Selling on the Web for YOU!

Or how I became a Search Engine Optimization 

(SEO) Specialist in three weeks

I belong to the EcoChic Team on Etsy (and EcoChicVintage.com), a great group of enthusiastic vintage jewelry sellers who really try to help each other. I am the team search engine optimization specialist.  (I rejected the title of Search Engine Optimization Expert.)

How did I acquire this title? For one, being the team SEO Specialist or SEO Expert sounds so much better than “Team Mascot” as I don’t sell jewelry except to help my wife with the technical aspects of her site, SoDear2MyHeart.com and help the team “get the word out”

Here’s a letter to the team at large and me in particular:

Here is my item: http://www.etsy.com/listing/69408266/singercraft-fagoter-with-foot

At the moment, I am #2 on the 2nd screen in Google search when I use the search strategy of “singercraft fagoter”. Using the same strategy on Yahoo search, I am #3 on the 1st page. The item was posted initially on March 5, 2011, and amended on May 4, 2011 (which, I thought, would bump it up a bit).” …

ONLY AS A TEST, I made a new listing for this item and kept the old just to see how long it takes for the new listing to show up in various places. The new listing is: http://www.etsy.com/listing/73506076/singercraft-fagoter-with-foot

If I change the search string to “singercraft fagoter revvie1″, I get…

on Yahoo search — 2 hits:

1. my listing for 69408266 on Etsy;

2. my listing for this item on Kaboodle.

on Google search — 7 hits:

1. my listing for 69408266 on Etsy BUT not the amended version from yesterday (I misspelled vintage so I know!)

2. my Singercraft guide [a rug making attachment] in which in the body of the description, I put a link to my fagoter

3. a posting on digitalouisville by sodear2myheart [God bless you!!!] regarding my buyer-pullout a couple of weeks ago

4. [this was slays me!] april1930s.com fagoter which doesn’t reference revvie1 AT ALL but is listed before….

5. my listing on Kaboodle

6. & does not reference me at all

I’m hoping that brilliant, tech savvy people in our group (DEN!!!) can help us piece together what is going on.

Sew-Sad (not her real name)

PS I really would like to sell this thing !!!

First I had to learn what a fagoter is.  But it didn’t really matter what it is.  The question wasn’t really about a fagoter; the question was about Search Engine Optomization.  I love it when I have the answer, especially when it’s something I learned recently.  Since I only recently became an SEO specialist, I was not only eager to share my findings with our team but I thought it would be helpful to share it here on my formerly neglected blog as well.

I have neglected the blog lately because I needed to brush up on my SEO skills for the group and myself. Little did I realize that in my quest to become an Search Engine Optimization Specialist, I would  have to completely re-learn almost everything I thought I knew about search engine optimization. Compelling?  I thought it was… Here’s my response with some additions and deletions for general consumption:

Dear Sew-Sad,

You’ve opened the floodgates.  Here’s the skinny on this particular keyword plus more than you ever wanted to know about keywords and search engine placement and, as an added bonus, my plan for world domination by EcoChicVintage.com!  Get a cup of coffee or tea… this is good stuff – if not a fun read.

The biggest problem with optimizing a page for this search term is that  “singercraft fagoter” only gets 28 searches a month on Google, world wide.  If you were ranked first, you can reasonably expect between 35-40% of the traffic will click on your link or about 11.  If you are less than first, you will get fewer clicks.

You can check the number of monthly searches by using the Google Adwords Tool.  Open a new window and key in “adwords.google.com” or just click on the link here.  From this page you can create an account, log into your account or just go to the “Get Keyword Ideas” link in the first paragraph below the happy shop owner.

When the tool comes up, key in your search phrase, enter the captcha words and get the info above.  It will also show you some other suggested phrases for your keyword or search phrase.

After you click Search, in fairly short order you get a screen that looks like the following.

You will notice that you can download the keywords as a .CSV file.  You can then feed this file to the Niche Profit Classroom MoneyWord Matrix Tool.

Here’s where the 21 days comes in.  Three weeks ago. I started using the “MoneyWord Matrix Tool” from Niche Profit Classroom for determining how good a keyword or key phrase this really is.

