As a person who does most of the SEO tasks for my business, I’ve learned a lot since 1998, when I began selling my handcrafted silver hair accessories online. I have a lot of internet jeweler colleagues, and many of them have recently started business websites. Quite a few of them sell on Etsy; but are eager to build their own e-commerce sites. Recently, two of them asked me to give them some tips, and I’ll share those tips with you now.
I find it very interesting that both of them made corresponding, very common errors; even more interesting is one of the sites was developed by a paid web maker or creator. Designers are artisans by nature, and visual impact is the most crucial thing to a designer. It really is a shame, but, the individual that created the website just didn’t consider search engines one bit while constructing the site, and doesn’t want to make the modifications I advised my friend ask for.
At first look, the site is clean, has simple navigation and is beautiful in its simplicity. The home page has lots of blank space, a big photo of a bangle made by the site owner and just 5 links to internal pages with a copyright announcement. Unfortunately this simply isn’t enough.
On the surface, the primary problem is there isn’t any text. Not even one word. Amazingly, the copyright announcement is an image. The hyperlinks are even pictures. This tells me that this web designer just doesn’t understand how search works at all; search engine spiders comprehend text, and can’t see graphics.
Behind the scenes, there isn’t anything that will assist search engine crawlers either. Simply a title … and an Author’s meta tag. Of course, that is expected, but … no Description or keyword Meta tags. In addition the title Meta Tag isn’t good enough for search marketing uses.
The second website was created by my friend’s husband; amazingly he truly did a better job than the professional designer. But, her husband also made some of the same basic mistakes, starting with the title Meta tag. This is what’s wrong …
They both used the business name as the site title. This is a instinctive way to do this; and in most instances this is a major error. This is how I explained it to them:
If your store is past the start-up phase and acclaimed similar to Tiffany, you can name a website in that way due to the fact that most people already know these brands and they’ll go to their favorite search site to find your jewelry by entering your store name. But, we are unknown, and very few are going purposes to search for our sites that way. No one is going online to find my website by entering Jewelry24Seven into a search engine; and if someone does they’ll find the site even though the name isn’t in the title. But consumers DO search for the products I sell. This is how I decided on our title.
The page title of my website is: Handmade Silver Jewelry – Silver Chains and Handcrafted Bali Jewelry. Not our business name, Jewelry24Seven. Our site has pretty good search engine results for these keywords; and these are very competitive search terms. The main reason the site can be found is the site title.
The user designed site has a decent description Meta tag; my acquaintance’s spouse did a great job with that. The paid designer’s home page didn’t have a Meta description at all. My friend asked the professional designer about it and was told … sure, include a tag if you want me to. The tag should list as many of your related keywords as possible. I don’t really agree … not completely anyway. This isn’t a good place to write a list of search phrases. This tag should contain an actual description of what you do and the focus of your website. Yes, this tag does have to highlight your most important target search terms; however, they need to be within the context of a description. It isn’t a second keywords tag simply separated by commas. The description does have to make sense. Here’s mine:
“Handmade silver jewelry and custom silver chains. Handcrafted sterling silver jewelry. Gemstone pendants and artisan rings. Hand made beaded earrings. 50 types of sterling chains by the inch. Bali bracelets, rings, earrings and barrettes.”
I broke it up into groups and used punctuation to give it some basic structure. Yes, it is fundamentally made up of search terms, but isn’t a straightforward list. When you read it, you understand what my website is about. You can see that our first and most significant keywords are in both the page title and description Meta tag.
My friend had a real problem with her designer when it came to the keywords Meta tag. The web designer asked my friend to compile a list of keywords that included words with spelling errors like joolry. In my opinion this is truly ill advised for two reasons … primarily due to the fact that it gives the impression the merchant is uneducated and unprofessional. Even worse, it takes up valuable space in the keyword Meta tag.
Most pages can’t be well optimized for more than two or three search terms. The first few must be the most important. I think including over_in excess of 15 keywords won’t help, and after that it pretty much lessens the importance of the relevant terms. The keywords tag also requires a juggling act in some ways; each term you include in your tag should appear on your page in the body text. This may be hard to accomplish, especially with deliberately misspelled words because it looks like the page is full of typographical errors. Lets take a look at our site’s keywords for example:
“handmade silver jewelry, silver chain, custom silver chains, sterling silver jewelry, bali jewelry, handcrafted, artisan jewelry, silver barrettes, custom made, bracelets, handmade earrings, silver ring, by the inch, pendant”
I have 14 search terms included in the Meta tag seen above. They are all included in my body text. The most important search terms are included first. search phrases are mentioned in the body text a few times; and are used in different ways. Headline or heading 1 text, category or text, bold text and text links all play a part in how our home page is constructed.
The web designer put up the biggest fight over the site’s body text. She refuses to believe it is needed. My friend may not be able to have the web designer follow her instructions; she feels the site is finished and I do see how text spoils her artistic vision. But with no text, you don’t get the site onto search engine listings; the result is very few people will ever see it. This is why you need to be careful when hiring someone to work for you.
Of course I know and acknowledge that Flash looks cool and it does have its place; same with images and Java. However, if you want a web presence that is easy to find on search engines, a static HTML page is the best way to reach that goal. Take full advantage of the Meta tags by including your most important search phrases in the 3 major tags – title, description and keywords. Be sure to mention every word you put in the keywords tag in your body text. Describe the images with “image alt” tags. Include text links to the inside pages of your site, not image or Javascript buttons. And put between 600 and 900 words in the body section in visible text that intelligibly describes the services you offer and products you sell on the page.
Work on acquiring as many sites as possible to link to your content with optimized hyperlinks that mention matching keywords and relevant text you have included in the tags. This is the only way to bring your web pages organic traffic on search engines; this is a major job; however this seriously is the one method you can employ to reach as many people as possible – people without investing a lots of cash for online ads!
Robert Edwards is a jewelry maker and metalsmith in NYC with more than 30 years experience in the jewelry trade. He is the webmaster of a popular retail website specializing in handcrafted silver jewelry and silver chains. This article may be copied and published on blogs and websites as content as long as the entire article, all links and this writer’s statement are included, Copyright 2010 Robert Edwards.