As a person who performs most of the SEO work for my business, I’ve become very knowledgeable since 1998, when I began marketing my handmade sterling silver hair accessories online. I have a lot of online jeweler friends, and a surprising number of them are just starting business websites. A lot of them offer their jewelry for sale on the Etsy site; but are eager to develop their own web stores. This week, a couple of them asked me to give them some tips, and I’m going to share those tips with you now.
I find it very interesting that both of them made coincidental, very common errors; even more interesting is one of the sites was built by a paid website maker or creator. Designers are artists at heart, and appearance is the most significant thing to a designer. Unfortunately, the person that created the website simply never considered search engines at all while constructing her website, and doesn’t want to make the modifications I recommended my friend ask for.
At first look, the website is clean, has simple navigation and is simply gorgeous. The home page has plenty of white space, a prominent photograph of a bracelet designed by the site owner and only five links to inside web pages along with a copyright announcement. Unfortunately that simply isn’t enough.
On the surface, the primary problem is there is no text. Not even one word. Even the copyright statement is a graphic image. The links are also images. This makes clear the web designer has no idea how search works at all; SE robots comprehend text, and can’t see graphics.
Under the hood, there isn’t anything that will assist SE spiders either. Only a title … and a writer’s tag. After all, that is expected, but there are no Meta description or keyword Meta tags. In addition the title Meta Tag isn’t good enough for SE marketing uses.
The second site was designed by my acquaintance’s husband; believe it or not he really did a better job than the paid web designer did. Unfortunately, he made similar errors, beginning with the page title. This is what’s wrong …
They both used the business name as the site title. I understand that this is a natural way to do this; but in most cases it is a huge mistake. This is how I explained it to them:
If your business is past the start-up phase and an industry leader like David Yurman, you can name a website in that manner due to the fact that people already know these brand names and they will go to their favorite search engine to look for their favorite jewelry by searching for your business name. Unfortunately, we are unknown, and no one is going uses to search for our sites that way. No one is going online to find my business by entering Jewelry24Seven into a search engine; and if they do they’ll come across it even if it isn’t in the site’s title. Of course, people WILL search for what I offer for sale. This is the way I wrote our title.
The page title of my site is: Handmade Silver Jewelry – Silver Chains and Handcrafted Bali Jewelry. It isn’t Jewelry24Seven. I have fairly decent rankings for these search terms; of course, they are extremely competitive search keywords. A huge reason my site can be found is the title.
The owner made site has a pretty good description; my colleague’s husband handled that well. The pro designer’s main page had no Meta description at all. My colleague asked the professional designer about a description Meta tag the answer was … sure, I’ll put it in if you want me to. The tag should contain as high a number of your relevant search terms as possible. I disagree … sort of, anyway. The description tag is NOT a good place to put a list of search phrases. It should be a real description of your items and services and what your site is about. Of course, this tag has to focus on your most important target search terms; however, they need to be structured as a description. It isn’t an alternative keywords tag simply separated by commas. The description should be understandable. This is ours:
“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.”
It has been separated out into phrases and used punctuation to give it some basic structure. Yes, it is fundamentally composed of keywords, but isn’t a straightforward list. If it is read, you understand what our site is about. You’ll see that our primary and most important search phrases have been included in both the page title and description Meta tag.
My friend had a real problem with the web designer over the keywords Meta tag. The site designer asked my friend to write a list of relevant words which included words with spelling errors like jewery. IMO, this is truly bad advice for two reasons … first because it makes the site owner look uneducated and unprofessional. More important, it wastes resources in the keyword Meta tag.
Very few pages can be thoroughly optimized for over 2 or 3 search terms. The first few should be the most important. I think listing over_in excess of 15 or so won’t help, and after that it sort of lessens the importance of the relevant terms. The keywords tag also requires a balancing act in some ways; every word you mention in the keywords tag has to be included on the web page in the body text. This can be tricky, especially with purposely words containing spelling mistakes due to the fact that it looks like the website is riddled with typographical errors. Lets take a look at my website’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”
Our site has fourteen keywords included in the tag list shown above. They are all included in the site’s body section. The significant keywords are included before any of the others. The keywords are included in the body text several times; and appear in several ways. Heading 1 text, category or text, bold text and hyperlinks written in text all play a part in the way my main page is written.
My friend’s web designer put up the biggest fight over the site’s body text. She refuses to believe it is needed. My colleague may not be able to get her to follow her instructions; she feels the site is finished and I do see how it spoils the visual impact. But with no text, the site will not be included in search engine listings; the result is very few people will ever see it. This is why you need to be discriminating when paying somebody to work for you.
Of course I understand and agree that Flash looks fabulous and it does have its place; so do graphic images and Javascript. However, if you need a site that is easy to find in the search results, a static HTML page is the way to go. Make good use of the Meta tags by including your primary search phrases in the 3 major tags – title, description and keywords. Don’t forget to include each word you put in the keywords tag in your body text. Describe your graphics with “image alt” tags. Include text hyperlinks to the inside pages of your site, not graphic or Javascript buttons. And write between 600 and 900 words in the body section in easy to see text that intelligibly describes the services you offer and products you sell on the site.
Work on getting as many sites as you can to link to your site by using formatted text links that use anchor text with the same key phrases and search terms you’ve included in the tags. There is no other way to bring your site organic traffic on search engines; it is a lot of work; however this seriously is the one way to reach a massive number of people without investing a a huge amount of money for online ads!
Bob Edwards is a jewelry designer and goldsmith in NYC with more than 30 years experience in the jewelry trade. He is the webmaster of a popular retail website specializing in handmade 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 author’s statement are included, Copyright 2010 Robert Edwards.