Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means finding ways to improve your website design and content so that it appears closer to the top in search engine results pages (serps) This post is all about ways in which networking helps to build up your ranking and improves the chances of buyers seeing your items in a search. Planting  a few seeds can help get your shop found.

SEO and social networking are not just for big companies, the principles can be carried through to your Folksy shops too.  Anywhere you can produce content on the internet, shops, blogs, facebook, twitter and more, can all be tweaked by using carefully chosen keywords and links to enable your products to be found more easily by potential customers or the press.  The following are a list of useful blog posts to help you with your Folksy Shop SEO.

Improve your shop descriptions

SEO for images

Listing and time management

The best descriptions and labels for handmade listings

Titles and using keywords

Improve your shop profile/bio

Using google analytics to improve your shop

Growing your social media network

Twitter and facebook are currently the biggest social networking sites and a great place to start.  If you are new to the whole concept of networking/chatting to people you don’t personally know online, it can be a little difficult to find a way in.  Try starting out on our forums like Shop talk or Crafty Chittah Chattah, responding to a few posts and starting to steadily build up a mini network of familiar faces.  You will find many Folksy shopkeepers on twitter and facebook, most of whom are more than happy to help out their fellow crafters.

Planting Seeds and organic growth

Twitter users with thousands of followers and facebook pages with huge rafts of fans all had to start somewhere.    The ‘seeds’ of social networking are perhaps your family, your personal facebook friends and maybe the fellow shopkeepers you have met in the Folksy forums or other online friends from an existing network.  These people are the ones that with a little nudge will help launch your new blog, facebook or twitter pages.  Liking your status updates, posting comments to your blog and retweeting twitter posts to help kick start your social networking.   Keep a look out for relevant social media threads within the Folksy forums.

Each of the friends you make or ‘seeds’ has the potential to become a huge flowering plant happily helping you to promote your shop, but you do need to work on this by reciprocating with posting links on your various growing networks.  Try not to become a pest with your requests for comments, fans or retweets and only post in appropriate places when asking for help in building up numbers.

How does networking with crafters help get me sales?

Posting in the Folksy forums or any other craft forum or network wont neccessarily bring sales directly.  In one of our recent google analytics basics posts we used the analogy that “networking within your own community is not preaching to the choir, but asking them to deliver leaflets around the village”.  Networking with other crafters can lead to many excellent opportunities for your work to be shared and for the number of back links to your shop to increase. Each blog post your listing is featured in, facebook user that clicks like and twitter follower that rewteets you is a boost to direct views but also with your search engine ranking.  The relevance and traffic of the site that links to you is also important.

We’ll be back with more help – let us know any tips you have to help with networking.  Take a look through our ‘social media advice‘ category to find tips on starting up a facebook and twitter page.