Artspan News

Keywords are a very important part of your site being found by people using external search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) or the ‘Search Artspan' feature on the Artspan home page. We have been working with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team to determine the best range of keywords that will help Artspan and our members' sites rank high in Google and other major search engines. It is good to have a basic understanding of what the keyword fields are and how they work, both from an external search engine and internal Artspan search perspective.

Keywords are found in two basic places on your Artspan site. First, there is the keyword field that is in the ‘About You' section. These are the keywords that are used for the search engines like Google. These should include your name, medium(s), genre(s), city, state, country if applicable and some other basic and generic keywords as recommended by the SEO team: for example, for artists.: art,artist,artists,artwork,artworks,original art,contemporary art,online art gallery. Please note how these are written out-no spaces between commas and phrase, no capital letters, and there IS spacing between words of a phrase. This is how keywords should be formatted. It is important to include different forms of a term, such as landscape,landscapes,landscape painting,landscape paintings. City and state are important in case someone is looking for a local artist, for example.

The keywords for individual images are handled a bit differently. The general terms such as art,artwork,artworks are applicable, but it is important that if the piece you are writing keywords for is a landscape to NOT include ‘portrait'. If it is an oil painting, don't include ‘acrylics'. Only relevant terms should be included. It is also important to not repeat the same term in the keywords more than once as this will cause your image to show up more than once in the search unfairly. “Spamming” your keywords is counter-productive in that it can cause your site to be dropped by the major search engines. Spamming keywords refers to adding non-applicable and non-relevant but presumably ‘popular' terms to your keywords with the intention of being picked up in other searches. If a search engine determines that you are adding non-relevant keywords, they may drop you from their search function completely. This is damaging both to the individual member and Artspan as a whole.

We will relaunch the Artspan site with a completely new design. It is a sharp and contemporary design. It is also very search engine friendly. We are targeting a number of terms: Contemporary Art, Original Art, Buy Art, Artists, Photographers, Artisans and others.

We will also introduce a new category of membership: Associate Members. This will be for artists, photographers and artisans who have their custom designed sites and want to keep them, while at the same time becoming Artspan members and having their images showi in the Artspan searches. The cost will be $8.95/month (10% off if paid annually) and that price includes hosting the site on our server and full access to stats. The price for Associate Members who do not choose to host with us is $35 per year. If you know anyone who might be interested, please let them know. Referrals mean a free month hosting for you.

Finally, we also hope to launch the new individual site designs towards the end of the month. We have coded one design, and are waiting on some others.

It has recently come to our attention that Artspan-generated emails are being blocked or put into the spam/trash folders of Yahoo, Hotmail and MSN email account users. We are addressing this with the companies involved. In the meantime, be sure to add the following email addresses to your email address book or ‘white list' so that you may continue to receive updates, newsletters and notifications:
director@artspan.com
denise@artspan.com
support@artspan.com
Also, take a peek into your spam/trash folder every so often, just to make sure nothing slipped by.

Did you know that there is a FAQs file (frequently asked questions) right in your member admin? It's the KnowledgeBase! When you are in your main admin page, click on the button that is in the center on the bottom row. You can browse by topic or search using a term with the search function. Answers to many common questions are there, and more are added often. If you have a question that you think should be added to the KnowledgeBase, send it to Denise at denise@artspan.com with “KB” in the subject line. Be sure to check the KnowledgeBase first before emailing us with a question. Chances are the answer will be there, and if it isn't, we will be happy to assist you.

Traffic in January: 58,461 unique visitors (visitors counted once only), 102,861 total visitors, 3mm page views and 4.6mm hits. This does not include visitors going directly to member sites. That number is much higher. Artspan gets a lot of traffic from non-North American countries. The biggest sources of visitors are (in order): UK, Australia, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

The visitors number was a new record for us, as was the new member signups: 77. The latter is important for all of us for 2 reasons: each new member generates traffic to Artspan and to us all and brings in a little extra revenue which we can put back into promotion. We have just raised our Google keyword purchase budget by 25%. These purchased keywords work especially well in bringing in art consumers: buyers and others interested in contemporary. Also, alas, some scammers...so always be careful. Consult previous newsletters for tips on how to spot them and deal with them.

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