The Art Gallery Hub
{ Converting web visitors into seasoned collectors
Who are the most important visitors of your gallery's site?
Most gallery owners come up with curators, critics, journalists as the decisive players of their gallery site's reach and presence. Sure, people forming the 'second audience' of a gallery's site matter a great deal, but they are second in rank indeed when it comes to the web presence.
Because there is a more decisive category of 'visitors': the search engines’ spiders. Your web presence starts with them.
The search engines' spiders are visitors of sorts
They are always there, working in the background. Checking regularly what has changed, what pages are added or updated, how frequently it is done, how well pages are programmed.
You’re fine as long as your site responds to their expectations so they can proceed indexing.
They make or break your site's presence
Because they are omnipresent, there is very little risk that the spiders will not notice your gallery's site one way or another.
But being noticed is not sufficient.
For your site to actually show up in the search engines’ results page (being indexed) depends in the first place on how well your pages are coded.
Thus a spiders' visit can have an even more serious negative impact.
There is a difference between being noticed and being indexed
Before the spiders actually index your pages to publish them in the results pages, they first check if your pages are worthwhile indexing.
Your page's coding can be poor and for example miss distinctive meta tags such as the description tag. Or the spiders may judge that there is no apparent link between a page title and its content, a weakness that occurs frequently if page titles are not unique for each web page.
There is but one strategy to reach out successfully to the spiders
Become best friends with them and stay on good terms. When you act upon their expectations and really take care of the programming of your site, update your content regularly, take care of internal links,etc. they will visit and index your gallery's site more frequently
The more frequent their visit, the better your position on the results page!
Check and follow up your coding regularly
Do it consistently. Make it a habit. Whether you maintain your site yourself or delegate it to your programmer, you should look at and check all key elements in the existing pages.
For new pages, hand over the page titles the programmer has to create, give him the text to be inserted in the description tags and the texts that will come in the alt tag of your images.
Why don’t you take a look as soon as you have finished this article?
Why all this hassle?
After years in business, you may consider a decent rank in the search engines pages is irrelevant for your site. You rely on other art world channels to get noticed and attract visitors. Right?
You may even consider that your site attracts a respectful number of regular visitors already. Well... maybe you neglect a surprising aspect...
Search engines still play a major role
On average 30% of people discover your gallery's site by looking up the search engine result pages!
Among these visitors there are certainly art professionals and collectors that every gallery strives to get in contact with. But the majority of people popping in via the search engines are people from outside the inner art world circle - art enthusiasts, young upcoming collectors, people eager to learn more about contemporary art.
Fresh, new prospective clients!
Neglecting this percentage of visitors is unforgiving
Considering the efforts, time and money it takes to build a growing and faithful audience, for web professionals to neglect this massive percentage of potential new visitors is almost a crime.
Especially when all it requires is to make it a habit to get the basic coding of your web pages right for the spiders.
Because the initial success of your gallery's site still depends for a major deal on their approval.
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