We recently posted Increase Traffic to your Portfolio blog post, and as we think that it is a very important subject to talk about, we’ve decided to give you a few more tips and tricks to help get traffic and new visitors into your portfolio website. We’ve got three extra techniques to share with you, all of which are easy to put into action.
If you would like us to cover a particular technique or theme within our blog posts, please don’t hesitate to email Graphic Tide, or go on to twitter and Tweet Graphic Tide, it would be great to hear from you. But anyway, let’s crack on with getting more traffic to your portfolio!
People Love A Story – Creative Case Studies
As the title suggests, people love reading, exploring and being part of stories or journeys. As your using personal stories that are close to you, this encourages readers to take note of what your saying, you have experience within that chosen field, and you are an expert within what you are saying. Case studies are a great way of doing this, it allows you to take people through a journey, you could talk about;
Your last project journey
Explain reasons why you did a certain project
Where you got your inspiration from
What can others learn from your mistakes during this project
Using these tips or similar, it can really be a great way to make your website differ from the rest, and if you can engage them in how your masterpiece was created or how it was used, thats a major bonus to you and to them. Your teaching others, while learning yourself, SCORE!
Image ALT Tags
This is SEO basics 101, but it’s important that your images have meaningful ALT tags.
Import for screen readers as every little little counts, which all designers want to achieve! But if you don’t really know what ALT tags are, why should my website have ALT tags which are relavant to screen readers and search engines (more importantly Google)?
Well it allows your website to have more information and words for Google to pick up. This is a very important point, as the more words you have on your website, the more words Google has of picking those words up, and using it to boost your position in the search engines.
For Example
If you have an image of say, a sitting cow grazing in a green field in the UK. You might describe the image in your alt tag as ‘Cow sitting in a green field grazing in the United Kingdom’. This allows Google to pick this information up, and allows other users, who say type ‘Cow Grazing UK’ into Google Images, to see your website pop up before them! That’s one visitor who you might not of had, and that one person might be very important to you and your company!
If your tags are blank, theres no information there for Google, and your missing out on an opportunity to get higher rankings.
Put Your Content In Categories
Image compression – Once you start getting traffic into your website, don’t lose these visitors with a heavy page load. This is not particularly associated with gaining traffic but important all the same in maintaining this traffic to your website.
With a page thats going to be full of images, forgetting to compress images could be a problem. Easy compress your images with PNG compression, Tiny PNG. For MAC users, click and drag images with the Imageoptim App.
Google has an exactly guide on how to Compress Images.
Bonus Tip:
To help gain traffic, try putting work into categories. Bloggers have been doing this for years and by default WordPress categories all posts. But what’s the benefit? It might sound pointless but think about your visitor. For designers your typical visitor is likely to be in the creative field, and is going to be already interested or at least intrigued in your work. To put it another way, your audience are going to have an interest in art or design. So thinking about your audience how could improve their time on your site by categorising content?
New visitors may have found you from a social network, search engine, another blog or recommendation. What these and many other referral sources have in common is that it’s likely to be very specific. By this we mean, a referral from another blog, might of had you featured on a; ‘Top 10 Best Upcoming Package Designers’ or from a search engine; ‘Book Illustrator’. Now that your visitors are coming to your portfolio with an actionable reason, to be presented with everything isn’t helpful to users or search engines.
Instead aid traffic by categorising content so it’s easier to discover and help your visitors. Pinterest does this very well by categorising pins onto boards. It targets people’s needs and avoids them wasting time, battling through content, especially if you have a large portfolio. If a potential client is looking for animators for example, they want find more evidence of your animations. If it’s categorised then your going to get more of your work in front of them which hopefully will result in more jobs.
We hope this has been a great resource in gaining more traffic to your site. Try and implement these tips into your website, and see if it makes a difference, I think it will.
Have you implemented any of these tips yet or got any tips that you found useful? We would love to know what you guys think about it.
