SEO (if you've been wondering why you don't show up on Google)

[Tiana]

This is not the usual tutorial. This won't tell you how to make a map but it will help you sell yours.

I'm gonna teach you literally everything I use to make my site show up in search engine results, for free. In that I'm giving it to you for free and all of these techniques are free. Woo everything is free. Okay, buckle up.

Humans of the Cartographer's Guild, whatever you make your link text say is what tells Google what content your site has.

I see a lot of people and they format their links like this. And that's great for human eyes, since it makes sense to click there, sure. But it's no good for search engine optimization unless you want to show up when people search for "like this".

Search Engine Optimization is more than just what you do on your personal site. It's also the links you make back to your portfolio externally. This is one such external site, but this also applies to any other public forums, linkbacks arranged on blogs, subReddits, anywhere that is publicly accessible and going to be scraped by search engine spiders.

If you make your website link text say something meaningless to a robot looking for key phrases, for example "here" or "portfolio" or even worse, just post your blank unformatted link, you aren't telling search engine spiders what your site is about. You want the robots to know that your portfolio contains, say, Tolkien style fantasy maps, hand drawn watercolor maps for children's books, modular town and street pieces, dungeon master hex grids, grimdark Lovecraftian fantasy and horror illustrations with a specialty in custom monsters for roleplaying games, whatever.

This is how you would do it (no spaces between the r and l in URL)
[ur l=yoursite.com]Robots are reading this part.[/ur l]

And the result, when you do it without spaces and with tailored text, will look something like this:
A collection of digital concept art and fantasy maps from Canadian artist Tiffany Munro.
Ah, excellent, now if a search engine reads this post it will now know who I am and what I do, so if someone searches my name, it will improve the chances of me beating out that Miss Universe Tiffany Munro and the film maker Tiffany Munro, none of whom are me. Though I still believe myself to be the dominant Tiffany Munro, that filmmaker does stand a shot at me if she gets better at SEO. Of course you will tailor it appropriately to your site, and ideally, be even less generic than what I just posted.


While you have to work a little harder than just linking it to a word in a conversationally natural sentence, now it's more valuable because it's linking me to a few different things I want people to be able to find in association with me. I get the sense a lot of people view the job postings here as an opportunity to show their art to the client who posted an offer so they tailor their text appropriately. It makes sense. I used to do that too. Just think of it this way. This method is improving the chances of future humans, not just that client, seeing your art.

If you have to change how you structure your pitch a bit to make the link flow naturally, or have several words be the link, it's cool. Don't feel bad about not realizing you could teach robots with your link text, just shift your habits and add it in there.


Next step is getting a few links from off-site with keywords. Of course not all sites welcome lite advertising, so take advantage of it where you can. It doesn't matter which sites you choose to affiliate your link off, though of course a site like the Cartographer's Guild has the advantage of attracting clients who want map related artwork. I've got links to my site from my signature on a webcomic site, which has actually brought me a customer, surprisingly enough! I also got a commission from an, ahem, adult oriented site because I met someone there who also runs D&D games. So you never know where you might find them. Whatever kind of forum that allows you to have a link to your own site in your signature, as long as you're okay with it being affiliated with you potentially in the future. Iiii don't plan on being a politician so yaknow I'm a bit more liberal with it. Anyway, using your portfolio in your signature is a great way to add a bit of search engine grabby bits across the web in a non-obtrusive fashion that requires no money and no negotiation.

Another method is to do link exchanges or guest posts. This, however, brings you into a territory of having to interact and work something out with a potential site. If that's your style, cool beans, but I'm trying to stick to the free of charge SEO options for this post.


Every time I post my link I am EXTREMELY specific, indeed overly specific for the human eyeballs who will be looking at the post. Now you understand my tactical reasoning. This is the reason I do that. The more external sites your site is linked from, in a link containing key phrases, the more search engines understand your site should be shown if someone punches in "how do I get a fantasy map for my novel?"

Ideally your site should also have links out to other sites. It makes you appear more "friendly" to the spiders, and so they like you more, I guess is the idea. So if you make a blog post, it's a good idea to try work in a link to an outside site. That could be to the Cartographer's Guild, or to a game, or a product. I often make my external links Amazon links to buy the book the map is associated with, though I admit I'm not the best at implementing this part of SEO I figured I'd share it in this rapidly expanding post. Seriously when I started, I was just going to write like one paragraph about being specific in your link text dangit and now I'm writing an entire Bible of everything I know about SEO.


