SEO

SEO Tips and Tutorials

A few tips and tutorials for artists who want to create their own website design and SEO. Site design is fairly easy when you use a WordPress CMS contact management system and one of the thousands of available for fee or free WordPress themes and plugins. The newer themes are SEO friendly and give you the places for your predominate keywords, definitions and descriptions. Be thorough and fill in every blank spot offered to you with your working words. You are telling the search engines who you are and what you do or offer. I’ll probably say that again before this post is over. Here are a few tips and tutorials to get you more familiar with SEO as it stands in 2013.

SEO No Empty Spaces
The empty spaces on your edit page or post screen mean something. Blank spaces in WordPress aren’t just empty for simplism’s sake, you are meant to put words there, your working words. Working words are the front doors to your website and your website is your business. For this post my working words are design tools, site validation, website design,  website tools. This is a post so I will add these words to the title, url, categories, excerpt, meta_description and meta_keywords. I would also fill out the feature image’s url (before I upload so I choose the url witch is created from the title of the image), alternate tag, and description.  If this were a page, I would add my working words to the title, url, (using the same working words as I did for the post but moving the words around to make original an new title and url) excerpt, meta_description, meta_keywords and once again, I would fill out the feature image’s url (before I upload so I choose the url witch is created from the title), alternate tag, and description. I recreated an original Website Design blog  category item about SEO. The url needed to be different than the post but still say the same thing. The post title is Design Tool SEO and url is design-tool-seo so I made this new page title SEO Design Tools  and url seo-design-tools. Changing it around a bit will keep you from have urls with numbers which is no good.

SEO Tags and Keywords
Tags and keywords are a very important part of SEO. The search engines check the tags and keywords to see if your site is worthy to offer as a return on search return pages under the tags and keywords you use. Then using those tags and keywords in the text body on your post or page will validate to the search engine that your site does in fact qualify as a return containing your tags and keywords. Use only a few one word tags and keywords. Some SEOers use keyword phrases as tags and meta_keywords but I find phrases are only valuable when used in the text body. Highlight them with italics or bold to reiterate or further validate their importance or relationships. For this page, my meta_keywords are:  seo, artist, website, design, tools, tutorial, learn, 2013

SEO Filling the Empty Spaces
It’s important to create your sites images with valid original urls (links). I think it’s worth saying one more time. Before you upload an image to your website, change the title of that image from nonsensical like this img54547 to a working word title like this Design Tools. Instead of ending up with a url like this urlmd.com/art-gallery/img54547, you create a url like this urlmd.com/art-gallery/design-tools. Now, that image is super duper powerful; It has a great url. It’s alt tag text is slightly more embellished than the url like this Design Tools, Site Validation. The image description will be even more embellished than the alt tag like this Design tools for SEO and validation of websites, design tips and tutorials. If you add a caption, it should mimic the title, simple and direct. Do all these things every time you upload an image to your website, and you will empower those images to do all the work for you.

SEO Creating URLs or Links
I am aware I am saying the same thing over and over but it is so important. When using proper SEO, you are using the same words over and over but you must somehow not be redundant. Create fresh new urls or links with the same words, use them in different order and use extension words like when needing to use art for the keyword phrase art gallery, use artist gallery instead. The artist being the extension of art. This way, you will not have urls or links that have numbers because there are more than one in use exactly the same. If I made a link with art-gallery already, I would recreate it for a new page, post or image. I would change it up but keep it similar, like artist-gallery. If I had a third link to create with the same words, I might switch them around or change the gallery to galleries. There are lots of ways to create fresh new urls or links before copying yourself.

SEO Right the First Time
Being thorough is important for SEO. Doing it right the first time will help to create a great search engine return status. The more you edit and change your posts, pages, titles, urls, categories, tags, images and just about anything else on your site, the more you damage your site’s validated state or search engine return status. It will take a while for the cache to catch up to your changes, especially if you have published it recently. Publishing once correctly and thoroughly will give that post or page a prime jump on validating and qualifying. Now, there is nothing wrong with grabbing an old url, title, image, page or post and hijacking it to create new and fresh material for validation. In that case, update and change it up as much as you wish. Old stagnant urls are useless but because of their valuable history, they are well worth a make-over.

More about design tools, Site Validation, Google + Button.

The featured image is digital art created by Mary Clanahan called Worlds Exposition Coloration and can be found in the Urbicolous Series 2013.

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