Adding Popular Search Terms to Your Craftsu Profile to Get Google, Yahoo, Bing Traffic

A few days ago, I emailed the article below to everyone in the Artisans group. Posting it here too so new members can access. This is the first in a series of tutorials for how to get more traffic and buyers from search engines.

When you are filling in your profile here at Craftsu, I recommend including terms appropriate to your craft media that are popular among searchers.

Using popular keyword phrases on your profile can help your individual profile URL show up in the search engines. I ran some tests with different phrases and found that my test profile pages actually ranked higher than the Craftsu home page for the search terms I included in those profiles.

For example, your craft items are made by hand. Popular search phrases using 'handmade' include:

handmade jewelry
handmade gifts
handmade cards
handmade soap
handmade purses
handmade beaded bracelets
handmade quilts for sale
handmade moccasins
handmade beaded jewelry
handmade masquerade masks
handmade glass beads
handmade jewellery (yes people commonly misspell)
handmade candles
handmade leather bags
handmade quilts
handmade handbags

Including actual search terms doesn't guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. But if you don't include them, you can pretty much count on your pages not showing up at all for those terms.

There are free keyword research tools available, like the Adwords Keyword tool at Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal or Keyworddiscovery.com or the paid Wordtracker Keyword service I personally use and recommend, to help you research words and phrases being used in searches every day.

By the way, the term 'handmade' is searched for almost four times more often than the term 'hand made'. But you would want to include both because Google counts these as two different words.

Having said all of that, beware of trying to artificially boost your profile's ranking in the search engines for specific terms. Your content has to appear natural to the engines. In general, you will be safe using a term or phrase once for every 100 other words of content.

Action steps to take:

Research popular search terms related to your craft or related to gifts using the tools mentioned above.

Update your profile to include a mix of these terms so that your content appears natural to the reader and the search engines.

More ways to use this tip:

You can add 'comments' to your own photos using popular search terms.

You can link to your Craftsu profile page from other sites using your important search terms. Think of it like accumulating votes for those words. In the eyes of the search engines, the more votes you get, the more relevant your content is and the higher they rank you.

You can also write blog posts using your search terms. Blog posts become their own pages on Craftsu so your posts can potentially harvest search engine traffic for years.