This will give you a good start, and depending on your choices, you can achieve good traffic to your site with little or no cost. For the best results, you should be marketing and tracking your efforts at least monthly. If you do not have the time or interest in marketing your site, or if you would like us to build you a new, search engine optimized site [we guarantee your listing will improve] , you can Email: help@art-and-technology.com or Call 518.698.2400 if you would like us to do these jobs for you. Good Luck!

We will talk more about this subject later, but first lets jump to the other topic...Key Words and HTML Code optimization. Now if you are lucky enough to be writing your own code, these changes will be easy. If you pay someone else to do your web site, you should ask if they write code with seo placement in mind. In many cases they do not, and you should then consult with someone who can make certain changes in your code to make it more search engine friendly. However, code changes after the fact will cost more.....better to hire someone who knows code optimization write your site in the first place. The majority of web site authors concern themselves more with design than search engine optimization.

In this section we will get a little technical, but hopefully you will find this section helpful. If you go to the menu bar of your browser, and click on VIEW...Source [or Page Source, depending on which browser you are using], a window will open with the source code of the page. If we use the page you are on right now as an example, you will see on the fourth line down a head tag <> and right below that a title tag<>. The first thing you want to do is to make sure the title tag is right after the head tag and that it contains the Key Words you want to use on this page. Notice I have a Pipe...|...symbol between my key words instead of words like the, for, and etc. The reason for this is that a search engine considers these words to be stop words and we do not want to use them here. As an aside...I will not go into detail about every nuance...such as the stop word issue, or my discussion here will become far too long and boring [uh, too late for that]. So next we see meta tags. These give the search engine robots, [crawlers] directions on how to handle the info on the site. The meta description comes first and should be an explanation of what is on your site. The meta keywords, are the words you want to use for someone to find your site from a search engine. If you think a potential customer for you is going to enter the search word{s} architecture, or fine art print into a search engine query box to find a service that you offer, this may be a good key word for you to enter here. DO NOT use too many keywords, thinking the more the better....it is not.
Now you will notice that some of my meta keywords are in my title tag. This is important. These words should repeat themselves on your page in certain areas, but again, not too many times in certain places, or the search engine will lower your ranking for spamming. Now if you go down the page a bit more, below the option value tags, you will see: a href="index.html">img alt="art | architecture | artists " src="images/prev.gif" border="0" class="abs"> and notice my keywords in the title tag are repeated in the alt="" tag area of the image tag. This is repeated 3 times in the first alt tags on the page. The closer to the top of the page the better. Now there are more alt tags on this page, but they do not include my keywords.......if I did this more than 3 times on my page, the search engine would take off points......so you can begin to see how this works. There are specific rules a search engine uses to rank a web page. The more you know about these rules and use them, the better your placement. The caveat here is the search engines from time to time change the rule set, and you must keep up with those changes to keep your high standing.

Now there are more instances of code optimization on this page, but I will not go into this right now. There are several tools online that will help with all the details of all this and I will list some of them below. But Beware....some of the sites you run into when you do searches and follow links for alot of this information will lead you to the slick underbelly of copy writing, with pitch salespeople looking to sell you their secrets. Not that some of them are not worth buying....you will most likely learn something from these people, just slow down and choose wisely before you purchase this info. Many of them are right....much of the information here in this 101 talk is worn out.....does it still work, yes, however not as well as it worked before everyone was doing it. With marketing, finding a way to do something that works and only a few people are using is very powerful until saturation occurs and then it becomes another weaker method. This is what many people claim to offer you, but unless you are lucky enough to be one of the first to buy into this new technique, and for the most part, when someone is going to sell you their secret worth $2500.00 for a limited time for only $97.00 that technique has probably already seen it's day in the hands of the top marketers who used it for personal gain, and then when they began to see market saturation, and knew that this idea's earning power was on the downslide, they decide to sell it to you, because they will then make more profit that way. Now perhaps that idea is still worth alot more than $97.00, if you can implement it quickly, and make some gain.....just choose your weapons with a little discrimination. Like me, you probably do not have an endless supply of money, and every year you will have to pour some of it into what works best for you, as a marketing budget.

So lets get back to key word selection.....how do you choose your key words? A once popular key word tool is located at http://inventory.overture.com, however most agree the results of this tool is not as accurate as it once was. You probably should use 3 or more of these tools to come to your conclusion of which key words you want to use. One free one I would recommend is Good Keywords. Now when you go to choose your keywords, do not choose the ones with the highest number of searches. look down the list for combinations that have less searches per month and try to use these first. Also try using different keywords on different pages of your site....matching up the use of these words within the text of your pages. You can check the density of the keywords on each page with a Keyword Density Analyzer I would highly recommend another free tool [if you try nothing else, try this one] from Web CEO that will not only help you with your keywords, but also give you a considerable amount of information about how to make your site better. NicheBot and SEO Elite are two more sites where you will find good info on these topics. There are many, many tools for free and for sale to help you with your marketing efforts....find the ones that appeal to you and start using their recommendations and see what results you get. With any marketing you do, you will find something that works well, but remember when it stops producing the results you want, you will need to find new techniques to keep your site popular.

To return to more keyword topics, there are two terms that have been in use for a while. Now these techniques may be a bit overworked, however you should be aware of them and they have to do with not picking the most popular key words to use on your site. They are called "long tail marketing" and "low hanging fruit". They are similar and here is how it works. With your site, you are probably targeting a "niche" market. Now if you were targeting selling your artwork online, you know that it is a broad market and fairly competitive....not as competitive as say "weight loss", so if you know a little bit about marketing online, you might quickly decide to tackle just one small piece of that market to start with. So you'll start looking for smaller niches within that bigger one. Losing fat, Losing ten pounds, or Lowering calories for example. These are smaller niches within the weight loss niche, but they have less competition. Now to get the "long tail" or "low hanging fruit", you need to zero in even further. Something like "lose ten pounds in ten days" for instance. This phrase is longer, thus it's likely to have much less competition than "weight loss". At the same time, it's not likely to get nearly as many searches each day either. But that's where the long tail, or low hanging fruit strategies come into play. You try to generate traffic to pages and web sites that have very small searches each month. And you try to make as many of those pages and sites as you can. This way, you have a better chance to rank well for each page, and you can combine the power of the trickle effect. Targeting tiny little, seemingly unimportant words or phrases can add up to a lot more traffic and income than targeting large, popular markets.

Having a popular blog is another way to help your marketing efforts. Another that works well for people is writing articles for an online article site. Ezine Articles is presently the most popular site and you should concentrate your efforts there if this is a road you want to take. Ezine Articles allows writers to publish articles that include a special area at the end called a resource box. In the resource box the author leaves a link or two along with a couple of sentences. Other webmasters and publishers are allowed to reprint the article on their own web sites, newsletters or blogs, as long as they keep the resource box intact. This gets links to your site around the net, without much effort for you, and helps with the link ranking method. More about Link Popularity

Again if you do not have the time or interest in marketing your site, or if you would like us to build you a new, search engine optimized site, you can Email: help@art-and-technology.com or call 518.698.2400 if you would like us to do these jobs for you. And if you have read all of this and have reached this point, let me give you the best advice...look at the pages that show up in the first page on google, yahoo and other search engines for your key words. They must be doing something right....investigate and emulate them to achieve first page status for your site. Good Luck!