I talk to artists daily and so many of them say "I have a very nice web site but no one buys from me, why?" The answer is not a simple one, but there is an answer. When the big rush to get on the World Wide Web was really gaining momentum it reminded me of the old gold rush days. Not that I was alive then, I wasn’t but the end result was the same. Thousands of able bodied men and women loaded up their wagons and headed for the gold fields knowing they were going to finally strike it rich. Only those who arrived first or those with great skills in finding gold, or those lucky few people ever found gold. Today on the internet is no different, thousands of able bodied people having heard the many rags to riches stories about the internet go and pull money from their bank accounts and get a site on the World Wide Web and wait for the money to roll in. You have your site up so what happened? In our rush to riches we often overlook some of the basic keys to business success that are as immutable today as they were when the first cave man tried to market his recent invention of the wheel to his fellow caveman. Not everyone he showed it to wanted a round rock in their cave.

I like to compare a retail sales web site to a bill board. If you get a fabulous bill board printed up and it is revolutionary in its concept, brilliantly scribed, and you put this bill board in your garage, the only people that will buy your product you advertised on the bill board are your friends and relatives that just happen to walk through your garage and see this wondrous bill board. Putting up a web site on the World Wide Web is just like putting your bill board in the garage. Only the people you tell about your site will ever see it. The millions of people out there that are looking for a piece of art for their office, home, or as a gift cannot find you among the millions of sites on the web. Just like that bill board you must pay an advertising fee to put it up in a well traveled spot in order for people to see it. You must also pay to advertise your web site. As a result of this, whole marketing and advertising businesses have cropped up on the internet and only people with extensive training in how the internet works have figured this problem out correctly. This particular specialty is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or advertising to the layman.

In the next few issues we will discuss this complex and often frustrating process of SEO. It is expensive and there are as many bad SEO experts on the web as there are good ones. On our site www.art-exchange.com we have been going through this process since the beginning many years ago. We have spent a lot of money getting this right. We still spend thousands of dollars per month to make our web site findable.

The other factor is that a web site is like a sand castle not a bronze statue. Web sites are a work in progress and you must be prepared to make or deal with changes on a regular basis. This is a very costly process to get right and cannot be done in one week. Should we just quit then and not sell our art on the World Wide Web?

Absolutely not. There are solutions and some of them may be surprising. In the next few issues of SellArtSmart we will give you our solutions to this complex and expensive problem. Because www.art-exchange.com is comprised of a large co-op group of artists working together, we can afford to do the things you as an individual cannot afford to do. The days of a little guy on a budget putting up a web site and getting people to come to it are over. That is unless he or she has a lot of computer skills or a lot of money, or are very lucky.

What are some of the SEO tactics we use to promote your artwork? There are several, each with its own set of problems, but here they are.

1. We give the search engines plenty of keyword rich text to work with. That is why when we ask you for keywords stay with us until you have completed this step. You cannot just put these keywords anywhere; there are only a few spots on each page that the search engine spiders look.

2. Make sure the search engines have plenty of basic links to follow. All of the pages must be linked correctly so the search engine spiders can crawl from one page to the next.

3. We must provide a correct site map. This makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find all of your pages. Proper text links to our site map is crucial.

4. We must provide hypertext links.

5. We must provide Meta tags in the head sections that are unique and apply to the page. We have built this in to our site from inception. Trying to retrofit a site properly is very difficult. Doing SEO from the design stage helps avoid critical mistakes. Search engine traffic will provide some of the most targeted visitors you can hope to attract, so it simply makes good sense if you have your own web site to optimize for search engines before blowing the entire marketing advertising budget on paid advertising and offline media. Be prepared to spend a budgeted amount of money each month for as long as your site is up for this process. Any artist that says "I will not pay one dime to advertise my work" will fail unless they are very famous, a celebrity, or born wealthy. If you are not willing to do this SEO advertising activity then your web site is still sitting in your garage. Is this all there is to it? Absolutely not! This is just the first step after creating your web site. In the next few issues we will discuss this complex and often frustrating process of SEO. It is expensive and there are as many bad SEO experts on the web as there are good ones. On our site www.art-exchange.com we have been going through this process since the beginning many years ago. We have spent a lot of money getting this right.  We still spend thousands of dollars per month to make our web site findable. The other factor is that a web site is like a sand castle -- not a bronze statue.