Red Coffee Cup Original Oil Painting 8×8 by Creativeapples Fine Art Photography and Greeting Cards

Many Etsy Sellers and many Website owners struggle with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is Part One of a series of posts on this subject. We will hit a couple of key items in each post and give you “to-go” projects to work on to help improve your website or Etsy shop. Helpful hint, print this article and bookmark it. Come back often and work it as you have time.

First of all, SEO is defined as the process of improving volume or the quality of traffic via organic or unpaid search results. Some of you will be past this point, but hang with us as we get everyone up to speed. Each post will dive deeper into the process. Now let’s dive in.

Everyone has heard the term “website traffic” or hits. However, traffic is NOT the problem. You must address your content and quality of your website before you can even worry about the rest. Etsy makes it very easy to add tagging and keywords into your shop. If you have your own website, you (or your super cool web guy) will need to add these into the HTML content. The search engines crawl your site and pick up on these search terms. Now here is the kicker… You are competing with thousands of other shops and their keywords how do you raise your rank? Look specifically at your work; include color, details and materials in your descriptions. It helps to get a fresh set of eyes on your shop. Have your friend review your descriptions and tagging they may see things that you have not thought of.

Time to think like a SPIDER. No, not those creepy crawly dudes but the search engine crawlers. A search engine will “crawl” and index the FIRST page of your website 4-8 weeks after you first submit it. At 8-12 weeks it will come back and start indexing the rest of the pages of your site. A Handmade Spark Mini-Site will do a lot of the heavy SEO lifting for you; however, it is always a good idea to make sure your content and keywords are up to speed.

Today’s Take-Away Tasks:

The take-away task today is to review your tagging, titles and descriptions. We will take it to the next level in the next post. Here is today’s checklist:

1. Review Titles, Tagging and Descriptions ~ Cross compare competitors and ask for a second opinion. Content is Key and be as specific as possible!

2. Photographs ~ Surprise! Your photo description counts as content too. We run across so many that are image #I0899784. Use this extra space to your advantage. Try, for example, typing in something like this: bluequartzsterlingsilver circularchaincharmbracelet.jpg instead. Some blog programs and web hosts allow you to “tag” your photos with keywords. Take the time and do it!

3. Reciprocal Links ~  Start thinking about ways to get your site onto other blogs and websites. The more quality links from high-ranking websites you have coming into your site. the higher your rankings will be.

4. Internal Links ~ those little web crawlers are smart. Internal links between pages of your website also help your ranking and prove that you are a human creating real links versus a robot. Look at any post in this blog and you will see that we link often to other pages within this website. Not an accident.

OK… You made it.

The next post will get you past the “Ok, I have a blog or website and content, now what?” stage.
Hang with Handmade Spark. We can do it!