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Does leaving “comments” on Art sites get traffic to my Art site?
Backlinks are a big contributor to how relevant search engines think your site is to specific search terms. If you have an art related blog, you post about your art or art in general, and other art sites have links back to your site it tells search engines your content is relevant. When your content is seen as relevant you are more likely to appear among the first listings of results a search engine returns for the relevant keywords it finds most prevalent on your posts.
Why would leaving “comments” help you with backlinks? Most comment forms have a field for your web site and when you submit your comment your name becomes a link back to your site. With this in mind, it’s good to comment for purely technical reasons as well as just being part of the conversation in your area of interest.
Pagerank is a term Google uses to qualify how relevant your site is. On a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest, page rank is determined by many factors including backlinks. Pagerank is not, by itself, an indicator of traffic though. Leaving meaningful comments on related blogs can build traffic to your site because others who read those blogs may follow the link to your site if they find your comments helpful or insightful.
Google also introduced a qualifying “no follow” attribute to the link tag and many comments include the “no follow” attribute. This means the search engine won’t consider that link as relevant to the site it links back to. This prevents large numbers of unrelated comments from skewing the results for a particular site.
Long story short, if you publish a site on a creative subject it’s a good idea to comment on other blogs and sites on the same or a related subject. It’s a good idea because joining the conversation is always a good thing. If the links don’t use the “no follow” attribute, you’ll get some backlink juice from the search engines and your links may show up earlier in searches. Even if those links use “no follow”, you’ll be more likely to increase traffic to your site if your comment is on point, helpful or you’ve added something to the conversation.
You’ll note charmfx.com uses the Disqus comment system. Disqus comments use the “no follow” attribute, but allow for readers to easily log in via other social sites where their comments may be visible to their friends. This also may bring traffic to your site based on the interest of friends.
Please add your comments and your own insights below.
Artists…PageRank doesn’t always equal Traffic!
Artists, performers, writers and other creatives using a blog or web site to showcase their work need to be aware of PageRank. It’s a number calculated based on link analysis that’s supposed to indicate how relevant your site is to other sites discussing similar content. The problem with that is, for artists, often our content is very, very specific! The more specific and individual we make ourselves and our work, the harder it is to be seen by search engines as “similar” or relevant to a keyword phrase or sites that may be tangentially related to the subject of our work. For many visual artists or performers who’ve documented their work with photos or videos the problem is compounded by a lack of text on pages for the search engines to index. For these it is very important to annotate images and videos with tags, captions or some descriptive text.
Having said all that, PageRank is only an indication of how likely your site will turn up in a search for specific keywords found in your site based on links from other sites seen as also relevant to those keywords. PageRank is not necessarily a direct indication of how much site traffic you can expect to see on your site! Often we see advertising for SEO services or instruction on how to improve search engine optimization for our sites. I’ve even seen this being offered specifically for Artists and creativity related sites. I’m all for optimizing your site for search engines, but the assumption that doing so will have a direct and immediate impact on site traffic for artist’s sites is typically not accurate.
When you are making work that is highly individual it’s important to realize that search engines are really not smart enough to grasp the subtle differences that might make your work or performance great versus something manufactured using similar descriptions. If your goal is to increase awareness of your work and a broader base of collectors or fans the thing to concentrate on is traffic. How do you increase traffic if you’re not focused on PageRank? For specific, individual work we all need to focus on virtual locations where targeted influence can result.
These methods have a higher likelihood of resulting in site visits from individuals who have already self filtered themselves, who are interested in the content they find in these channels.
Please mention your own experiences and add methods you’ve found to be effective in the comments below.