Linking Advice
It's important to make sure that other high quality art sites link to your site.
Carefully review all sites before submitting your url. If the site looks spammy or dishonest, do not add your url or exchange links with it. Also, carefully review sites that charge a fee, try emailing artists that are already listed and ask them if it's worth the cost.
Make sure your site is something special so that people will have a reason to link to it. Here are some: web design tips.
Check out all the artist portfolio and community sites that you can find. Join the ones that you like.
Here's a list of sites offering Online Gallery Space and a list of Art Directories.
Don't forget your local Arts Council. Many of them have online directories where you can list your site, plus they often offer all kinds of other great resources. Your city may have its own arts council, as well as your county, country, or region.
Here's a nice list from Wikipedia, but it doesn't have them all: Arts Councils
Here is another list of Organizations from DMOZ but you should still do your own search because they don't have them all either: Arts: Organizations: Regional
Again, carefully review all sites before submitting your url or images. Some sites charge a fee, some sites are well worth that fee, others...not so much.
Consider doing a press release, if you have the time you can learn to do it yourself, it's free and can generate a lot of links and publicity if you can think of something newsworthy to release...you can also hire someone to come up with an idea and write a release but there is no guarantee on the outcome.
Write articles or tutorials, don't give away your trade secrets of course, but you can write useful how to articles on your art or craft. When the article is done you can submit it to a hard copy publication and/or keep it on your own site. Remember to include original photos, illustrations or diagrams with your article, people love to link to good tutorials with nice pictures.
