Meet Matt Steel.
I met Matt a few years ago while he was working as a freelancer at TMP when he would come in over the Summer months and help fill the gap when the work piled on.
Recently I’ve been working with Matt to help get his site, Matt Steel — Creative Artworker, up and running so that people looking for either his specific name or a couple of particular keywords he would pop up on the first(ish) page of Google.
It got me thinking, for really talented creative folks it could seem like an impossible task to get their artwork up on the web and found by the right people. Matt was already doing most of the things right but there were a few tips I had to hopefully help push him up the rankings a little bit.
Getting ranked for your ‘Name’ keyword
- Sign up for Google Analytics — This will help you track your own traffic into your site and allow you to join the Google Search Console
- Set up Google Search Console — This will allow you to submit your sitemap to Google so that they know you exist. You can also keep track of the search terms that are bringing people to your site and how well you rank for them.
- Add Content to your site — Matt had a tonne of beautiful artwork for his site, but very little description around it. While a picture tells a thousand words, it’s only true if people see it first. Goolge indexes words, and uses those words to rank your content. Write about the brief on the project, what you did to answer the brief, and why you chose particular directions to achieve the output. Also, include any ROI results that came from the work you did. People love pretty stuff, but what they love more is pretty stuff that work.s
- User Keywords in your images file names — I’m not 100% sure this works, but Matt wanted to be found for the term Matt Steel, so by including /my-project-name-by-matt-steel.jpg it couldn’t harm the rankings, and might improve them for image searches. Matt was already doing this, but the web builder he was using (Behance I think) was changing the file names after he uploaded them.
- Post to Social — Especially on Google+. While Google won’t say it helps, it can’t hurt supporting their own platform. Post to LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, G+, and include links back to the original artwork. If people pick them up and blog about them hopefully they’ll give you some backlinks. You should also make your social accounts reflective of your brand name, and include your website as the website on there.
- Include the keyword in your title — Every page has a title, so if you’re looking to score big for Matt Steel then you should have My project name — Matt Steel Creative Artworker. It’s not the most important part of the title so it’s last, but it helps with rankings.
What else would you recommend?
Check out some of his kick ass artwork below, and of course, go see his site — Matt Steel
