New Artspan Look
The new design for Artspan.com will be live shortly. The new site is in the final stages of testing and will be moving to our server shortly.
New Member Templates
These will be online towards the end of the month (or so we are promised). We do recognize these have been delayed and that many of you are waiting on them. This will be one design but with 6 different color variations. Additional designs will go online in 2007. These additional designs have been done; they are waiting to be coded.
Regional Directory
We will add a series of A-Z regional directories this month, broken out by state and country. We feel this will be of real interest to visitors and, in fact, may be the first thing visitors look at. It could also help sales. It can be reassuring to buy from someone in your general vicinity.
Coop Ads in Major Art Publications
We be sending out an eblast to those who expressed interest interested. Mariana, our print ad designer, was out of the country, so we have not been able to move until now. She is back.
Reminder
The Forum now has over 500 members. We need YOU! Please register here http://www.artspan.com/community/register.php . When you register, edit your profile information to add a signature line and include your site's URL. By doing this, each time you post, your URL will be indexed by the search engines, thus boosting your search results rankings.
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December referrals special: any member referring a new member will get two free months hosting (if you are an annual pay, you will get 2 months added to your year). It will be March before the hosting fee resumes. So, we would really appreciate any effort you can make!
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We have a new record count this month with 98,246 unique visitors (unique visitors are visitors counted once only). Total visitors were 171,309. Both numbers do not include visitors going directly to your sites. Member site visitors are considerably greater than the totals recorded just for Artspan.
Visitor totals have grown nicely through the year. We started in January with 58,000 unique visitors.
Visitor totals to the member sites depend on our promotion AND on yours. Keep promoting your sites to one and all. I will included some tips on site promotion in the next few newsletters, starting with the item below entitled “Meta, Meta, Meta.
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We will send out a message with a link to a new questionnaire within a week or two. We need to know exactly how many U.S. members are interested, what the age range is and more information that will allow the insurance companies to give us a quote for a possible group health plan.
(Non-U.S. members may be surprised to learn that there is no universal health coverage in the United States. We hope to be able to provide some answer to this.)
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Most search engines, including Google and Yahoo, find your website on their own as they automatically “spider” through the web. You do not need to submit to them. Your site will be indexed (categorized and ranked) according to the Meta information and content of your site. Meta information is entered at the top of the page of code that determines the look of your homepage. Artspan supplies 2 fields in the About You section of your admin that correspond to two of the three categories of Meta information that are important for the search engines. The other one is the Meta Description which we fill in for you.
First and most important, is the Meta Title. The Title appears on the upper left corner of the title bar of whichever browser you use (i.e. Internet Explorer). If you are a painter, it could read, “Tuscan Landscapes by Your Name, ” if in fact you paint Tuscan Landscapes. Remember to always include your name as that's how people who know you will search for your work.
The Meta Title can have a big effect on the search rankings for your chosen term. For example, I did a search for Tuscan landscape paintings on Google. There were a half million results. The number one result had this in the Title bar:
Tuscany Landscape Paintings of Tuscany Italy - Tuscan Art
This is not graceful but it is effective. Of 8 words total, The only word that was not relevant to favorable search engine ranking was “of.” Had the artist put in her name it would have been even better!
The next item in importance is the Meta Description which is also entered in the code that is behind your site. A sample Meta Description might read, “Tuscan landscape paintings of Tuscany in oil and acrylic by Your Name featuring scenes of the Tuscan countryside.” This description will not be seen by visitors to your site: it is invisible to them. It is strictly for the search engines, as are the Meta Keywords. These Keywords should be words that correspond to your art and to you—your first name, last name, town, country, medium(s), genre(s) you work in, and any other words that can characterize your work. The more specific these words are, the more likely your work will be found in searches. Do not repeat any words or phrases exactly: Tuscan painting, Tuscan painting, Tuscan painting. This is considered spamming and will be penalized by search engines
More tips on site promotion in coming months.
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