(Feel free to move right along now – this is probably only interesting if you have an Etsy shop or something else that you are trying to make visible on the web. And even if you DO find it interesting it’s going to get really long.)

(Happy birthday Mama!)

I’ve been grappling to understand something that has been flooding my brain, and the brains of thousands of Etsians, for a little over a month. Something has happened in the land of Etsy and the land of Google, or that weird place where the two meet, and it has brought the views and sales of many, many, many people to a screeching halt. I have read all of the following explanations:

- the rollout of Google’s new Caffeine program, which shows no more than two results per page (so if you search “handmade jewelry” you’ll see Etsy’s main page, and then a “click here for more from etsy.com” link instead of results that would have formerly included many individual shops)… and other things about their new algorithms that I don’t understand

- the new search bar that Etsy implemented at that time (they have since agreed to change it back – it was dumb and confusing to new buyers)

- one of the Etsy dudes using us to test his own pet analytics program (did this make Google mad at us?)

- the lack of a sitemap

- the lack of the word “handmade” in the meta tags (Etsy says it was NEVER there, but they have always said don’t use up one of your 14 tags on the word “handmade”, because it would be redundant – I have always shown up in Google in a “handmade jewelry” search even though I’ve never tagged as such)

- the fact that if I list a pair of penguin earrings they will be indexed under the URL shown, and then if I sell them and relist a duplicate pair they are given a new URL, and Google could possibly be overlooking all of this “duplicate” content (Etsy is fixing this URL thing – they said it would take about four months from January, so we’ll see)

- I forget what else

I have spent at least an hour and a half every single day – since March 9th – doing research, fiddling with my listings, and lurking in the forums. This is only possible because I wake up before Mikey and Hazel to drink coffee and eat breakfast and be able to do this, and because I have an iphone that I can take with me and use while I lay with her to get her to sleep for about half an hour every night. I used to spend that half hour playing games, and now I spend it feverishly reading through the forums. I have tried so hard to not let this cut into my ACTUAL life and crafting time, parenting and wife-ing time, etc… but it has been really hard. I don’t know $%*t about any of this stuff. I really don’t. I’ve been losing sleep over it. It has been stressing me out. I sat in on my first virtual lab and took five pages of notes. It has been harder than anything I ever had to learn in school, and I am only at the tip of the iceberg. It’s like I’ve been at this job for almost four years and all of a sudden I have no idea how to do it.

Aren’t I on Etsy so I don’t *have* to do my own SEO work, Mikey asks? Aren’t I on Etsy so I don’t have to know what a meta tag is? A sitemap? An alt tag? A 301 redirect? …this is what I thought.

Apparently I do need to know some of these things to be a better business owner. I feel much more capable after four weeks of mass Etsy hysteria, I gotta tell ‘ya. I might just sew and make jewelry and carve linoleum blocks and not know anything about the web side of things, but there are some crafters out there who are also tech GENIUSES and they have been so willing to spend hours in the forums sharing what they know. I definitely would not have understood any of this on my own without the direction of cindylouwho2 and many others.

Since Google is always changing things up like this so as not to have their secrets bested, I don’t want to throw myself fully into SEO best practices just to have the rug pulled out from under me in another year, so this is my plan: equal parts SEO maintenance and off-site promoting.

So…

The SEO part – here are the tidbits I have gathered that seem to be the most useful:

- Do lots of experimental Google searches to see what people are looking for and determine a handful of keywords for your product. What you make, obviously, as well as “handmade”, “handcrafted”, “handcarved”, “handsewn” – whatever applies to you. The consensus seems to be that lots of utilitarian titles that all look the same are boring to buyers, but there really should be keywords peppered through out your tagline (right under your shop banner), the first few words of your titles and the first few words of your descriptions (Google looks at the first 160, I think – Etsy just added a Google preview to the listing page). You can mix it up with more creative titles as long as there is SOMETHING leading people to your shop from various types of searches. I have tried a few different combos so I might come up in one person’s “handcrafted earrings” search and another’s “handmade jewelry” search. I am still watching my analytics to see what works, and then I’ll gradually change all of my listings to the combinations that are the most effective. “Summer breeze” might be a pretty, poetic title, but no one who wants a pair of blue beaded earrings is going to be searching for that. Adding these words here and there throughout your 14 tags has also been suggested repeatedly, as well as in the beginning of your profile.

