In Blog 262 I Talked about making the product for your site. In this blog I am going to talk about the SEO learning curve.

To start off with I’m excited to share that Soleman™ is now being reviewed as a trademark for product as well. The Soleman name for writing this blog has been registered for a little while now but I submitted my application to add product as well. Look for new Soleman product soon! 

So, I made two sites so far, one for eBay which now will sell the samples I don’t use and any returns or other items I may have around that I want to sell. Etsy is now my main source of Ecommerce for the Print on Demand business I have had up since August 2022. I have now also linked my Etsy site on my Soleman Studios website with a few items to test the waters. Goal is to eventually add Woo Commerce to sell directly, instead of through the Etsy site. I will still grow my Etsy site as well, because I love the platform. I have featured my products on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram with Facebook having the most success so far. To be continued…

SEO Learning Curve

In my previous careers I had some exposure to SEO but am learning firsthand now how important it is. Search Engine Optimization is what it means. Which begs the question “How do you get people to your site?” There is an abundance of information on this, so I started with You Tube videos and other online tutorials. It’s basically tools or practices you use designed to improve the positioning of your site in organic search results. Organic search results are unpaid listings. Basically, you can’t pay to improve your organic results. This is why it’s important to attract people with high-quality marks that are relevant to what they are searching for. So, if you put marks for being a resource for Apple computers when you are just selling apples you will make a few people upset.

Keywords, Tags are a good start

Finding the right keywords and tags is a big part of this. You can use the Keywords in your headings and also tag them under tags and place them in the body of content. There comes a point though if you use too many it just doesn’t make sense to the customer so it’s a fine line there. Sites like Google use algorithms that are very complex to pull out what it believes is the most relevant results based on the query. It uses web crawlers and bots to gather all this information that it finds on the internet. The crazy thing about all this is it’s ever evolving so what may have worked last year…

A few curveballs…

Just when you think you have a grasp on it though a few curveballs come your way. The success rate is different for each platform. So, if you have an Etsy site your results may be different than if you used Google from a website like Soleman Studios, eBay would be different too. So, with that, there are many “sales people” selling their services to help you along the way. Many paid tutorials as well. There are so many companies out there that make their sole income on this.

Best to be organized

For my site I’ve written down keywords that can be used for say coffee mugs. Now there may be different ones you may want to use for different things. Let’s take a Poodle coffee mug. What words do you use for that? You must think what people might input to start with. Probably “Poodle coffee Mug” is a good start. I go on Etsy and pop in poodle coffee mug to see what the drop-down words are, I do that on Amazon too. This is what showed up on Amazon:

Poodle coffee mug

white poodle coffee mug

standard poodle coffee mug

toy poodle coffee mug

porcelain coffee mugs 

black poodle coffee mug

poodle coffee travel mug

red poodle coffee mug

black toy poodle coffee mug

black standard poodle coffee mug

If they are relevant to my product, I’ll use these or a variation of them. Usually, it only works as a tag if it’s less than 20 characters on most sites. I also use tags like “Gift for him” “Gift for her” because people may search for that. Poodle lover would be another good one. This is a good inexpensive way to do it. Then there is a site called “Marmalead.com” that ranks your keywords and even your listings to help you improve; money well spent for the app. I try to have a dozen good quality keywords for the tags, incorporated in the content and heading for best results. It’s tough though, takes a lot of work, patience, and practice. I have a word document that I have listed them out for different items that are generic then add the more specific ones to each product.

In Closing…

This is a work in progress, so there will be more blogs about this as I learn and educate myself along the way. Hopefully this gives a little more information on why the SEO Learning curve takes a little time to master. Stay tuned…

• I will be on vacation until Feb 7 and will resume the blog when I get back.