Use Keywords to Sell Your Original Art

To many, keywords are something that other people have to worry about.  If you are an artist that wants to sell your original art on the Internet, your use of key words is critical to everything you do online.  If it can be published on the Internet, then whatever you are doing online should be optimized with the strategic use of keywords. 

A keyword is a word or short phrase that captures the essence of the topic of a document.  The major search engines like Google then use these keywords, page titles and descriptions to index the page on the website.  People looking to obtain information then use these keywords in their searches on search websites like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.

Writing for the Internet is different in that you must always keep the keywords that you have deemed important in mind.  For example if you are an oil painter, you should not refer to one of your paintings as “artwork”.  Not unless you think that people are going to search for the term artwork.  Instead, you might call it an “original oil painting”, or a piece of “original art”.  These are more popular search terms.  There are many free tools available to help you find the most popular key words and phrases, but I recommend Google’s Keyword Tool that is very easy to use.

Most visual artists would prefer to simply display images of their original art, but you must be aware that the search engines can’t read images, only text.  That is why it is so important that you use what is called an “alt text” (alternative text) description.  We’ve all seen this before.  When an image doesn’t load, there is still a description of what the image is. That is the alt text you see.  You should make sure that you apply very descriptive alt text to every image, more than just a title.  In my opinion, good image alt text for images of your original art include the medium and the artist’s name at the minimum.

The use of key words is important even if you are posting images of your original art to online fine art gallery websites like TheArtGallerist.com.  These websites typically have an item description and/or an artist information section.  Each of these sections can be seeded with key words to help your page be found by people performing Internet searches.  Obviously in the description section you are going to want to talk about the work of art itself.  Words like oil painting, ceramic art, hand blown glass, original art, affordable art, etc. can all be used to describe what it is the customer is looking at.  Additionally, words that describe your style, (“contemporary”, “impressionist”, or “cubist”), the substrates (“acrylic on canvas”, “print on watercolor paper” or “oil on board”), or the techniques you used (“dry brush”, “intaglio” or “gallery wrap canvas”) are just some of the descriptive key words that people might search.

In your “Artist Information” section, don’t be shy from peppering your biography or artist statement with important key words as well.  Biographies should always be written in the third person so that you can leverage the most unique keyword you own, your name.  Places you studied (art schools) or well known artists you studied with can also be key words to an individuals search.  Even in your Artist Statement where typically everyone strives to write as “artistically” as possible, you should always try to remember that you are writing to be found on the Internet.  The use of your key words here is not redundant, but still vitally important.

To get started with this new way of thinking for writing on the Internet, start by making a list of all the key words people might use to search if they wanted to find you; the artist.  After you have compiled the list, you can check your list using the Google Key Word tool to find out how many searches are performed for that word or phase each day.  Then, it is simply up to you to start using them in everything you write about you or your “original fine art” online.