Easy Etsy Relevancy

Looking for a fast and easy way to be relevant on Etsy?

This might not get you to page 1 of search, but it will help some, and is a great start. (and not everyone can be on pg 1 anyway)

Take a look at your shop in gallery mode. You notice that only a little bit of the title shows that way.

Now read those little bits of titles. Do they say what your product is???

If not, you need to make sure that your titles say what the item is in gallery mode.

Easy peasy.

This is a good start to SEO too. 

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