Selecting the Right Keywords

(Disclaimer: I'm trying to learn this stuff so everything that you read here might be wrong for a while. If I were you I would sit on my hands and not change anything until I see my views improve. I'm focusing on major search engines and when I think I'm done I'll go back and try to fit it into Etsy's policies. Seeing as they change their mind constantly I'm going to leave them for last.)

The science of hunting for keywords is pretty easy. All you need to do is go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and start entering words and short descriptive phrases to see what the competition is and how many searches are performed on it each month. The idea is to select the ones that seem the best to you and then you can star and download them to an Excel spreadsheet.

The art of it is not that easy for me. The idea is to aim for a targeted audience that might buy your item and conventional wisdom says that people use longer and more specific phrases once they are ready to purchase something. If the competition for the keyword is high and it's frequently searched on then you'll probably be buried in huge numbers of results and if the competition and monthly searches are low you might not get a huge number of views but the ones that you get are truly interested in your items and not just window shopping or lost on the internet.

Some keywords are good to describe individual items and some are more relevant to my shop as a whole and those are the ones that I'm starting with first. I'm also going to forget about the hats and blankets for this first pass. These keywords will end up being used in my shop title, shop announcement and section names and should create a theme for my shop. I've spent hours over the last 2 days playing with keywords like fashion, couture, plus size, sweaters, clothing, etc. but they are such common terms that they all have high competition and lots of searches. I started out with a theory that I should find things with a competition less than .5 but so far I haven't even come up with one. You can easily see which keywords are getting people into your shop on Etsy simply by looking at your shop stats and the keywords used for my items are more targeted (for example "Mohair Sweater" or "Plus Size Cardigan"). I'm not sure where to go from here in terms of coming up with more targeted keywords for my shop as a whole but I'm not giving up. I'm going to google around for a few more ideas and then settle on a few key phrases that I feel describe my shop well and make it easier for the people interested in high-end sweaters to find me.


Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

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
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

SEO this morning

*Wanders around babbling about white mohair sweater plus size. plus size sweater mohair white, sweater plus size white mohair...

I'm still confused so here's a picture of my dogs instead.



Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

Stephanie's Guide to Setting Up an Etsy Shop

We're going to back up here and take a look at what you should do when opening an Etsy shop.

So maybe you've been thinking about opening an Etsy shop, there is a lot to do when you decide to do this.

Having set up 4 shops, I wish I had a list like this for the first 2

Here's the list broken down into steps.

#1 The most important: Find out what laws you have to abide by for your area. go to your local courthouse or SCORE office, they will have all of the info you will need. Each municipality is different, and each type of work is different.

#2 Have product. I'm assuming you already have this.

#3 Take awesome pictures of said product, search the Etsy forums, there's tons of awesome picture advice there.

#4 Use one of these pics as your avatar (optional) and write yourself a profile, shop policies, announcement. again, there's tons of advice about that in the fora as well.

#5 Look up shipping. if you are in the US, go to postalcalc.usps.gov, and find the pricing for 1 oz, 2 oz, etc (use whatever weights you will be using) to the US, Canada, Mexico, and Australia to start, you can add more later. But Australia's prices generally are the same as the rest of the world. Not always though. 

#6 Make shipping profiles with the shipping information you just gleaned For more on shipping, there is a really good thread started in business topics about the subject, (written by GoTo) here's the shipping thread

#7 Read up on SEO, basically, you want the beginning of your announcement, your "shop title" (which is the words under your shop name when you are looking at it as a buyer) your titles, tags, and beginnings of your descriptions to be descriptive of what you sell, again. This is SEO at it's most basic. Karen has been writing up some good stuff on this blog recently about SEO too.

#8 Start listing! make sure your tags are accurate, your descriptions are descriptive, etc.

The reason I say listing last is because you want everything else in place first- I made the mistake of not having it in place.

SEO - Learning about Keywords

(Warning! I'm just starting to learn about SEO so you really shouldn't follow my advice about anything based on my bumbling around here . At any given moment half of the things that I say could be completely and absolutely incorrect.)



Today I'm starting to learn about which keywords and phrases are best to use to have my items come up in google. Mostly I'm reading all sorts of articles to get myself oriented. I don't have much to say yet other than "I dunno" but here are the things that I'm looking at today. The first one is the google adwords Keyword tool and I found three posts on the Handmadeology blog that seem helpful so far:

Etsy SEO Made Easy Part 1

Etsy SEO Made Easy Part 2

Etsy SEO Made Easy Part 3



Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

SEO - Inbound Links to Your Shop

(Warning! I'm just starting to learn about SEO so you really shouldn't follow my advice about anything based on my bumbling around here . At any given moment half of the things that I say could be completely and absolutely incorrect.)


One of the things that I found out yesterday is that links to your shop help to increase your visibility to search engines. No one has to actually click on your link - it just has to be there. That sure makes it a lot easier! The first thing that I did was to copy and paste the same links to both my shop and blog at the bottom of each of my Etsy items and in my profile. Something to remember is that we each have 2 working URL formats. The first for my shop is http://www.etsy.com/shop/MirabilisColors?ref=si_shop and that is what is seen in the URL line of my browser. The second one that will work for me is http://www.mirabiliscolors.etsy.com and I use that on my business cards but unless I'm missing something Etsy won't turn that one into a live link.

I was also told that when posting our links to our shop from outside of Etsy that it's better to label the link with searchable keywords instead of just showing the URL. So, Handmade Sweaters from MirabilisColors would be better than http://www.etsy.com/shop/MirabilisColors?ref=si_shop


I'm also going to go back in and edit every one of my blog entries to have the link to the shop at the end of each one. It might be kind of annoying but hopefully not too much.

Stephanie adds:

Actually, Karen, all links to anything on etsy are made live, it's just off site links that are dead.

Karen adds

LOL - I wonder if you saw that before or after my edit. I should stick a warning on every post that I might be wrong about everything and will be correcting myself along the way. For some reason I can't get it to show a live link for this blog. Can you and if so what format do you use?


Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

Getting Started With Search Engine Optimization

Well, it's August 1st and the kickoff date for my monthly promotion task. This month I'm going to focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that my items have a chance of being found in a google search instead of being buried far beyond where any normal person has the patience to go.

There are all sorts of links and tools out there to learn from but I'm going to start slowly and build on what I figure out along the way. You can use your shop announcement, section names, item titles, item descriptions and tags to put in keywords that will help the search engines find your stuff. Some of it is obvious but from what I understand the order of the words that you use can have a big effect on things. I'm going to be digging deeply into this for the next few weeks until I feel confident that mine is the best that it can be.

My tasks for this morning are to read this article about SEO Mistakes and to go look at some of the successful sweater shops and see how they're using the available areas for their keywords.

Have you focused on this yet and what have your experiences been?


Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com