- Add a link back to the “earrings” section of your shop in each earring listing. It has also been suggested that, in the description of your brand new blue owl earrings for example, you add something like “check out these guys in red” and a link to an older listing that has already built up views, hearts, and been indexed by Google. Supposedly it’ll get Google to see this new listing faster. I don’t know about this and haven’t done it – it seems messy and like too much to keep up with when I’ve got over 150 items in my shop all the time (what if I run out of red owls?)

- Make sure your Facebook fan page has been indexed by Google.

- Create as many inbound links as you can. The way Google finds new things to index (i.e. your new listings, or an updated shop announcement – any fresh content in your shop) is by “crawling” from one page to the next. My Etsy shop only gets crawled about twice a week these days, but this blog gets crawled every day. If I link to a new listing from here, or you do, or someone clicks through from my Facebook fan page or shares one of my listings on their own Facebook page, or if I post it on Twitter and someone retweets, this gives Google the heads up that there is something new to index, and you’ll show up in their search results more quickly. If you are constantly “spamming” with only your own content and no one else is, you’ll get frowned upon – there needs to be a balance. This is also really helpful if you are tweaking things in your shop and you are waiting around to be crawled again before you can see how the results are affecting your traffic. The more often you are crawled, the more quickly you’ll be able to see how things are taking effect. The more often you have fresh listing / announcement content or are generating inbound links, the more often you’ll get crawled, and the faster your new stuff will show up in someone’s Google search. To know how often you’re crawled, Google your URL and then click “cached” just beneath. It will look like this, with the info up at the top.

- In the virtual labs I asked if, because my blog is crawled every day, my updated Etsy mini (over there on the left, which updates every time I post a new listing) counts as an inbound link. They said it does not, because Google reads only HTML and not Java.

- They tell us that capitalization and punctuation do not matter to Google.

- You can get a good idea of how all of this is working through your Google analytics and by signing up for Google alerts. One of the reasons I knew something was up, in fact, was that I stopped getting an immedate Google alert every time I made a new listing. Even though I list multiple things across four or five categories every day, I might only get one Google alert per week right now… and they are starting to pick up again. Etsy admin have said this doesn’t matter & is not indicative of anything, but I don’t believe them :) You can use your analytics to track pretty much everything: what keywords people are using to get to your shop, how they are getting to you (blog links, search engines, your email signature, etc.) – it’s not totally accurate, because if you went to MY Etsy shop and eventually clickety-clicked your way to Emmalee ten shops away, *I* would show up in her analytics as a referral because you started with me, even though I do not directly link to them. You can generally tell from your view numbers what’s a direct link, though, and it gives you lots of useful info like your bounce rate (percentage of people who are clicking into your shop and then immediately leaving – you want this to be as low as possible because this means they’re staying!), how long visitors are staying, how many pages they’re browsing, if they’re new or have been to your shop before, and on and on.

- This could go on forever.

The off-Etsy stuff – these are the things I have always done that bring traffic, new things I am trying, or things that I plan to add into the mix. Most of these don’t take any time daily, or only take a few minutes, so I plan to pepper them throughout my morning and evening Etsy work.

- Put your shop URL everywhere you can legally do so! In your email signature, in every possible profile / about me page / everything, every networking tool you use.

