This is part one of a two part post, which will later be followed by a video ebook on SEO. Here goes for part 1 anyway…

Whether you are a designer, illustrator or an artist, getting the SEO right for your website is crucial to achieving success on the web. There is no point in having a website that is never found; it means that passing traffic and business is lost on a daily basis, and is effectively like building a great new shop and then keeping the shutters down.

This short blog post will give you some great tips on how to ‘lift the shop shutters’ on your portfolio website, and get yourself noticed by making sure you meet the criteria below that will allow you to achieve success.

Research

You need to make sure that you are targeting the right keywords for you, your business, or your industry. To do this, it is usually a good start to do a brainstorm about what you are about and what people are likely to search for when looking for your products/services.

Once this is done you can think about fine-tuning your keywords and phrases. To do this, type ‘keyword tool’ into Google and choose the top result. This tool allows you to type in any phrase or keyword and get the monthly search volumes for your country and globally, as well as a host of alternative words and phrases for you to choose from. So it allows you to choose the best words to target easily.

META Tags and Page Title

Once you have chosen your target key phrases for each page, you need to start implementing them on your website or blog. Many platforms allows you to enter your page title and META description and META keywords somewhere, and if you have a custom built site then these can also be entered into the code quite simply by yourself or your webmaster.

The important thing to remember is to include each of your key phrases and words in each of the above, so be consistent, and adhere to these limits:

Page Title – No more than 70 characters long

META description – between 130 and 160 characters

Meta Keywords – max of 5 comma separated key phrases/words, and no more than 4 words between each comma

To read part 2 of this SEO Tips Tutorial, please click here.