BUSINESS: How To Improve SEO Through Community Networking

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or SEO is the art of understanding how search engines rank results and then making changes to rank your shop/website higher. SEO is therefore an important tool for most people in the handmade community who own on-line shops and websites, because improving SEO means that more customers will find you. There are a number of ways of achieving this as Luke Saunders from Makers-Online explains:

Advertising
Using a service like Google AdWords makes it relatively easy to attract visitors to your site, but you pay for each visitor you get. Typically this is between 30p and £1 per visitor depending on how competitive your field is. Alternatively, buying advertising space on various blogs/websites can be good value but the number of visitors you get may not be that many and they may not be the kind of visitors you are looking for. For most small handmade business owners, advertising turns out not to be very cost effective, as it costs more for each visitor than can be made from each visitor.

Widget and Friends by Anna Hull

Networking and other organic marketing
Putting something which is really interesting, funny, or useful on your website is a great way to attract visitors. Then, when people see it they will share it with other people they know who will also come to see what all the fuss is about. It could be an article, a funny picture of your cat, or some interesting thing you’ve made, anything that provokes some reaction. Essentially this sums up viral marketing; it is really difficult to engineer but if you happen to do it then brilliant, you’re on to a winner. Networking with other people in the community using Twitter, forums, or by blogging is also a good method of getting known within the community. Networking is also useful for sharing hints and experiences but it is unlikely to attract visitors from outside the community (who will buy your products).

Normal visitors from search engines
Search engines have both paid results like AdWords and organic results (the main search results). Visitors via organic results are great as it costs you nothing and they are likely to be well targeted as they have just searched for a site like yours after all. These visitors are ideal, and ranking highly for a popular search term can really push a business forwards but achieving this can be hard and for many sites it’s the only option. There are some suggestions below on some ways to achieve this.

Handmade Cushions by Diane Goode?

Search Engine Marketing
SEM or SEO is an endless subject to understand with hundreds of factors, but it basically boils down to two things:

1) On-site stuff: when someone searches for a phrase, "handmade cushions" for example, the search engine will calculate how relevant the content on each page of your site is to that search phrase. SEOMoz, one of the leading sites on SEO did some research on how Google calculates this and provided a tool which can be used to see how relevant any page on a website is in relation to any search phrase. Essentially, if the search phrase is actually on the website and also other words relevant to that phrase, then it’s probably deemed relevant by Google. This is the main factor for uncompetitive search terms.

2) Off-site stuff: If a lot of other sites link to a given page on a website, then search engines will assume that the page is popular and the more popular a page is deemed to be, the higher it will rank. Also, if other sites are linking to the website whilst mentioning the relevant search term, then the page is not only popular but also relevant.

For example, if we link to UK Handmade using the following term: "handmade", it shows that not only is UK Handmade popular, but it is also about handmade (as a side note most people link to the site using the following term: "UK Handmade" which has the word handmade in it anyway, which is probably why it ranks highly for that word in Google). This last point about having the search phrase in the link text to your page has been deemed the most important factor by some way. These external factors are the main factors affecting SEO and, unfortunately, they are also the hardest for website owners to manipulate.

If you didn’t follow that then the main point is this, if you have relevant text on your webpage and other sites are linking to your webpage with relevant text in the link itself, then you stand a good chance of ranking highly and attracting visitors to your shop/website.

Handmade Silver Jewellery by Rachel Lucie?
 

How can I do this?
The first step is to choose a search term that’s not too competitive at first. There is little chance of ranking #1 for "jewellery" for example, but perhaps for "handmade silver jewellery" it is possible. Using the makers-online homepage as an example, the phrase "handmade accessories" was chosen as one that makers-online wanted to rank highly for. It’s not that competitive but it’s a good start. The content on the home page is relevant enough and it has quite a lot of links to it from other sites, so it’s deemed popular as well, but it’s not ranking highly. However, if lots of people linked to it using the following term: "handmade accessories" then it is highly likely to rank top for that search term. So, that’s the second step, how to get people to do that? Admittedly, it’s pretty hard but as the handmade community is a supportive and collaborative one it is possible to achieve by making some friends within the community and asking them to do it, and in return linking back to them. By working together in this way, with enough people involved, it should be possible to start getting useful traffic from search results.

Spotlight
Spotlight is a new scheme being run by makers-online which will act as a hub to allow people in the handmade community to work together in this way. Each week people can register their interest and specify a website they’d like to promote and a search phrase they’d like it to rank highly for. That week everyone in the group will write briefly about one or more of the other people in the group, linking to their websites using the appropriate search term. The groups participating will change each week and therefore participation can be as little or as much as the participants choose, so if you only want to participate once a month then no problem. It won’t be a magic bullet but consistent effort over several weeks should bring positive results for all participants without too much work. Many shop/websites owners are networking and blogging already and this is just a way to do this more constructively. You can see the first spotlight post here.

You may be thinking “isn’t that just like reciprocal linking?”, but it really isn't. Reciprocal links usually come from a single webpage with tens or hundreds of other links of often irrelevant sites. Writing a blog post with a bit of thought and only a handful of links about people who are likely to be genuinely interesting is entirely the opposite end of the scale.

If this interests you then email contact@makers-online.com for more details.