Etsy SEO – Tools to Optimize

When the Etsy’s SEO Guide was released in September of 2009, Etsy seller Amy Vander Vorste published her own SEO tips with tools to help sellers on her website.  Amy sells handmade at Etsy’s Avlor’s Imprints and has shared her marketing and business tips with HandmadeMarketing.org before – from showing us how to create a form for customers and inventory to creating a Facebook user name. 

The SEO guide from Etsy.com aims to share great tips with sellers and offer insights into how to enhance Etsy shops for search engines and improve rankings.  Because search engine optimization is an evolving process, expect updates to this initial guide.

The guide advises sellers to focus item descriptions and as well as the shop title on the first 30 words.  This will ensure that the most optimized keywords will be displayed.

“[After reading the Etsy SEO guide], many of us are redoing our shop and item titles and descriptions to utilize those first 30 or 160 characters,” Amy says.

To help make this process a little less painless for sellers, Amy says sellers count their characters using Google Docs’ word count tool, which can be found under “Tools”, then “Word Count.”

“If you make a selection, it will count the characters in the selection. Then you can easily tune your titles and descriptions to the correct number of characters,” she tells other Etsy sellers.

What techniques have you used to help make your shop or website optimized for search engines?  What role do you think search plays in sales?  Have you noticed any changes in your SEO since Etsy published this guide?