Tips for optimising an art site?

Any different, I think he is asking if there is any difference between a "normal" site blog in any theme and a website in the art niche..

Well, you could start with forum postings in a forum related to art. Then, you can also submit to some photography or photos directories.. Also a good idea would be to "share" some pictures online in social sites or anywhere in internet, also something like commenting on related blogs would be very useful (such as photography related one's)

Since you're in the SEO section I'm assuming you mean optimizing for SEO.

First off, you need to see if there are any keywords he could potentially rank for. Big keywords like "buy oil paintings" etc are probably out of the question since you'll be competing against extremely large companies and I'd imagine he doesn't have the budget for that.

However, I'm sure you can find some more niche keywords that fit his style well.

I have no idea what kind of oil paintings he does, but an example of one of these type of keywords would be "modern african oil painting." Make sure you do solid keyword research and see if anything he paints doesn't have major competition.

Once you find good keywords for him, you'll need to optimize the pages. A lot of artists want snazzy flash sites, but the truth is these don't rank well.

Whatever style you go with, try to make each page have 300-700 words of good unique content relevant to the keyword you are targeting.

From there, it's as simple as building quality backlinks and watching your rankings go up.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the tips guys - what are your thoughts on alt text for the images?

Set the images up as a Flash movie & pull the image URLs from a remote xml file & you can rank the images as a video thumbnail image in Google organic text search.

Make sure the images are stored outside of the Flash movie, Google needs to see both the image + xml file, so basically your running a single image as a movie gallery on an endless loop. Your traffic will never know their looking at Flash movie since the image never moves.

Create a regular thumbnail image as a backup If the traffic isn't running Flash.

I learned that trick from a real estate site, they dominated the text SERPs with video thumbnail images for most of the houses they were selling.