Oh for the love of SEO, Google is King

I'm a lover of sharing information, particularly information that helps fellow crafters who are trying to survive in a world dominated by corporations. This post is no different, I want to tell you the latest thing I've discovered about SEO (search engine optimization).

So, you have your product, and your lovely photos and your lovely website, but sales are minimal if even any at all. So you start to look into ways to get yourself noticed. There are many different ways including paying for advertising. But, give that we're small businesses we can rarely afford to pay £100's for advertising. So, where to start?

I'm going to let you in on the research I've done this week. Google is one of, if not THE biggest search engine going. More organic searches come from Google than any other search engine, I know I for one use it for 100% of my searches it's even built into my browser.

There are a number of different things that you can do to increase your Page Rank (what Google uses to determine where you come in the search results).

1. Create a Google+ account - this is easy and if you have gmail you're already part-way there.
2. Create a Google+ page for your website - make sure you create as a local page, as Google will give you more weighting for local searches.
3. Link your website to Google+ - medium difficulty, you need to have admin details for webmaster tools (NB. if you use create.net then you can indeed access this)
4. Add the Google+ badge to your site so people can directly add you to their circles.
5. Build meaningful circles - invite your friends, people in the same industry, all those lovely crafters you've met. However, don't just add people for the sake of it. Social engineering is all about meaningful relationships, one person that interacts with your 10 times a week is better than 10 who interact with you once a month.
6. Connect your blogger to Google+ - this helps you engage more of your readers.
7. Interact - Google+ has communities that should be relevant with your industry, join in with the discussions and look for local communities also.
8. Get your website verified by Google - you can only do this once you've built a meaningful circle, but it's meant to vastly improve your search rating

This is just a drop in the ocean for how to improve your SEO, but if you start here then you're onto a winner already. Then you can look at things like Google Keyword Tool for writing descriptions and meta information. Oh and don't forget commenting on  blogs and the many other things we're supposed to do too.