[Off-Topic] SEO

[This is a copy of the original post on the Danzerfaust Ceramics Blogger page on 9/8/2017]

For ceramic artists, a very important part of getting noticed and reaching broader audiences is having a web-presence.

Whether in the form of owning or renting a website, writing a blog, or managing social media, having some sort of presence on the web is a must for any artist.

But just having a presence on the web isn’t enough.

This presence must be noticed. And to get it noticed, one of the best ways is to ensure that it is readily found on a search engine.

Here is where SEO comes in.

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is exactly what the title suggests: optimizing online content to be more easily found by search engines.

This may sound very technical, or very complicated, but in truth it is very simple.

A big part of improving the SEO of your content is using keywords.

Keywords are words that represent your content.

These are any words that might help to identify, at a glance, what the article is about.

When you type something in to the search bar of a search engine, it splits up any terms you’ve used into single words, and searches for each word in its database of websites.

Put more simply, search engines use words to find websites.

To optimize our web content (again, this is almost anything, from blogs and websites to social media) so that search engines can find them, in our content we want to include any words that we want to be associated with.

The areas where the most important of these keywords should be featured are:

• Title

• Body

• Tags (or similar features, if applicable)

So, if, for example, you want to be closely associated with the word “ceramics,” the word ceramics should appear at least once in your title, more than once in the body of your content (this will vary depending on the length of the content), and in the tags.

This should help tremendously in allowing search engines such as Google and Bing to find your website.

More importantly, links to your web content will rank higher: that is, they will be displayed closer to the top of the results when the keywords you choose are searched on the search engine.

Keywords are only a small part of optimizing your web content, but are one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase your content’s SEO.

If anyone would like me to do more posts on SEO in the future, let me know in the comments below. I’m still learning and finding out more about how to pursue it effectively, and would love to share what I find!