On-page SEO for artists: titles, descriptions, headings and alt text

Most of what gets sold to artists as "SEO" is off-page work: links, directories, outreach, packages with monthly fees. On-page SEO is the other half, it is free, and it is almost entirely writing. It is the words and tags on your own page that tell a search engine, and a person, what they are looking at.

It takes about fifteen minutes per page, once. Here is what those fifteen minutes consist of.

On-page and off-page, briefly

On-page is everything on the page itself: the page title, the summary text, the headings, the words, the images and their descriptions, the links. You control all of it.

Off-page is mostly links from other websites — a gallery's exhibitor list, a press mention, a residency page. You earn those by showing work, not by editing anything. They matter, and they are not what this article is about.

1. The page title

This is the single most useful tag on the page. It is the text in the browser tab and the blue link in search results. Google's documentation on title links calls it "the title of a search result on Google Search… that links to the web page," and the guidance is simply: "Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements."

There is no official character limit — Google notes the title "is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." In practice, aiming for roughly 50 to 60 characters means you see the whole thing.

Patterns that work for an artist:

• Home: Rose Hill — coastal landscape paintings, Maine
• A series page: Tidal Marsh series — oil paintings | Rose Hill
• A single piece: Tidal Marsh No. 3 — oil on linen, 36 × 48 in
• About: About Rose Hill — painter, Camden, Maine

Every page gets its own. The same title on twelve pages tells a search engine you have one page.

2. The summary text (meta description)

This is the grey sentence under the blue link. Google's snippet documentation says it "sometimes uses the meta description HTML element if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page."

Two things follow from that. It is not guaranteed to be used — Google may pull a sentence off the page instead. And it is not a ranking factor: Google said so plainly, back in 2009 and still live today — "even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."

So write it to earn the click, not to please a machine. One or two sentences, 50 to 160 characters, saying what is actually on the page. "Original oil paintings of the Maine coast, 12 to 48 inches, available directly from the studio" beats "Welcome to my website."

3. Headings

Headings are the page's skeleton: one main heading that says what the page is, then section headings under it. Google's SEO starter guide puts the reason simply: "Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages."

Worth knowing, because a lot of advice online gets this wrong: the same guide lists heading counts under things you should not focus on. "There's also no magical, ideal amount of headings a given page should have," it says, and "from Google Search perspective, it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order."

Use them in order anyway. Not for Google — for the person skimming on a phone, and for anyone using a screen reader, who navigates by heading.

4. The words on the page

This is where artist websites are thinnest. A gallery page with twenty images and no text gives a reader nothing to go on and a search engine nothing to read.

You do not need an essay. Google is explicit that length is not the point: "The length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking purposes (there's no magical word count target, minimum or maximum, though you probably want to have at least one word)."

What to write instead of padding: the specifics only you know. The medium and the surface. The size. Where the piece was made or what it is of. The name of the series and what holds it together. When someone searches "encaustic seascape" or "large oil painting Camden Maine", those words have to exist somewhere on your site in a sentence a human wrote.

5. Images: alt text and file names

For an artist this is the highest-value fifteen minutes on the list, because your pages are mostly pictures. Google's image guidance: "Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of the image," and "the filename can give Google very light clues about the subject matter of the image. When possible, use filenames that are short, but descriptive."

• File name: tidal-marsh-no-3-oil-on-linen.jpg, not IMG_4021.jpg. Rename before uploading; it takes seconds.
• Alt text: describe the piece as you would to someone on the phone. "Oil painting of a salt marsh at low tide, blue-grey and ochre, 36 by 48 inches." Not "art" and not a list of keywords.
• Decorative images — a background texture, a divider — get empty alt text. Not everything needs describing.

6. Links and addresses

• Link between your own pages. A series page should link to the pieces in it; an about page should link to the work. This is how both readers and crawlers move around.
• Make link text descriptive. "See the Tidal Marsh series" tells everyone what is at the other end. "Click here" tells nobody.
• Keep addresses short and readable: /series/tidal-marsh rather than /page?id=47.
• Never change a page's address without a redirect. Old links in emails, catalogues and other people's websites are the links you worked hardest for.

7. The keywords tag is dead

If someone tells you to fill in a keywords meta tag for ranking, they are seventeen years out of date. Google said in 2009 that it "doesn't use the keywords meta tag in our web search ranking," and its current documentation repeats it: "The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all."

What not to do

• Repeating "original abstract art for sale" until the sentence stops being English. Stuffing is a spam signal, not an optimisation.
• Hidden text — white on white, tucked behind an image. This is a policy violation, not a trick.
• The same title and summary on every page.
• Generated filler about "art trends" to bulk the site out. That is the behaviour Google's spam policies name as scaled content abuse.
• Leaving a page hidden from search after a redesign because you switched it off "until it is ready" and forgot.

A worked example

One artwork page, done properly, takes about five minutes:

• Page title: Tidal Marsh No. 3 — oil on linen, 36 × 48 in
• Summary text: An oil painting of a Maine salt marsh at low tide, 36 × 48 inches on linen, available from the studio. Part of the Tidal Marsh series.
• Main heading: Tidal Marsh No. 3
• Words on the page: sixty to a hundred — when and where it was painted, what you were after, the surface and framing.
• Image file name: tidal-marsh-no-3-oil-on-linen.jpg
• Alt text: Oil painting of a salt marsh at low tide in blue-grey and ochre.
• Links: back to the Tidal Marsh series, and to how to enquire.

How Art Easely helps

All of this lives in one place. In the website builder there is an SEO bar above the page you are editing, with a count of how many checks pass. Open it and you get, in plain words:

• Page title — "the name in the browser tab and the blue link on Google," with a live character count that warns you past about 60.
• Google summary text — "the short description Google shows under your page's link," which flags anything outside 50 to 160 characters.
• Share picture — the image used when the page is shared. Your logo is used if you do not set one.
• Headings — a check that your heading sizes do not skip a level.
• Words — a count of the words in your sections, with guidance by kind of page: 300 or more for blog and about pages, 150 to 300 for a home page, 50 to 150 for gallery pages because the pictures are the content, 100 to 200 for shop pages.
• Keywords (optional) — kept, but labelled honestly: "Optional: Google doesn't use them."
• Hide this page from Google — a toggle, for the pages that genuinely should not be indexed.
• Get AI suggestions — drafts a title and summary from what is on the page, which you can take with one click and then rewrite in your own words.

Those word-count targets are our guidance, not Google's rule — Google says length alone does not affect ranking, and that is true. The count is a proxy for a different question: is there anything here for a reader? A gallery page with no words usually means nobody can tell what they are looking at.

Underneath, the parts you should not have to think about are handled: each artwork, collection and event gets its own page, structured data is emitted for search engines, alt text falls back to the artwork title when you have not written one, images are resized and served from a CDN, a sitemap and robots file are generated for your site, and Website → Redirects is there for when a page address has to change.

For the strategy this sits inside — which searches an artist can realistically win, and how long any of it takes — read SEO for artists. For what belongs on the pages in the first place, what to put on an artist website. The same writing muscle pays off on Pinterest, where descriptions are how pins get found.