An SEO Rant

(Warning - I'm really annoyed from all of the confusion and conflicting information over in the Etsy forums today so this will inevitably include some whining before I get to the end and decide to do something about it.)

I don't normally complain about Etsy much since it's the only home that I have at the moment but it's just crazy over there since they announced the changes to the relevancy search. The admins are contradicting the search engineers, everyone is wailing about not understanding the difference between tag stuffing and using good keyword phrases and people are running amok spreading hysteria and misinformation all over the forums. It's like one of those meetings from hell where no one knows what they're talking about so they just wave their arms around and freak out a lot. The worst part is that I've been wasting time there and doing it too.

I'm mostly annoyed at myself. I've worked in the software field as a programmer, business analyst and project manager and I would never have tolerated this behavior from myself or treated on of my customer's businesses in the way that I'm treating mine. I know how to research these kinds of things and organize myself with a solid plan so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop wasting my time watching people freaking out on the Etsy forums and posting very authoritative sounding guesses about things, figure it out in terms of how major search engines work instead of aiming for Etsy's constantly moving target and then at the very end do my best to make sure that I'm relevant while still not tag stuffing. And I'm not changing another freaking tag until I figure it out!

(The whining part is that I was really hoping that the SEO fairy was going to visit my shop and listings one by one and make it all shiny and perfect and put me on page one of every search engine that there is and give me a pony too.)


I'm reading a series of Bing articles now that seem pretty helpful and go into a bit more detail. In the spirit of starting at the beginning and taking it one step at a time I'm just going to focus on the advice in the first one for now and start working on it tomorrow.

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/05/12/who-s-looking-for-you-sem-101.aspx
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