The Art World and the World Wide Web

Searching by Artist Name
Where does your gallery rank? Galleries in particular can benefit
from quality search engine optimization. One of the greatest
hopes of a gallery is to come up high in a search engine ranking
when someone searches for one of their artists. This is not easy
to do, especially for galleries that are getting started late. But
it is possible.
If a Web user searches by the gallery’s name, galleries will
generally come up on top. The battle is in the more general
searches, e.g., when searching by an artist’s name, style or period
of art. If a gallery’s website comes up when someone searches by
an artist’s name, then the SEO is working well. For example,
if you Google Fred Tomaselli, James Cohan Gallery ranks in
the top position. That’s what you want.
Aside from a custom “content-only” solution, getting that
top placement requires a lot of time, persistence, hard work,
and regular brushing up on search engine metrics. But even all
that won’t guarantee a top placement.
Freshness, Words, Links and More:
Other Ways to Increase Your Ranking
Keep Content Fresh: Regularly updating the content on sites
is one way to get the attention of search engines. Websites
that keep content fresh tend to get more traffic, which
translates to a higher ranking. A site that doesn’t update is
neither very useful nor interesting and will be passed over
in favor of a fresher site. Aside from the search engines,
adding new content is good practice in general.
49