Tips from a Pro – Improve Your Shop SEO

James Dillehay, from craftermarketer.com, shared his thoughts on how crafters can utilize SEO (search engine optimization) best practices to increase sales.

James Dillehay is a professional craft artist and author of nine books. He has been interviewed in The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Bottom Line Personal and has appeared as a featured guest on HGTV’s The Carol Duvall Show and Entrepreneur Radio. He served as a member of the advisory boards to the National Craft Association and ArtisanStreet.com.

“Properly done, SEO can enhance your Etsy, Artfire or personal domain website pages to help the search engines determine what your site is about,”  James told HandmadeMarketing.org.

He explains that SEO practices help search engines like Google and Bing rank you web pages high in results when searchers type in queries looking for items like yours.

James says effective SEO for increasing your crafts sales is generally concerned with two things.

1. “On-page” Factors.  “An example of on-page factors would be if you make handmade jewelry, you want that phrase and similar search terms throughout your content, like in your page title, URL (if possible), meta description, body text, heading tags, image names and alt image text,” he said.
2. Incoming Links. “Equally important, is getting the links pointing to your site to contain the popular keyword phrases you want to rank high for. So if you want to rank high for the search term “handmade jewelry”, you would first include the phrase as mentioned above and then set out to get incoming links where the linking text reads “handmade jewelry.” You will want to vary your incoming links and the words and phrases included in your content so as to appear natural to Google and the other search engines. Google has sophisticated tools that filter out sites they determine are attempting to artificially enhance their ranking results. As long as you get links coming in “naturally”, you can start improving your rankings by making link-getting part of your daily marketing,” James tells handmade sellers.

He suggests looking to social sites who are focused on supporting the “buy handmade” movement for help with enhancing your SEO.

“Craftsu, IndiePublic and Artists.Gawker.com let you set up a free profile and link to your Etsy, Artfire or other storefront,” he says.

For more information about how you can increase the number of potential buyers looking at your handmade crafts, be sure to take a look at James Dillehay’s blog.  He blogs craft business tips here.

Looking for other handmade business tips from pros?  Check out these HandmadeMarketing.org articles:

Tips From A Pro – Etsy Photography Inspiration

Tips From A Pro – Strike Gold in Etsy Treasuries

Tips From A Pro – Jewelry Photography Tips from Allyjoy

Tips From A Pro – Etsy Bag Team on Successful Etsy Teams

Do you have tips to share with readers of HandmadeMarketing.org?  Tell us your SEO tips for increasing handmade sales.  Be sure to include links to your blog, shop, and social media so we can link to you as the article author!