Whether or not your gallery has a website, you can use the Internet to create and discover publicity opportunities. you can use search engines to find information about everything from media contact information and audience demographics to trends in auction prices to staying informed about particular articles or art movement of interests. you can use e-mail to communication with established contacts and to seek out new one both locally and internationally.

Using the Web as a Research Tool -- Learning What's Out There?

Virtually any information you need to conduct your public relations campaign can be found on the Web. you can keep up on the latest in the art world without subscribing to multiple art magazines or spending hours in the library. You can learn about buying trends among collectors, the going prices of different kinds of art auctions ,and the acquisition policies of museums. You can locate contact information for many people whose interest you want to cultivate, including members of the media. you can learn about emerging artists, new techniques,and use of media. Also, you can generally keep informed about how others are participating in and regarding the work you are doing, as a kind of informal evaluation or feedback process on your PR efforts. Are you or your clients causing a stir or a buzz in the art world? A survey of the Web will tell you who is talking about whom. If your name is not yet circulating with regularity and generating positive responses, you just know that you have more Public Relations work to do.

Search Engines

Simply having a web site is not enough to make a public relations impact. people must be able to find your gallery on the Web. if people know your gallery's full Web address already from some prior contact,they can type it right into the address bar on their Web browser (such as Internet Explore or Netscape Navigator) and arrive promptly at your Web site. but how do you reach the untapped audience of people who might have an interest in your gallery but who don't know you?You need to make it possible for the to find you.

Surfing, or following one link after another on randomly encountered Web pages, may lead some people to your site, but most people want a direct route. people can find your site most easily by using keywords in a search engine to find your site among related sites. To make this possible, first the search engines have to know that your gallery's site exists.

How to get Listed?

The first step is to make your site known to the major search engines. most of the automated "crawler" search engine like Google determine how high to rank a site by the number of links to that site found on the Web. two ways to make sure these crawler search engines are aware of your site are to build up your links yourself an to submit your site directly to search engine directories, such as yahoo! (associated with Google), Looksmart?Zeal ( associated with MSN), and the nonprofit Open Directory, which are complied and categorized by human editors. To submit your site directly to some of the Web directory sites, got ot the site and provide the information the Web directory site requests, usually the URL, or Web address, of your home page and a brief description of the content of the page including identifying keywords that Web users might use to try find your site. ideally these keywords will also correspond with heading on your web page. you, or whoever is designing and maintaining the site for you, will want to have meta tags on your site, to make it more likely that they will turn up in searches. meta tags contain information about the information on your sites; they are basically a "keywords" listing that is typically located in the HTML "head tag of each page.

If your site is judged to be noncommercial, your submission to the search engine directories is usually free; if it ti judged to be commercial, you will likely have to pay a fee to submit your site to the directories. the more educational or informative or purely cultural information your site contains -- as opposed to just serving as a site to visit to buy art -- the more likely it will qualify as non commercial. this provides an additional reason to post informative articles on subjects within your expertise on your web site. If the Web directory sites select your web site to add to entire directory, the web crawler search engines will likely find it and add your site to their listings.

To speed up that process, you can submit your URL directly to the crawler-based search engines like Google or Alta Vista. On Google, for example, visit www.google.com/addurl.html, where you can enter your Web address but are not guaranteed that you will be added to the search engine or in what time frame. ( if your site is not showing up on searches, you can pay google to analyze and critique your site for you ). Check this and other crawler search engine sites for detailed instructions on how to submit your URL. Often web designers will provide this listing service, and there are private companies that will do it for you for a fee.