(NPC also talks about a 21 day process for moving your site UP in the search engines.  They explain it plainly and clearly in a way that anyone can understand AND IMPLEMENT.)

The MoneyWord Matrix Keyword Tool allows us to import the Google Adword Tool’s suggested list and then processes it to tell me overall, whether a keyword is Excellent to Jackpot (Dark Green), Good (Light Green), Fair (Yellow), Poor (Light Yellow) or “Don’t Waste Your Time” (Red).

According to the MoneyWord Matrix Keyword Tool, (see Figure 3, below) you are competing with 657 other pages that have this keyword which rates it “Fair” as in that isn’t too much competition for the word.

Notice our keywords are ranked from Green to Red with shades in between.  It also gives you competing pages, a ranking based on the competing pages, average Google PageRank of the top sites, PR Rating and the color rating based on the combination of CP Rating and Average PR Rating.  It also shows the TRT which is an estimate of how many hits you should have if you manage to capture the number 1 spot in the Organic Searches.

Google PageRank is a number from 0 to 9 which basically “ranks” how well your page matches a given search term.  (Interesting sidenote: “Page” in Google PageRank does not refer to your page but rather to Larry Page, one of the founders of Google but I digress.)  Building a page with a Google PageRank anything above a 3 is pretty difficult but not impossible.  Several of our members have done it and I know of one, at least, who has a at least a 4 (You GO Alicia).

It gives our keyword an overall ranking of “Yellow” or  “Fair”.  The problem is that if you optimize your page to get it ranked FIRST by Google, you could reasonably expect 11 visitors a month from Google.  That’s based on the generally accepted idea that the number one ranked page usually gets 35-40% of the search traffic to click through.

As you can see there is a button to download the file in a .csv format.  This thing is truly amazing.  I use the Google Adwords tool to get my original list of words, then use this to find the REALLY good ones, then take them and run them back through the adword tool to get more MoneyWords etc.  I have generated a list of over 7,000 keywords for vintage jewelry and I am still processing it.  I would guess that 3/4 of the list contains garbage words but even if only 10% of them are any good that’s 700 MoneyWords.

Of course there is more to it than just finding the right keywords.  How you use them is important as is having a number of links back to your site (all of which is explained in the Niche Profit Classroom).  Keep in mind that you don’t want to do that for your individual items but for your categories of items OR….. BETTER YET…. to send visitors to your EcoChicVintage.com page.

Here’s the thing.  If someone is chatting away on Twitter and sees one of your beautiful baubles, they go, “Ooh, that’s pretty.  Now what were we chatting about”?

But if they have gone to Google looking for a, oh I dunno, lets say a “Singercraft fagoter”, it’s probably because they want to BUY ONE. This is the most Search engine traffic is not only free but it is highly targeted.

Imagine if each of our shop pages on the EcoChicVintage site were optimized for our individual specialties.  We can and would get thousands of visitors. It’s the same reason, shops locate in a mall.  They know they will get overflow traffic from each other.  If someone came to the mall because of store A’s advertisement but store A’s product wasn’t exactly what they had in mind, they may buy it from store B or they may buy the product from store A and buy a complimentary product from store C.

Here’s a little more about this MoneyWord stuff.  I have been working with computers since the late ’60s (yeah, I really AM that old and yes, I was actually employed by a bank back then.)  I have been building web sites since 2002.  I have been relying on advertising, pay per click, social media such as Twitter etc. since then because getting ranked was just too darn hard to do and I never had the time to putz with it on somebody else’s nickel. I like Google Adwords… if you don’t have the time to do the research, they are the way to go.

When I got my first retirement check last month (sigh) I decided I had some time to research search engine placement.  I had already done a lot of research and found most of the people in the biz were just throwing stuff (for lack of a better term) against the wall to see what would stick.  That didn’t sound very efficient.

There are basically two theories:

1. People use really general keywords because the terms get SO many searches a month.  Surely, I will get some of those.  I don’t mean to offend those that use “vintage” or “antique” by itself as a keyword but would you actually use that as a search term if you were looking for an “Art Deco gold filled necklace”?  I wouldn’t.  You will be SO far down the list that you will never see any traffic from that term.  There are literally MILLIONS of people competing for those terms and the traffic they do generate isn’t very good because the searchers are looking for everything from antique cars to antique clocks to Sears & Roebuck catalogs.
2. The other option is to use keywords with really long tails such as “Antique watch fob made in Chicago during the 19th century”.  That narrows it down but it still doesn’t work so well because, like Revvie’s fagoter, there just aren’t that many people that narrow their search down that much either.