- Flickr is very valuable, but do NOT be spammy there. You are allowed to link to your shop in your profile, but you cannot in your photo titles or descriptions, folder descriptions, you can’t tag things “Etsy” – nada. It’s against their TOU and they have shut people down without warning. If you have things tagged “Etsy” don’t freak out :) I realized I had some old ones from way back in the day when it either wasn’t in their TOU or they didn’t enforce it – just go to flickr.com/photos/YOURNAMEHERE/alltags and you can see what you’ve got, doing a mass delete if necessary. I have all of my product photos on Flickr, and every day when I list a few new things on Etsy I take five extra minutes to drop each of the product photos into five or so pools of group photos. There are a bajillion groups on Flickr – join lots and lots so you are getting your photos spread throughout a lot of different pools each week – people will find their way to your shop through your profile. I have also started linking here on photos that are used here – traffic here is up as a result, and so traffic to my shop is up.

EDIT: I emailed Flickr with some questions about the TOU and apparently linking a photo to ANYTHING is not allowed – not even a personal blog. Little known fact. Everyone in the world does this. They also specified no banners, etc., which made me remember that I have my banner and avatar stored there, and now I’m assuming the screenshots of treasuries should go, too. I’d be heartbroken if my flickr got shut down without warning!

- I try to update my Facebook fan page a handful of times per week with a new listing (no more than once a day, and usually not every day). I made a fan page a year ago and then didn’t do anything with it, but after the “crash” at the beginning of March I got on the bandwagon. I was skeptical that I could make many sales to just my friends and family, but as soon as they became a fan of my page it snowballed and I have lots that I don’t know, and have made many sales over the past few weeks to friends or family of my friends or family :) I also added a link to my FB fan page in my sidebar a week or two ago – there is a button builder on your main “pages” page of your FB. I added it to my Etsy profile and dropped it in a few “what are your FB fan page URLs?” in the forums. As of this moment you don’t get notifications from your fan page, but someone pointed out in the forums that if you “like” all of your own stuff, you’ll get notifications in response to that (the same annoying way that if I “like” Claire’s status, and then 37 other people do too, I get 37 notifications). This made me cringe, but I’ve had lots of sales there so I don’t want to miss any comments.

- Blogging is GOOD – for me. I have no idea how you’d start a blog JUST for promotion. People seem constantly overwhelmed by the undertaking in the forums, and I never read promotion-only blogs so I really have no idea. I can’t help you there, but if you already blog or want to take the plunge, it can be majorly to your advantage :)

- Twitter. I hate Twitter. Hate it. But I do it. Sellout, I know. I made one before Hazel was born and didn’t do anything with it until March, either. I never tweet new listings (because I never look at other people’s, so I don’t suppose many would be looking at mine) – I mostly tweet blog entries if they have something that would be interesting to strangers, like projects or thrifting finds. People love PROJECTS – finished or in progress. People love TUTORIALS. People love to LOOK AT YOUR STUFF. I don’t think people care so much about Etsy listings because they are seeing so many. I will tweet this blog entry – people will come here and read it and then go to my Etsy shop and hang around for awhile. I know because Google analytics tells me so :) Etsy is on twitter, so you can find lots of people to follow there.

- I made a button for this blog since Tia asked if I had one (hi Tia!), and in 24 hours I have traffic from her blog. Take my button! Share the love! Make your own! It’s not hard.

- I registered with Technorati but haven’t been keeping track of that one yet.

- I include extra business cards in orders that I know are being given as gifts. I write thank you notes on postcards for all of my outgoing Ebay and Swaptree mailings. I hand them out in bars… not that I often get to go to bars anymore. I wear my jewelry and people just ask about it. Don’t leave home without your business cards. Put some in your husband’s wallet so he can forget to ever give them out. Pimp your goods and get your friends to do the same.

OK. Enough out of me. Here are some links that I’ve found really useful over the past few weeks – very random. I hope you find something you can use.

Etsy admin Eric on what creates an inbound link
Storque article : Web Analytics Enhancements
some useful links provided by a fellow seller
Storque article : cheap marketing
An article about titles
An article about search engine ranking factors
How to make a DIY lightbox for better photos
Google webmaster central
Google pagerank checker
preview of next week’s episode of Lost
Storque article : 5 tips for better descriptions

And with all the talk of the importance of inbound links, I give you……………… some of my friends :)

Rita!
Erin!
Emily!
Maggie!
Melissa!
Claire!
Jamie!