A Cautious wander into the SEO wilds

You’ll notice things look considerably different around these parts today. That is due to a complete ground up site rework.

Recently a friend of mine rather brutally (but incredibly honestly) reviewed my previous website and enquired as to why it was so bad. In all honesty I had no answer for them. Things like SEO and even ‘Doing things correctly’ definitely had eluded me (and perhaps still do) but I was definitely the kind of guy who would just chuck everything into the ether as I created it and hope for the best, and clearly that wasn’t working out so great. So it was long overdue to try and get all this figured out.

I write about it here maybe as an optimistic hope of what I expect to happen here moving forward, we will have to wait and see what results actually occur, but for right now I wanted to write a bit about the changes and what I expect to happen.

First things first! It’s generally tidier overall. Previously the site had well over 200 pages, most of which were duplicates or multiple images from the same series or theme. All of that has now been reduced to single galleries on single pages per category of artwork. Each piece of work loses it’s own time in the spotlight but I think overall the benefit way outweighs the negative in this respect.

Something else my friend pointed out to me (And while this may be obvious to some I was oblivious) is that SEO is important and if there is no text on your site then the powers that be have nothing to use in that regard to put your work under the eyes of those who are searching for it. Previously my site had next to nothing in terms of descriptions anywhere. There were no SEO titles, no SEO descriptions, no descriptions at all and no Site Mapping or Indexing. This is why now everything is almost over explained. I wanted to make sure that each part of the site was clearly explained, targeted at specific clients and had it’s perfect use cases outlined, all whilst filling these texts with tasty searchable keywords.

Lastly for the time being, I have covered the site in contact boxes and contact details. This is to try and reduce any amount of work that a potential client would have to do to get me to do a scribble for them. I want no excuse! It’s something several of my art friends have been talking about lately, how hard it is to actually find some of our contact details and get us to work for them, and I was definitely guilty of this too. Here is my attempt to fix that issue. In this regard I have also set in place a Newsletter sign up sheet to have a way to more consistently reach out to visitors of my site and hopefully bring them back to look around time and time again.

It’s going to take some time to hopefully see the results of all this work but I think it was an important thing to do in the long run, and whilst it’s not perfect yet its something I hope to continue building upon moving forward and not letting myself fall into old habits. Maybe ill make a report in a month or two talking about any differences I find.