SEO is search engine optimization or, for those of who have had enough of buzz-words and acronyms, it’s getting your craft blog or website to rank as highly as possible at Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
It’s important because typically 60% and upwards of people finding your crafts will have done so via a search engine. It also costs you nothing in direct payments like advertising would. It costs you in time and effort perhaps, but you don’t have to lay out any cash.
Trademark recognised.
One way to improve the chances of getting your craft business ranked in Google – without doubt the most influential search engine at the moment – is by using Google Webmaster Tools. It does require a little bit of tinkering with some html code but it’s pretty easy – copy and paste – so hopefully it won’t give you a problem.
Now you can just submit to Google as I said here – and that will be fine – but if you give Google a bit more info it can get you ranked quicker. Much quicker. Like a few weeks rather than several months.
So over at WMT (sorry – another one of those annoying acronyms – Web Master Tools!) you need to register if you haven’t already got a Google account, which is free. If you’ve got Gmail, just use that as your login.
Then there’s the code bit – you need to put a small chunk of code into your webpage to tell Google you are the site owner – then you submit a site map and you’re done. If you have a blog you can get a really useful plug-in here which will automatically update the sitemap for you.
Now I’ll be quite honest, I don’t know how this technology works, I just know it does! Sometimes you have to just go with what works, yes?
OK, it’s not absolutely necessary. If the code gives you any grief and you don’t have someone who can sort it out for you, don’t worry about it. There are other things you can do to improve your SEO and we’ll get into that next time.
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