Now the next thing you need to understand about SEO–people don't just drop in key words anymore, but they tend to ask questions or structure their searching in a sentence. For example, someone meaning to hire one of us might search, "Do I need a map for my novel?" "How to hire a cartographer" "What do you call a map artist?" "Is the Game of Thrones map based on Europe?" "How to find an artist for a board game?" "Examples of black and white lineart map" "Beautiful city watercolor map." I know I often use adjectives like 'beautiful' and 'amazing' when I search because I'm trying to reduce the pool of results I get. Or I might add in specific nouns, like 'dragon' 'moat' 'medieval compass'. If I'm looking for inspiration I don't just type "fantasy map", I'll add in several words.

You can roleplay as your potential customers to figure out what they might search to end up on an image or post like the one you want to be found. Or you can use sites designed to give you a helping hand with search engine optimization. I'm going to link the three tools I've used. All of these options show you different spreads of search engine data that will help you get a sense of what people search and how to tailor what you write on your blog to capture such results. I recommend using Google Trends to see what's worth using and the other two to get ideas for key phrases.

https://answerthepublic.com
https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...y%20map&geo=US
https://keywordtool.io/

All useful tools to find out what people will be searching for in your field, however, because I didn't make them links with text, it won't particularly help their likelihood of showing up for the key phrase "how to find keyphrases my customers are searching?"

Now, to build an association while having blank links like that, this particular post would have to repeat the desired phrase a few times. Density allows robots to tell what subject matter is important context. Since I've repeated the word "keyphrases" likely a robot will figure out to pair those URLs with the concept of "keyphrases" but it won't be intelligent enough to pair it to a very specific question typed out by a potential customer.

You can put this into action by pairing your art and link with a blog post that uses the same phrase multiple times, three or more.

Lately I've taken to writing very short "how i made this art and what kind of ideas me and my client tossed around" articles to pump with keywords. Without a doubt, the most successful blog article attached to a map is the one where I refer to "Dungeons and Dragons 5e" multiple times. It performs far better than just "Dungeons and Dragons". I have yet to try referring to a specific published module by name but I imagine that would work well too.

Every time you post your art into a gallery application without the ability to set alt text and fill it with keywords is a lost opportunity to also make sure your art shows up in Image search. I've noticed a lot of portfolios just have thumbnails that link straight to an image, which works fine for humans, but doesn't contain meta data that will teach search engines to associate your image with important key phrases like "fantasy map art". Use a gallery application that gives a textbox to fill in the alt text/hover text/etc, or create a blog. Because I use Wordpress, I have data associated with all of my images that is invisible to the human eye, but can be picked up by spiders, thus translating to my website being served up as a search result.

Since forums don't use meta data or alt tags, you can't fill those up with key phrases, though, so it's best to create a somewhat organic seeming statement you can turn into the link text while using a forum.

On a site where you can control the html, you can make alternative or hover text for a link, embedding significantly more key words and phrases than is immediately visible to the human eye, though. It's in this kind of hidden text which is intended only to be read by robots that you can add many tags for nouns and adjectives that describe your work in greater detail.

Finally, one more note about search engine optimization and blog posts. Robots favor the text that's in headers, that is to say an <h1> <h2> <h3> tag, and in that priority. So to add importance to a keyword, put it in a header text. This helps to break a post up into more readable blocks anyway, so it can make the reading experience easier for a human as well. Double benefit!

You have to teach the robots because they deliver the websites to people based on the words that people manage to come up with to ask the robots. So basically the point of these tactics is to address what humans are going to feed into robots in the form of either data or question, and how the robots are going to know that your site is the answer. By spending 15 extra minutes when you add a new piece of art to your portfolio to brainstorm what question your art answers, you can vastly increase the chances of someone stumbling upon your work.


I won't pretend it's an effortless task. Not every tactic works. Sometimes the ones that work are frustrating because they're not what I want to work. I wish game specific branding wasn't so successful compared to artistic rhetoric, but you have to get into the popular mind to find the best keywords. Still, sometimes showing up for an obscure keyword might be great too. If you have historical pieces, connecting them to the surrounding figures, battles, and appropriate dates are all excellent keywords. Or real world locations, another very successful option. Fandoms, of course.



I'm not the best artist here. But I can effortlessly find my own work by searching on Google or Duck Duck Go. I've made sure of this by doing as I've said. I haven't paid any money for advertising. Clients just find me. Like 60-80% of my site traffic trickles in from search engine traffic. And they email me, having found my portfolio when they searched for fantasy maps and liked my art. Which is cool.

Here's the thing.

