1129 total results

it means that between Yahoo! and MSN there were 421 unique results returned in the query. The of first 250 means that the link search depth was set to 250 per engine. The 1129 results is the number of links in the Yahoo! database (although they don't return 100% of what they know of they return most of them). If Yahoo is turned off the third number should be from MSNs database.

Making Untrustworthy Data Trustworthy:

In social networks there tends to be an echo chamber effect. Stories grow broader, wider, and more important as people share them. Tagging and blog citation are inevitably going to help push some stories where they don't belong. Spam will also push other stories.

RSS, the Wikipedia, Government content, press releases, and artful content remixing means automated content generation is easy. Some people are going so far as to try to automate ad generation, while everyone and their dog wants to leverage a publishing network.

What is considered worthwhile data will change over time. When search engines rely to heavily on any one data source it gets abused, and so they have to look for other data sources.

Search Engines Use Human Reviewers:

When John Battelle wrote The Search he stated:

Yahoo is far more willing to have overt editorial and commercial agendas, and to let humans intervene in search results so as to create media that supports those agendas…. Google sees the problem as one that can be solved mainly through technology–clever algorithms and sheer computational horsepower will prevail. Humans enter the search picture only when algorithms fail–and then only grudgingly.

Matt Cutts reviewed the book, stating:

A couple years ago I might have agreed with that, but now I think Google is more open to approaches that are scalable and robust if they make our results more relevant. Maybe I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Matt also states that humans review sites for spam:

If there’s an algorithmic reason why your site isn’t doing well, you can definitely still come back if you change the underlying cause. If a site has been manually reviewed and has been penalized, those penalties do time out eventually, but the time-out period can be very long. It doesn’t hurt your site to do a reinclusion request if you’re not sure what’s wrong or if you’ve checked carefully and can’t find anything wrong.

and recently it has become well known that they outsource bits of the random query evaluation and spam recognition process.

Other search engines have long used human editors. When Ask originally came out it tried to pair questions with editorial answers.

Yahoo! has been using editors for a long time. Sometimes in your server logs you may get referers like http://corp.yahoo.com/project/health-blogs/keepers. Some of the engines Yahoo! bought out were also well known to use editors.

Editors don't scale as well as technology though, so eventually search engines will place more reliance upon how we consume and share data.

Ultimately Search is About Communication:

Many of the major search and internet related companies are looking toward communication to help solve their problems. They make bank off the network effect by being the network or being able to leverage network knowledge better than the other companies.

• eBay
• has user feedback ratings
• product reviews reviews.ebay.com
• bought Shopping.com
• bought PayPal
• bought Skype
• Yahoo!
• partnered with DSL providers
• bought Konfabulator
• bought Flickr
• My Yahoo! lets users save or block sites & subscribe to RSS feeds
• offers social search, allowing users to share their tagged sites
• bought Del.icio.us
• has Yahoo! 360 blog network
• has an instant messenger
• has Yahoo! groups
• offers email
• has a bunch of APIs
• has a ton of content they can use for improved behavioral targeting
• pushes their toolbar hard
• Google
• may be looking to build a Wifi network
• has toolbars on millions of desktops and partners with software and hardware companies for further distribution
• bought Blogger & Picasa
• alters search results based on search history
• allows users to block pages or sites
• has Orkut
• has an instant messenger with voice
• has Google groups
• Google Base
• offers email
• AdWords / AdSense / Urchin allows Google to track even more visitors than the Google Toolbar alone allows
• Google wallet payment system to come
• has a bunch of APIs allowing others to search
• search history allows tagging
• MSN
• operating system
• browser with integrated search coming soon
• may have been looking to buy a part of AOL
• offers email
• has an instant messenger
• Start.com RSS aggregation
• starting own paid search and contextual ad program based on user demographics
• has a bunch of APIs
• AOL
  • AIM
  • AOL Hot 100 searches
  • leverage their equity to partner with Google for further distribution
• Ask
  • My Ask
  • Bloglines
• Amazon
• collects user feedback
• offers a recommending engine
• allows people to create& share lists of related products
• lists friend network
• finds statistically improbably phrases from a huge corpus of text
• allows users to tag A9 search results & save stuff with their search history

Even if search engines do not directly use any of the information from the social sharing and tagging networks, the fact that people are sharing and recommending certain sites will carry over into the other communication mechanisms that the search engines do track.

Things Hurting Boring Static Sites Without Personality:

What happens when Google has millions of books in their digital library, and has enough coverage and publisher participation to prominently place the books in the search results. Will obscure static websites even get found amongst the billions of pages of additional content?

What happens when somebody comment spams (or does some other type of spam) for you to try to destroy your site rankings? If people do not know and trust you it is going to be a lot harder to get back into the search indexes. Some will go so far as to create hate sites or blog spam key people.