I used the second method for years with my Pay Per Click campaigns and was continually disappointed with the results.  I happened across this MoneyWord Matrix idea several months ago when I was looking for a way to improve my search engine standings and saved it for when I had the time and money to check it out.  The problem is that I have thrown so much good money at so many bad plans that my wife, Terri”s response is usually, “NOT AGAIN”!

Her cynicism has rubbed off on me so I do a background check on anything I buy online especially courses on how to make money.  I was very pleased to find out I couldn’t find a single person or comment that had anything bad to say about Niche Profit Classroom,  the folks behind the MoneyWord Matrix.  I had to do my due diligence before I could even spend the $1 they charge for a two week trial.  They are clean as a whistle.  I spent the buck and I have had my head buried in the courses ever since.

I have to add that most of the courses I ever bought dumped a bunch of reading off on you.  Most that have been around as long as Niche Profit Classroom have had several fits and starts with new ideas etc. and they can’t resist giving you the old stuff with the new stuff leaving you (me) more confused than before I had their material.

I am happy to say that Niche Profit Classroom does NOT do that!  They say “Start Here”.  Each lesson follows the next in a logical order.  I was able to “look over the shoulder” of the instructor as he did the market research (yeah REAL market research), found the keywords, and actually showed me how to build a website that has meaningful content that Google loves.  Keep in mind that Google is in the business of connecting searchers with meaningful content so they LOVE sites that provide it.

I had to throw out most of what I thought I knew about keywords and search engine placement and start over but it’s worth it.  Why?  Because I was wrong.  My approach wasn’t working because it was wrong… (I feel much better after saying that.) I must admit it is now easy.

For the first time ever, I have 4 new web site customers at once.

I’ve never had that before and I’m swamped – that’s why I want you to get this course and do the preliminary work for me… ok If you get the course you can do the work yourself!  That’s okay too because there are plenty of people who WON’T do this… notice I didn’t say CAN’T but WON’T.

I urge each of you that are interested in where your pages rank on Google and other search engines to spend ONE DOLLAR and TWO WEEKS learning all you can about how to really market on the world wide web.

You get full use of the MoneyWord Matrix Tool.  If nothing else you can run as many keywords as you want and save the spreadsheets.

Warning, you will NOT want to give it back.  It’s that GOOD!

But the main thing is the training.  It’s good.  It is very straightforward and it is ALL on video.  You will watch over their shoulders as they build a site from the ground up using WordPress.

The Niche Profit Classroom model is based on selling information in e-books but the same techniques apply to your jewelry or anything else you have to sell as well.  If even half of us do this, we will be the most educated team on Search Engine Optimization on Etsy. Guaranteed!

Here’s the link to the Niche Profit Classroom, the authors of The Moneyword Matrix concept:

http://webselling4u.com/NPC

Please let me know if you have any questions.  You can use my Contact Form.

Cheers!

Den

That’s pretty much what I told them.  Can you afford to spend years finding out what I learned in three weeks all to save a buck?   I couldn’t.  I’m a skeptic turned believer.

So, how did I come up with the title, “Engine Optimization Search Specialist”?  Google Adwords suggested it and the MoneyWord Matrix Tool told me only 2,300 sites are optimizing for it and the top sites only have a GooglePage Rank of 1.  It’s Dark Green with a Jackpot/Jackpot rating.  I found this page on page 5 of Google within hours of posting the blog, made a few tweaks and it seems to have gone to #1 since then.

Click Here to Discover How to Get Free Search Engine Traffic for Life,
and How to Convert that Traffic Into Dollars Using Autopilot Sales Machines

Who knew that setting up a web page could be such a task? I thought I had the three main components, a domain name, a hosting account and content. The “experts” all agree that when setting up a web page, good design is important but good content is essential. I thought I had good content but I had no idea…

What I found out was that the very act of setting up a web page (or in my case a blog) gave me more content than I could shake a stick at. I’m a programmer, I’ve been writing computer programs for over 40 years. I’ve known how to set up a web page, in fact how to design and implement whole e-commerce web sites for 15 years and yet, this blog thing felt strange to me. I had used Quick Blogcast from GoDaddy but when I took on a real job after being self-employed for the previous 25+ years, I didn’t want to spend my evenings in front of a computer so I gave it up.