I've been noticing a lot of other people's map art doesn't show up, resulting in the top results staying relatively static while my art was sneaking its way up into the rankings... and I know it's due in part to this simple mistake. I've been keeping an eye on what shows up when you search for "fantasy map" and a few other phrases for a while. I entered the rankings. People find me now. That is what I wanted. A lot of the rest has stayed the same. That's not what I want. I want you fine humans to benefit from the same trickle as I do, and to displace the decades old results people keep linking to me when they want to buy a map! There's one particular one that shows up near the top that's been referenced to me over ten times! It's not that good but it's above the fold and not attached to a portfolio from which that artist takes commissions, so therefore, people move on to me. Feed the search engine robots, ya'll. Your business will benefit from it. Right now, if someone doesn't know about the guild, they might never know what they're missing from you.

All I ask in exchange for this free lesson is if you benefit, in the future share your wisdom and help other people learn things they don't too. This is normally the part in the sales pitch where they'd put the squeeze on ya but that's all I want. Let us not become masterclass YouTuber advertisers trying to sell the secrets to success in a handbasket. Share your wisdom. I've learned everything I know about drawing maps from the guild for free, and I keep seeing people making simple SEO mistakes, so, I figured it was time to give something back. Please take this and use it. It really does help to surround your link with specificity.

[Marc]

Though being a long read, this was very helpfull and gave me a new insight in how search engines work. Thank you for putting the time and effort into explaining this Tiana 🙂

[Wired]

Thank you very much for this, I'll give this a second read once I'm back home.

[Redrobes]

Well I believe you. I just did a search for your name and you were top of the list....

[Tiana]

Well I believe you. I just did a search for your name and you were top of the list....

I am the dominant Tiffany Munro. For now. Mwhahaha.

Yeah, this is basically the extent of my tactics. SEO goes deep and technical. I've done my best to try not devolve into super programmer technicalities, but keep it to tactics people can do for free with a little bit of work.

I forgot to mention but I use Wordpress plugins, two of them, to help me out with the task. One is Yoast for blog posts, and the other is NextGenGallery for managing my images, since you can create things like slideshows without losing the ability to load the images up with meta data, and organize your images into folders appropriately in a way that is more organizationally sound to me.

I'm really hoping a few people here will take this information and strengthen their online presence.

Wired and Marc, you're welcome.

[Cédric H.]

Thank you so much, this is very helpful!

[Tiana]

Thank you so much, this is very helpful!

You're welcome! Your portfolio is one I think could benefit from a little bit of an overhaul. I would suggest adding a big button at the end of your "about me" and "why do I need a map" text that directs the viewer to your portfolio, and one that directs to a method of contacting you, since you've created a call to action but someone has to scroll back up and find the 'portfolio' or 'commission' button to discover your art or how to contact you. You could even shift everything that's on the portfolio page to your main page above or below the call to action on the front, since your sample collection is relatively small I think you could definitely get away with presenting the art on the front page. The comprehensive contact page with information to provide is a great touch, so I'd probably just make it a clear linky button that says 'commission me' after the call to action and one that says 'view portfolio', basically replicating the top navigation underneath as well.

[Cédric H.]

You're welcome! Your portfolio is one I think could benefit from a little bit of an overhaul. I would suggest adding a big button at the end of your "about me" and "why do I need a map" text that directs the viewer to your portfolio, and one that directs to a method of contacting you, since you've created a call to action but someone has to scroll back up and find the 'portfolio' or 'commission' button to discover your art or how to contact you. You could even shift everything that's on the portfolio page to your main page above or below the call to action on the front, since your sample collection is relatively small I think you could definitely get away with presenting the art on the front page. The comprehensive contact page with information to provide is a great touch, so I'd probably just make it a clear linky button that says 'commission me' after the call to action and one that says 'view portfolio', basically replicating the top navigation underneath as well.

Thank you so much for your input, this is great advice! =D
I definitely would like to work on my portfolio, I know it does need some work visually but I'm not sure what to do to be honest so any advice is greatly appreciated. Right now I'm using one of those free portfolio templates website since I can't afford my own at the moment so editing it has a lot of limitation but I will definitely keep in mind your opinion and see what I can do with what I have and try to improve my SEO.

[HaydenGreen]

Though it's been more than 3 years since you shared that tutorial, it's still relevant! Huge thanks for sharing. Actually, your guide seems to be really helpful for those who are studying SEO. As for me, instead of making my websites' ranking better myself, I've always hired local seo service providers to do that. I prefer delegating such complicated things to specialists. Btw, I know something about SEO, but I lack practice. Having some basic knowledge is enough for a manager. Anyway, thanks for sharing, buddy. I'd be grateful if you'd updated your article. Best wishes!

[Tiana]

The last 6 posts on this thread seem really sus. Probably about to get some ads edited into them.