Twinkly's Beginner SEO *day 4*

Good morning :-)

I've been answering a lot of questions about yesterdays post and using the keyword tool. Here's how I would work it:

You need to be searching for the keywords that you dreamed up the other day. Search for them individually first, and then search for them in combination.


Say you were thinking of selling Blackboard Jewellery.
So you might put this in the search box:

Blackboard


Jewellery


Chalkboard


Jewelry


Blackboard Jewellery


Chalkboard Jewelry

Then you can compare these phrases easily.

Then you might search:

Geek


Nerd


School


Back To School


teacher gift

And compare results.

Then, you might pick the two 'best' terms from each list and see what they come up as.

Geek blackboard jewelry


teacher gift jewelry

Bear in might as you narrow the search in this way, you'll be seeing significantly less monthly searches. Don't worry - just try and get the highest you can.

I hope that helps!

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So, we are going to move away from this a bit now. Hopefully you have started thinking about including your keywords in all the valuable places in your shop. So Google search can now see your shop, your items, your description. But how can we move our results UP the search to those amazing first and second page slots?

The key to moving on upwards is backlinks from relevant sources. The more relevant the place featuring *your* shop link (and section links) the more theoretical 'points' you get. Google rates pages on their relevancy based on *their* metatags, content, frequency of updates and other complicated webpage stuff.

So, blogs are a great thing to get featured on in terms of SEO. I'm not going to preach for an hour about having a blog, but it is a great way of reaching customers, getting people interested in you and your shop, and you can link to your own shop as many times as you like. And it's all relevant! I try and link my shop in every post, in fact I've linked to it three times in this paragraph. Ha!

But just posting your link over and over again on your own blog isn't going to really make a huge difference unless you are getting linked from other relevant sources. So, I have a little challenge.

If you comment on this post, I will link your shop in my next post along with a picture of my favourite item from your shop. I'm relevant to your SEO because this is a craft/handmade/etsy finds blog.

Then, when the post is up, come back, have a look, and chose one of the shops to feature somewhere yourself. It could be on your blog, it could be on a forum, on Pintrest/weheartit/stumble/facebook or twitter.

This challenge is all about Karma. If you feature someone and tell them, they might link you back, or mention it somewhere. Backlinking is something that can only have a great effect if you return the favour whenever possible. Something I always do if I feature a shop, although I haven't done it in the last week (bad twinkly) is link to the shop directly from the username, the listing from the image, and the section from the description underneath. That way I'm giving my linkee three links for the price of one.

The great thing about being featured on blogs is that even as the post falls back into the archives as new posts go up, Google still counts the link. Websites might be updated and your link might fall by the wayside, but a blog link is for life!

I try to make a post featuring Etsy sellers at least once a week, and although it's taken a while, I believe I am reaping the rewards. Tomorrow I'll talk about how you can find out where you are being linked from (and don't forget to always thank someone who links you. Courtesy goes a long way to being remembered in the future and building friendships)

So:

• Comment with your shop link, even if I have featured you before. I'll create the post tonight and post it over night before the next stage of this SEO course goes up
• Come back to view the post, chose someone to feature somewhere else. Even a tiny link on twitter is worth it, especially if you can get it retweeted
• Thank anyone who links you

Something to note: the NOFOLLOW tag you might see if you are big into source codes is something that bulletin boards and forums use to prevent Google from finding links in forum signatures. That's because consistent links from the same URL will damage your PageRank. Google is very careful to avoid 'link farms' and spam. That's why finding relevant places to link from is important, and I believe it is something we can all help each other with.

Katie x