This is a fictional online portfolio, pretending to display a collection of sketchbook pages relating to the sea. The purpose of this fictional portfolio is to help illustrate how to set up an online portfolio that helps drive traffic to your website.

Firstly, notice how the title of the blog post describes the artwork: “Seascape Paintings.” There can sometimes be a temptation (particularly when writing for social media) to include ‘arty’ or cryptic headings, or to call your collection of work something along the lines of “gallery” or “portfolio”. However, cryptic or generic titles do nothing to help Google understand what your artwork is about. It is better to use very clear, descriptive words that describe exactly what your artwork is. The better Google understands the content on your website, the more likely their search engine will direct relevant visitors to your site.

Note also how the website URL uses similar keywords (for example the website address of this page is www.portfolioexample.com/seascape–paintings/ rather than something like www.portfolioexample.com/xyz–123/) . You can format URLs to use words by visiting Settings > Permalinks in the WordPress dashboard. Then when you create each post or page, you type in the words you wish to have in the URL. Use dashes (hyphens) between words. These words also help tell Google what your website content is about.

When people think of an ‘online gallery’ to display their work, they often imagine a series of images that you click on and open, one by one, with each image featured on its own page. However, in terms of driving traffic to your website, it is far better to present a collection of artwork upon a single blog post or page, rather than having each image opening out upon its own page. Standard online galleries often require clicking on each image to open (or clicking NEXT), or display images within a slideshow (slideshows can also make your website load slowly and often display poorly on mobile). The advantages of creating longer, single-page collections of artwork are as follows:

• Longer posts or pages are typically viewed as a higher quality by Google. You are more likely to gain more visitors to your website with a single long page than spreading the same content out across many smaller pages;
• When collections of images are displayed upon a single page, any social sharing of images on that page encourage visitors to view all of your artwork, rather than just the single image shared. For example, if someone shares any of the fictional images below on Pinterest, anyone clicking on that link will arrive at this blog post as a whole, which contains an entire collection of many images that they might be interested in. As there are many images on one page, your share stats also grow much faster than if there was just one image per page, which can helps add the appearance that your work is popular and well-liked by others;
• Mobile users can easily scroll down the page to quickly view all of the work (opening new pages or images is not required).

When a collection of artwork is displayed in a blog post format, as in this fictional example, you can easily add captions, an introduction, and other helpful information. Adding text to an online portfolio is very important, as this provides further opportunity for Google to understand what the page is about. (Google robots are far better at understanding text than images). Lots of text makes it more likely that Google will understand the page. The text used in headings and subheadings is especially important.

When you create a portfolio of images within a single blog post or website page, ensure that you include related images and text, rather than have an assortment of unrelated content, which is likely to confuse Google about what the post is about. So, rather than grouping all of your artwork upon one page, or grouping it chronologically, it is much better to group it by theme or topic. That way, when anyone searches for something relating to your topic (i.e. ‘seascape paintings’ or ‘paintings of the sea’) they are more likely to end up on your page, because Google understands that this may likely to be what they are looking for.

In the body of your article, provide background information about the artwork. Text alongside images also helps Google understand what the images are about (and of course provides extra information to readers).

Visitors like to know the story behind your finished work, so think about presenting your process — from the initial concept, to early sketches, to the finished product. – Matias Corea, Behance’s Chief Designer

You may wish to share:

• Ideas/themes behind the work;
• Mediums, techniques, and tools used;
• Discussions about relevant artists. When you mention others it is good etiquette to link to their websites. Links are created using the symbol on the WordPress toolbar when editing a post). Links to other relevant websites are also a good way for Google to establish what your site is about. By linking to others, you are more likely to get others linking back to you, as a thank you. Having other websites link to you is considered a very valuable signal by Google (as it implies that others think your website is valuable enough to mention and talk about).

Aim for each article (or collection of artwork) on your website to be as long, comprehensive and thorough as you can make it. This doesn’t mean that you should waffle (Google can tell how long visitors spend on your page, so if you bore readers and they ‘bounce’ quickly away, Google is likely to send fewer visitors to your website in the future). However, it should be possible to write a reasonable quantity of relevant, helpful text. Aim to publish at least 1,000 words of valuable content per page or blog post. This sounds like a lot, but once you have added captions and so on, it doesn’t take very long. For example, if you had a portfolio of 20 related images, a short introduction, followed by a 50-word caption under each image, would easily bring you to the 1,000 word total. There is no magic rule about 1,000 words, by the way (and you can write much more than this) – but this is a good rule of thumb to aim for. Many articles on the Student Art Guide are around 3,000 – 4,000 words long.

Use the free Yoast SEO plugin, to help ensure your blog post is optimized for search engines. This is shown in our upcoming tutorial about how to grow traffic to your website. This helps ensure that your page meets current best practice in terms of being ‘search engine friendly’. This plugin is perhaps the most valuable WordPress plugin and is one of the many reasons why WordPress is a superior website building tool.