What happens when automated content reads well enough to pass the Turing test? Will people become more skeptical about what they purchase? Will they be more cautious with what they are willing to link at? Will search engines have to rely more on how ideas are spreading to determine what content they can trust?

Marginalizing Effects on Static Content Production:

As the web userbase expands, more people publish (even my mom is a blogger), and ad networks become more efficient people will be able to make a living off off smaller and smaller niche topics.

As duplicate content filters improve, search engines have more user feedback, and more quality content is created static boring merchant sites will be forced out of the search results. Those who get others talk about them giving away information will better be able to sell products and information.

Good content without other people caring about it simply means to search engines its not good content.

Moving from Trusting Age to Trusting Newsworthiness:

Most static sites like boring general directories or other sites that are not so amazing that people are willing to cite them will lose market share and profitability as search engines learn how to trust new feedback mechanisms more.

Currently you can buy old sites with great authority scores and leverage that authority right to the top of Google's search results. Eventually it will not be that easy.

The trust mechanisms that the search engines use are easy to defeat and matter less if your site has direct type in traffic, subscribers, and people frequently talk about you.

Cite this Post or Subscribe to this Site:

Some people believe that every post needs to get new links or new subscribers. I think that posting explicitly with that intent may create a bit of an artificial channel, but it is a good base guideline for the types of posts that work well.

The key is that if you have enough interesting posts that people like enough to reference then you can mix in a few other posts that are not as great but are maybe more profit oriented. The key is to typically post stuff that adds value to the feed for many subscribers, or post things that interest you.

Many times just by having a post that is original you can end up starting a great conversation. I recently started posting Q and As on my blog. I thought I was maybe adding noise to my channel, but my sales have doubled , a bunch of sites linked to my Q and As, and I have got nothing but positive feedback on it. So don't be afraid to test stuff.

You wouldn't believe how many people posted about Andy Hagans post about making the SEO B list. Why was that post citation worthy? It was original and people love to read about themselves.

At the end of the day it is all about how many legitimate reasons you can create for a person to subscribe to your site or recommend it to a friend.

Man vs Machine:

For most webmasters inevitably the search algorithms will evolve to become advanced to the point where it's easier and cheaper to manipulate human emotion than to directly manipulate the search algorithms. Using a dynamic publishing format which reminds people to come back and read again makes it easier to build the relationships necessary to succeed. To quote a friend:

This is what I think, SEO is all about emotions, all about human interaction.

People, search engineers even, try and force it into a numbers box. Numbers, math and formulas are for people not smart enough to think in concepts.

Disclaimer:

All articles are wrote to express an opinion or prove a point (or to give the writer an excuse to try to make money - although this saying that SEO is becoming more about traditional public relations probably does not help me sell more SEO Books).

In some less competitive industries dynamic sites may not be necessary, but if you want to do well on the web long term most people would do well to have at least one dynamic site where they can converse and show their human nature.

Earlier articles in this series:

• Why Bloggers Hate SEOs
• Why SEOs Should Love Bloggers
• Dynamic Sites and Social Feedback
• Controlling Data and Helping Consumers Make it Smarter
• Small vs Big and Voice in Brand
• Syndication and How News Spreads
• Trending and Tracking the Blogosphere and Newsosphere

A while ago I started publishing bits of an article that I intended to finish quickly, but life slowed me down. Here were the first parts

Why Bloggers Hate SEOs
Why SEOs Should Love Bloggers
Dynamic Sites and Social Feedback
Controlling Data and Helping Consumers Make it Smarter
Small vs Big and Voice in Brand

I am going to see if I can finish up the article today. Here is the next piece:

How News Spreads:

News has to start from somewhere. It doesn't really matter if it comes from blogs or traditional media. A few things that are important with both publishing formats are

• both have incentives to get the scoop or report on stories early
• both have audiences who can further spread your message
• both are fairly viral
• both have lots of legit link popularity
• getting viral marketing via blogs or news coverage is something that most people will not be able to replicate

Eventually if the story spreads the feedback network becomes the next round of news. If one or two well known reporters write your story other journalists and bloggers may feel like they are missing out if they do not cover it.

The story about me getting sued was picked up by another blogger, then BusinessWeek, then the WSJ. About a few hundred blog citations followed that. Sometimes news that goes a bit national comes back local, and even then you get a bonus links. A Pittsburgh paper mentioned I was sued. That story was syndicated on a Detroit paper, and even got a mention in the blog of the local paper.

Newspapers love to syndicate content from each other to lower costs. Sometimes they even syndicate things that don't make sense because they need fill to surround their ads. I have even seen an Arizona column featuring local Rhode Island bloggers.