Your handmade biz website, SEO & Social Media

Your handmade biz website, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Social media – how do they all tie together? Getting people to your website should be your #1 priority – right? To say that it’s all sort of confusing is an understatement – but let’s have a look, shall we?

As handmade an/or creative biz owners, most of us have a website

Our website is our internet based “business storefront” and that’s where we want people to visit – right?

We want people to find and visit our websites to:

• purchase our products
• get a free pattern that we released
• read an educational article that might help them in their business

Whatever our reason is – it’s our #1 desire to have them visit our business storefront.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key to being found in Search Engines

Search engine optimization, in it’s simplest definition, is to make your website more appealing to the search engines and drive targeted visitors to your site.

You do this by writing quality website content – patterns, articles, etc. Each piece of content should have focus keywords or phrases that you think or feel people would use in order to find the content that you are publishing.

Now, in addition to making your website appealing to Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., you also have to make your website appealing to your potential visitors.

Now, let’s talk about Social Media

Social Media is another way to spread the word about your website and get people to visit it. Or is it?

We’re all encouraged to share our website offerings on Social Media Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, even Twitter and LinkedIn. But does that really help?

If you use WordPress on you website, have you looked at your site stats? Where are your visitors coming from? This will give you an indication of which social media platforms have the greatest impact on your website visits.

I’ve been watching my stats closely the last couple of months and Pinterest is the leader in pushing traffic to my website.

That’s because many people are using Pinterest like a search engine and are saving things that they feel they are interested in for either immediate or future use, often times immediately going to your site to check out the offering. When someone saves something to their boards, their followers are notified and your item can be saved by others who may not have seen it to begin with. Pinterest saves are showing up in Google Searches as well.

Facebook and Instagram are really “social” social networks – meaning that they want you to stay on their platform and connect with your followers on their platform and stay on that platform. I think that’s the reasoning behind only being able to have 1 link to your site/offerings on Instagram without using an add-in.

So, in my opinion liking or commenting on a post or following someone on:

• Instagram has little to no impact on getting people to your website
• Facebook has little to no impact on getting people to your website – unless people are sharing your content (including links) to their following

Do you want to know what really works & ties your handmade business website, SEO & Social Media all together?

Instead of just sharing from within Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram – visit the website, leave a brief comment (you can include a link back to your own website) and then share from the website that you visited.

This is called a backlink – because you’re leave a comment AND a link back to your own website.

The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular you own website will become. One single blog post can result in hundreds of quality backlinks.

Search engines like Google evaluate the quantity, quality, and relevance of backlinks for a web page in order to estimate how important that page is.