Now I’m “semi-retired”, have the time and that desire older people get to “share” their experience so I decided to set up a blog again. I didn’t hear many people talking about Quick Blogcast and really didn’t want to pay another monthly fee so I set out to find a new platform. After some research and at the urging of a friend and client, I decided that WordPress was the way to go and since I already had a hosting account, opted for the self-hosted version.

After all these years, I was half way home to setting up my very own Web Page where I could, impart wisdom, rant, help people, bring attention to my wife’s vintage jewelry (www.SoDear2MyHeart.com), and maybe even sell a web site or two.

Or so I thought:

• My first obstacle was that I chose a theme that didn’t have some of the normal widget and menu stuff.
• My second obstacle was that I didn’t know how to do .php scripts and I am using Dreamweaver CS4, not the new Dreamweaver CS5 that helps you with those. (No you don’t need Dreamweaver to write a blog but I wanted to use it to help make the blog appear “seamless” with the rest of my site.)
• My third obstacle was that I went to a public library and got a (computer) virus which took me 24 hours to get over. After removing 1,700 infected files, I had to re-install Dreamweaver and several other programs.
• Next, I gave up on my nifty design that matched the rest of my web pages and went with “The Morning After” since it had a “newsy” look and feel and appeared to have more widgets, menus, and columns for widgets. I would deal with the huge difference in the appearance of the two designs later.
• Then (here’s the stupid part) I decided that I didn’t want my readers going to my web page and seeing that they were at www.webselling4u.com/wordpress but rather at blog.webselling4u.com. I had already set up blog.webselling4u.com as a subdomain. So I went to my WordPress options page and changed the domain names to blog.webselling4u.com… well not exactly… I change them to blog.websellign4u.com (notice the g and n are swapped). I’ve had this domain for years now… If I can’t spell it who can. At 3:00 this morning I gave up and called GoDaddy. They were GREAT and eventually found the misspelling. Turns out what I did would have worked with the new 3.1.1 version of WordPress if I had just known how to spell my own domain name.

So here I am. I’ve conquered setting up a web page. I have more content than I wanted. And, I have new challenges to come. Maybe I will get that Dreamweaver CS5 upgrade soon so I will have a clue what’s going on when I look at the .php code next.

As all views tend to be shaped by one’s perspective (If you don’t believe me, have you seen the movie, Vantage Point?), I should give some background before I actually get into what’s “I think” is up with Etsy.

My wife, Terri, has been selling  vintage and antique jewelry for years as SoDear2MyHeart on Etsy.  We moved from eBay to Etsy when eBay started tinkering with the rules in a manner that we felt was detrimental to the sellers.  She has been a member of various vintage jewelry selling teams and enjoys discussing the “ins and outs” of vintage jewelry with various team members.  Currently, she and I are members of the Ecochic Vintage Team on Etsy.  (I am an honorary member as I don’t sell jewelry but do try to assist the team with technical help when I can. Here’s my latest effort on their behalf: EcochicVintage.com)

Things seem to be changing very quickly at Etsy.  Forums, circles, social networking, privacy issues all seem to be overshadowing the business of buying and selling handmade and vintage items.  I like the Goodwill commercial where the narrator describes the process, “You look in your closet and say, ‘Oh my, a purple paisley shirt’”.  In their case the shirt is donated to Goodwill where it eventually winds up in a store where someone else says, “Oh my, a purple paisley shirt”.

Shouldn’t selling on Etsy be that easy?  Isn’t there enough to keep up with in our marketplace without our “shopping mall” removing all our signage and redirecting the traffic flow in the parking lot every week?  Many if not most Etsy sellers are not technically savvy but every last one of us knows how to read a profit and loss statement.  It doesn’t take a technical wizard to figure out that these changes have not been good for sales.

