Noticed that I’m getting continued traffic to Webmetricsguru.com from one of my paintings called "After The Bath" that I also posted here earlier this year.  In fact, today I had 4 visits because my painting, one of my earlier series, was named after something popular.

And if you look at the image search results in Google, it’s easy to see why I’m getting that traffic….my painting is midway in the first page of search results from 25,000 images of  "After The Bath", the main results being Reniors and Degas paintings.

http://images.google.com/images?q=after+the+bath&hl=en

WebMetricsGuru: After The Bath - … 463 x 563 pixels - 47k  - jpg www.webmetricsguru.com	Paul-Louis Bouchard After the Bath 312 x 432 pixels - 41k  - jpg www.orientalist-art.org.uk	1884 Fürdés után 638 x 661 pixels - 50k  - jpg www.literatura.hu	After a bath 677 x 950 pixels - 82k  - jpg www.cs.haifa.ac.il

I stumbled on a secret - but one that had nothing to do with taking advantage of Google Internet Search.  I did, in fact,  name one of my very best paintings, one that I still own, After the Bath.  But so did Renior and Degas - and they are popular artists with a lot of searches on their name.

As an artist, for example, there’s great advantage to think profoundly about what you name your work, especially if your well known and have traffic to your site and blog (which means that Google thinks your site is popular).   Search Engines are still textually based, though Google’s recent purchase of Neven Systems may take Image Search past text to what is actually in the image - but that’s still several months away from materalizing as a technology in Google’s search results - and even if it does happen, Image Search will still be textually based for some time to come.

If you can, with artistic integrity, name your work something that captures the popular vein of what art searches look for - your image will probably rank high in Google Images and you’ll get qualified traffic to your blog or site.

I had some interesting conversations with Artists today, including a followup interview with Marsha Wooley and a woman called Sabrina Tilikevich that I’ll cover in ArtNYC later today or Sunday.