Everyone who owns and operates an art website wants their site to be ranked higher and to be seen when people search for an art related website or for an art service. How can an artist, art gallery or some other art related business rank higher when people are searching for a product or service? The answer is to begin to use keyword phrases. In SEO (search engine optimization) the technical term for this is "Long Tail Keywords". Just what is a Long Tail Keyword (phrase) and how can we take advantage of this for our art related website?

It seems like most people are only concerned about individual keywords for their website and blogs. Why is this? When the internet was in its infancy and the media was a much smaller, we were all taught to use certain keywords related to our product, service or business. Today, if you are to use single keywords, you will never rank very high in anyone’s searches, as the competition for certain words is overwhelming! However, if you were to use keyword phrases related to your art business when you are describing or writing for the internet, you will have a much better chance to rank higher. Let me show you why a phrase is better than a keyword in order to help your website to rank higher on the internet than your competitors.

If you were to put the word "art" into a Google search, it will tell you that there are 1,400,000,000 web pages for that word. Yes, that is B, as in Billion! That is a heck of a lot of competition. However, if you continue and add the word marketing to the word art and make the phrase "art marketing" there are 67,000,000 web pages. That is 40 times better then the single word of art. Now if we put into the search the phrase "art marketing strategy" the number of web pages comes down to 3,440,000 or about 20 times better again. The phrase "art marketing success strategy" yields 2,330,000 web pages. Finally, the phrase "art marketing success strategy ideas" yields 1,170,000 web pages. Our last phrase produces the least amount web pages yet.

What does all of this mean for you and me? It means that we can improve our page rank by using carefully researched phrases for our keywords, titles and descriptions. This should be done for each page of your website, each title and post that you write, each meta word and each meta description that you write. As you can see from the example above, just placing single keywords related to your business is just not enough to compete. Also, remember, a majority of all internet searches are now being done by a phrase.

Researching keywords is a whole science that I do not profess to have as I leave that to professional SEO firms. But, you can do a lot of research on your own with keywords and keyword phrases with Google’s Adwords. You will need to have a Google account, but the account is free. Google Adwords will suggest keywords and phrases in your area of interest along with data on the overall competition for those keywords. Adwords will show the amount of global searches for that keyword.

You will need to play around with their keyword tool in order how to learn how it all works. But once you become familiar with how to use the keyword tool it will help you to discover those key words and phrases that will get you ranked higher and higher in the search results. I use the keyword tool for tags, article content, press release content, image tags, meta descriptions and meta tags. This may sound technical to some, but really it is something that you need to be aware of in everything you post to the internet in order to stand out and be found.