In my perfect world:

• eBay would be eBay and not Amazon or they would be replaced by someone who wants to be eBay
• Etsy would be the Etsy of yesteryear ago and not try to be Facebook
• eBay & Etsy would acknowledge that WE, the SELLERS are their customers because we pay the bills
• eBay & Etsy would acknowledge that the buyers are OUR customers and quit messing with them

Perhaps the management of both will read this blog and enact my suggestions.  I’ll let this sit for a few days to see what happens.  If not, I think we should talk about how to survive in the current environment.  I’ll share our plans next time.  Meanwhile I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Den

 

Back in July of ’09 Twitter had some problems and I wrote a post to address them. Since then I had dropped my blog and am just now starting up again. That was my most popular page but now most of the information is out of date or even unnecessary. That being the case, I thought I might offer a fresher, shorter version.

Here’s the problem: Once you have over 2,000 followers, Twitter starts watching your follower to followee ratio. They use a very simple rule – you can only follow 10% more people than are following you. For instance, this morning I had 24,668 followers. If I multiply that by 1.1 (or 110%) I get 27,134.8 which, of course we can round up to 27,135 since .8 followers gets kind of messy. I am actually following, 26,159 so I can follow another 976 people before I am blocked from following any more.

Here are a couple more examples:

• If I am following 1,000 people and 50 are following me – I can follow another 1,000 people. (Remember, you can follow up to 2,000 people before the rule kicks in.
• If 2,500 people are following me, I can follow 1.1 X 2,500 or 2,750 people before I am blocked from following any more.

So what if we want to follow more people but are close to or our limit? Should we just start unfollowing everyone? Great news, you don’t have to unfollow Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber or Britney Spears. I found this great FREE tool that will let you get your follower list in shape in no time flat!

JustUnfollow.com is a great tool that will look at the people you are following then see if they are following you back. If they’re not, it will list them but this is the best part and what sets this tool apart from some others – It will list them in order by who you have been following the longest. It not only presents you with a list of people that you are following that are not following you back from oldest forward but it also puts a handy “Unfollow” link beside each one of them.

What could be better? As they say on the info-commercials, “But wait, there’s more”! The premium version has a “Whitelist” button so you don’t lose the people you really want to follow anyway, like Ashton, Justin and Britney. You simply “whitelist” everyone you want to keep and they never show up with the “Unfollow” link beside them.

Additionally, the premium version will so let you unfollow more than 100 people a day.(yes the free version is limited to 100 per day) and it has an algorithm to allow you to not list those that it thinks will follow you soon. This is a very slick package and well worth the $4.95 per year upgrade price.

A couple of tips before you start deleting your followers:

• Don’t delete more than 400 per day. You will use up your APIs and the Twitter gods start looking at you funny.
• Don’t follow a bunch of people one day and delete all of them that don’t follow back the next – again the Twitter gods get angry.

If this has been helpful, please let me know. If not, I’d like to know that too. If it is inaccurate in ANY way, I NEED to know that so please write. You can write me via my contact form or leave a comment below.

Thanks!
Den

Thanks for visiting. I spent the better part of a day setting up my blog so I could share my 62 years of wisdom with the world. Turned out to be more of a job than I anticipated and I have spent the last 42 of those years as a professional data processor/computer operator/programmer/systems analyst/instructor/designer/web developer/IT manager/web marketer as well as some other non-related things.

As you can probably tell, I used WordPress and it’s great! I have absolutely no quarrel with it and I am learning as fast as my mind can race. The problem is that I now unlearn almost as fast as I learn but that’s ok, I figure this is always an open-book test.

The tricky part isn’t getting a blog up… the tricky part is getting it to look like the rest of your site or what we call seamless. So far my seam is still showing. I’m afraid I may have done it backwards – set the site up first and then tried to match the blog to it. I’m also thinking that perhaps I should have set the whole site up in WordPress. But I have all these cool things I learned with Dreamweaver. After all, I AM D Weaver… what else should I use?

This is not what I expected to be writing my first blog about. I do have a lot of good experience. I’m just gaining more experience at this particular moment than I expected to.

So, if you have suggestions, I’m all ears. If you wanna laugh… please do.. I am. If you’re in the same boat, let me know that too and maybe we can paddle out of here together.

Thanks again for showing up for opening night.

en