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  CONTEMPORARY ART
Artspan Newsletter February 2007 | Volume 4| Issue 2
 
February 2007 Newsletter
 
Written and Edited
by Eric Sparre

  In this issue:
New member templates
New pricing
Other News - New Directories and Sculpture Portal
Updates on the Health Plan and the Coop ads
New Traffic Record
Boost your Google Rankings - Optimize Your Site Content
Featured Members: Dimitri Yin and Phyllis Northup
  New member templates  


The new templates are live. Please click on the Themes button in your member Admin and then select one of 9 new variations. Preview your design choice first before making it live. One of the color variations does not yet show but will on Monday, February 12.

You can switch to the new designs whether or not you currently have a homepage and main gallery page now. We had previously announced that you would need to set up a homepage and gallery page before switching, but we were able to resolve the programming issues that seemingly made this necessary. However, Professional and Pro Plus members should probably set up a true homepage and gallery pages at this point anyways. This will make your site look better and be more interesting and logical to navigate and there are other reasons. One of those reasons can be found in the news item below entitled Boosting your Rankings by Optimizing your Website Content. It outlines ways to optimize your search engine rankings by tweaking your content – most importantly that of your homepage.

 New Pricing  


We are raising all member template site prices by US$1 per month effective March 1. This will not affect associate members.  

As I said last month, we need to narrow the gap between revenue and expenses. We are still the lowest cost major provider and the only one to spend significant sums on advertising. We are the only provider of artist sites to function as an art portal. We attract significant traffic (see below) and this traffic is shared by you.  

We are going to working to greatly expand our content offering beginning this month and this of course also involves additional cost to us. But the greater content will result in stronger traffic and rankings – again this will benefit all of us. We have other major projects planned also.  

This is our first price increase in 7 years. We did have one very small partial increase before, but this did not affect those who were already members. Please be assured that we remain committed to keeping the sites as low cost as possible.
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 Other News - New Directories & Sculpture Portal  

The regional directory is up. Just go to the regular A-Z Directory and use the Search Artist by Region dropdown to select a country or state. You then need to choose a letter. We will eliminate that requirement. That is, we need to see all artists in any state or country, not broken out by alphabetical letter, so there is a little more to do. As you know, we will also be programming directories by category of work or subcategory. For example, painting or abstract painting.

We believe that the easier we make it for our visitors to find work, the better for all of us.We are also close to launching the first of our category portals. The first one will be the Sculpture portal, and will incorporate an overview of the category, articles, news, member directories and a resource section consisting primarily of important links.

Updates on the Health Plan and the Coop ad  


We have currently 155 members interested in participating in a group health plan, and we took this to a number of different carriers. We were not successful. It appears that insurance companies have not had recent happy experiences with affinity groups. We are waiting on one response and if that is not favorable, we will try again in a few months or so, possibly using a different broker. We will also contact other organizations to see if a joint approach might bring results.

Coop ads. Those who expressed interest have been contacted and we have reserved space in the April issue of Art in America. The next issue would be either May or October, though the annual which comes out in the summer is also a possibility. The summer is of course not a good time, but the annual does have a long shelf life. It is used year around as a reference. As to B&W Magazine, Mariana will have to let interested members know. They publish 8x a year so I am not sure as to which issue she has targeted. If you need to communicate with her, please use the display@artspan.com email.

 New Traffic Record  


Artspan had over 100,000 unique visitors for a month for the first time: 100,839. Unique visitors are visitors counted once only. Total visitors were 177,000 for January, with 6.62mm page views. These totals do not include visitors that go directly to your member sites. That total is considerably greater. Hits were over 9mm, but that is essentially a meaningless stat.

 Boost your Google Rankings - Optimize Your Site Content  


I refer you to the November newsletter for a full discussion of meta tags, the most important of which is the meta title. Meta tags are used by the search engines to properly index and rank your site. Of even greater relevance to search engines is the optimization of the text on your site. Decide on some search terms you want to optimize for. Make these terms as specific as possible. If you try to optimize for 'landscape painting,' you will be competing with millions of other sites, including Artspan. You will not rank highly enough for traffic to find your site. Remember that most people do not go beyond the first 20 results. However, if you optimize your site for more specific terms like Tuscan landscape painting or California impressionist landscapepainting, you should be able to compete effectively with other websites.

Here is what you do. Make a list of what you consider the most important terms describing your type of artwork. Take the most imortant term and use that as a header on your homepage. For example, Tuscan landscape paintings. Then enter a couple of paragraphs on the homepage describing your work. Sprinkle that copy with your keyword preferences. But don't overdo it! If you repeat more than 5 times out of 50, you could be penalized by the search engines for 'spamming,' and might then be removed from all rankings for six months or more.

Words that appear on your homepage are weighted as more important than words appearing on interior pages. Search engines 'read' your site top to bottom and left to right and will begin with the homepage and then follow each interior page link in order. Incidentally, Keywords should be relevant to the copy that surrounds them – do not use the keyword phrase Tuscan Landscape Painting on a page about your education (unless you trained in Tuscany with a master landscape painter).

Also add links to other pages on your site in your text. If possible make those pages (links) keywords. You could call a page “Tuscan landscape paintings.” And add key terms to the image description fields. This can result in occasionally clunky writing, but that is a small price to pay for a healthy increase in traffic.

Finally, my usual plea...join the Forum! Its entertaining and interesting. When you register and fill out the profile, remember to add your homepage as part of your signature line. That way your site URL will be indexed over and over as a link from a top-ranked art site.
 Featured Members  
Kurt Lothman
Abstract Paintings
Kurt's intention is to show that many problems in the world are actually purposely created and those responsible are by and large able to evade punishment at this time; however, he believes that they eventually suffer the consequences. He explores political problems, while some paintings are just fun abstracts.
Constance Williams
Paintings and Ceramics
Currently, Constance finds herself focusing on two mediums. Her ceramics have a contemporary form, organic and sensual with a layered finish that often has a painterly old world appearance. Her paintings are mostly landscapes and seascapes as well as abstract paintings, using any medium to achieve her goal.
 Legal and Other  

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