Handmade Pottery + Ceramic Jewelry

I finally finished sanding my porcelain green-ware the other day

As usual, there’s a few casualties

I have finished the hands and feet- but just have a photo of the feet
First things first – I managed to get 3 days in the studio this past week, despite the holiday – what a relief! I’ve been working on David’s order and then finishing up some of my work that has been sitting in my studio. I bisque fired most of what you see in the top photo, and will hopefully have a larger bisque fire early this next week. Greenware is fragile and I’m reminded of this when work breaks because I manhandle and sand a little too vigorously. For safety sake, I sand outside and collect the clay dust to dispose of later – usually in my clay reclaiming bin.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies in the past few weeks including Ratatouille, Connie and Carla, Tristan & Isolde and Aeon Flux which inspired the feet of my effigy doll. One of the characters in Aeon Flux had been modified to have hands for feet which was oddly fascinating. My doll has similar hands and feet like the character in the movie.

Meanwhile, I have been meaning to update my blog – I’m going to be going through my blogroll links and will be eliminating links to blogs that aren’t updated regularly. I know it sounds a little harsh, but over the last year, I’ve accumulated a lot of links and need to do a little house cleaning. I visit my links at least once a week and have found that a lot of people have just plain stopped posting. I am also going to reconfigure my blog template and allow tabs at the top labeled with frequently used categories.

What does this mean for me? I need to go through every single post I’ve ever written and institute a minimal amount of categories, such as functional pottery, glaze testing, wall pieces, mixed media, ceramic techniques, marketing, internet etc. Obviously, I need to think about the categories and choose wisely. I think I should limit myself to 10 or less so that it doesn’t get too crowded up top.

Implementing categories brings up another issue – tags. Tags and keywords are how people find my blog. I’m always surprised when I click on my stats to see how people find my space here on the Internet. A recent purusal shows that people land on my blog by looking for “discouraged artist pottery” (this one made me laugh – I guess I have been whining a bit lately), “pottery toner transfer”, “cone 6 glazes”, “ceramic wine tumblers”, among some more unusual and amusing ones.

I subscribe to a number of newsletters – some more helpful than others and happened to read Barbara Brabec’s yesterday. She had an interesting article on how to improve your Google ranking. While I already insert keywords into the “alt” attribute in my images, I haven’t been using the title attribute for my links. Use this wisely, you don’t want to be accused of keyword spamming.

Why is this important? Web spiders are looking for up to date content and index pages to be used by search engines among other activities. Computers also read text and not images so it’s smart to add written content to your images and additional written descriptions to your links. Go ahead – hover your mouse over one of my links or images and see what happens. I’m sort of just playing right now but I think this could be very powerful. Barbara relates how she just went from page 19 to 4 after implementing some of these strategies.

What does the html code look like to add text content to an image using the alt attribute?

What does the html code look like to add text content to a hyper link using the title atribute?

I hope this makes sense! This may be old news to many of you who are more computer savy than I, but I’m game to try something new. I’ll let you know if I find more traffic coming my way or not. Right now I get about 100-200 hits a day to my blog (depending on the day of the week) which is low compared to some of you super bloggers out there. I no longer use traffic exchanges which I did in the beginning. All the traffic is now generated by subscribers and people who land on my blog by typing in the magic keywords. Do you need help with key words? Google has an interesting Key Word Anaylzer to try out.

Whew, that’s it for this weekend – I need to check out recipes for Baklava on the net – we’ve been invited to a Greek themed dinner tonight.

PS. My mother just alerted me to the fact that seeing text under alt images must be enabled. For PCs go to Internet Options from your control panel, click on Advanced and then Accessibility. Click on the box that reads always expand alt text for images. Thanks mom!