Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a hard concept for me to grasp. I'm not even sure if I really understand it completely, but it goes a little something like this:

You list your item on Etsy and add all the information for your customer to be ready to buy it. This includes search tags for Etsy to help the customer find your item in the first place! The thing is, Etsy doesn't straight up tell you that Google and other search engines like Bing or Yahoo! can't find your listing from your search tags. They find it based on keywords in your listing title and description. So, what that means is that if your title or description aren't using keywords strategically, the search engines won't find you. What THAT means, is that you're missing out on a huge market. While Etsy has gained quite a bit of popularity over the last few years, a lot of people out there still don't know what it is. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in.

I've been doing a lot of reading on how to optimize my keywords for the engines to find my listings and tweaking each of my listings. This means re-writing a lot of what I've written to be more keyword friendly. To be keyword friendly, I have to be pretty repetitive and repeat the words 'crochet dress' over and over throughout the listing, along with all the other key phrases. When Google sees these key phrases showing up several times in the listing, they bump the link up higher in importance when listing links when people search for the specific keywords I have in my listing. So, for example if I only used the phrase 'crochet dress' in the title of my listing, and a customer searches "crochet dress" and is surfing through pages of links, my listing link will show up AFTER the link of a listing which says "crochet dress" 2 times, and so on.

So now I'm going through all of my listings and re-writing my titles and descriptions to be keyword rich and redoing my Etsy search tags to be found more in the Etsy searches as well.

Nothing like opening a handmade goods store only to spend half your time writing and doing administrative work on the computer!! :P

Good times.


Sarah