creative grease: stains on the driveway of hot glue media

SEO for Crafters and Magazine Layout

The new issue of Copper Wire Jewelers Magazine is out, with tons of great articles and featured pieces, including one by yours truly covering the basics of search engine optimization for artists and crafters. These are basic, non-technical tips that are useful whether you’re using a market like etsy, have your own website, or perhaps a Wicked Plum shop. :) We were also proud sponsors of this issue, and are happy to have provided a revamped look and feel for the magazine.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

We all know those moments—those “I’ll just list it now and beef up the description later” moments when we put other things ahead of our items. I’m oh-so-guilty of listing “blue crystal earrings” with nary a word regarding the kind of crystal, the shade of blue, the metal the earwires are made of, or even the length of the earrings themselves.

In cases like this, how is a searcher supposed to find our items? They know what they want—maybe it’s cornflower blue vintage crystal earrings on gunmetal hoops—but even if my item is in fact cornflower blue vintage crystal earrings on gunmetal hoops, the search engines, and therefore the shopper, will never know, because I got lazy and just typed “blue crystal earrings”.

When you write, the best thing you can do is write with your customers in mind. They will benefit from, and appreciate, well-written, detailed descriptions, and are more likely to buy when they are certain what it is that they are buying. Don’t make a potential buyer wonder what shade of blue those earrings are. The information that makes your customers happy will make the search engines happy too.

The magazine can be viewed in full by clicking on the embed below, or you can download the PDF, which contains clickable links to all the featured artists’ sites and stores. To learn more about the magazine and the community behind it, visit the Copper Wire Jewelers group on Ning.

dani made this mess on April 20th, 2010