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Everyone on Etsy wants more traffic. You can get more traffic from search engines if you optimize your site. That’s called SEO, “search engine optimization”, by all the cool kids.
Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.
SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.
What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.
They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.
Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.
Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.
- Before You Do ANYTHING Else…
- Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition
- Sell Handmade Stuff On The Internet – SEO, Part One
When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.
Pick your top 3 keywords.
You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.
Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.
That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.
They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.
Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.
Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.
When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.
As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.
If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.
As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.
**cough** I can build one for you… **cough**.
The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.
There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.
Feel the power.
Very nice. It seems to me this is indeed low hanging fruit in that you can quickly and complete control of content create a site that will rate on your keywords, and then point to wherever you want to build some back links.
I just set up a wordpress blog to do just that. Then wrote a worthwhile post (I am just looking for traffic but out to inform and educate as well) and linked it to a page on my regular site. Which, by the way, is actually running on WP as well using Headway.
I am getting a request to approve a pingback from the wordpress.com blog site. For the best SEO mojo, do I approve it or not?
Thanks
Michael
Yes! Absolutely allow the “pingback”. You’re adding a link from your site to the other site that’s already linked to you. Links are generally good. Links to a “keyword related” site is good and links to a site that’s linked to you is great. If it’s a link from your own site to your own site, that’s even better. That’s happens in WP when you refer to another post from the one you are writing.
That’s as long as it’s a site that you want to link to. I’ve gotten some spam pingbacks, so be careful of that.
Thanks for asking.
-c
Hi Conrad
I had heard that one way links to your site are better. That mutual linking decreases the Googlishiness of your site. I would like to hear more on your thinking about this.
thanks
Michael
I’ll write a post about it. You’ve inspired me.
Cool, I look forward to reading it!
Very nice. It seems to me this is indeed low hanging fruit in that you can quickly and complete control of content create a site that will rate on your keywords, and then point to wherever you want to build some back links.
I just set up a wordpress blog to do just that. Then wrote a worthwhile post (I am just looking for traffic but out to inform and educate as well) and linked it to a page on my regular site. Which, by the way, is actually running on WP as well using Headway.
I am getting a request to approve a pingback from the wordpress.com blog site. For the best SEO mojo, do I approve it or not?
Thanks
Michael
Dang, Wow! you learn something new everyday. To Cool! Thank again for more GREAT INFO.
Roger
Hi! Great post. I’m loving the information on your site. Having at Etsy shop can be hard to get your product out there and in front of people, so this info is great. What I’m wondering is this: I already have a blog setup for my business. If I wanted to follow the advice you gave about, should I make this part of my current blog, or is it really best to build a completely seperate one for this purpose, so I don’t “put people off” (so to speak) by constantly posting info about each and every one of my products? I really appreciate the advice. Thanks again!
Candace
I would just write all of the posts at once. If you want to date them all in the past, they won’t be at the front of your blog.
You could also make them pages, under one parent page called “products” or something.
If you were using WordPress, you would create pages for each, then use the “Exclude Pages from Navigation” plug in and leave those pages out of the menu. I would use the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug in to submit the site maps to Google and that will contain the pages, even if they are not in the menu.
WordPress has a zillion sub-domains because of their service, are they counted as a seperate domain or it’s better to get your own domain name and add the extension /blog/ or what have you?
WordPress.com gets all the juice from all of the subdomains.
Each subdomain is on it’s own and has to get it’s own juice. It’s better to get your own domain than a subdomain at wordpress, but then, those are free!