Handmade Link

I’ve been dreaming of writing this post now for weeks and finally decided to get off my butt and write a bit LOL. Well do you link to your shop? That is really the only reason I’m writing this is to show the advantages of linking to your shop and products. Inbound links to your work give it more relevance with the search engines. That is the simple message in this post. Well you may ask how do I know this. Many of you own websites and are probably aware of this, for those who don’t , there is a wonderful tool called google webmasters. Google webmasters is a tool for site owners to give insight to how google sees your site and how your site is performing on the web.

So now to hopefully not embarrass one of our vendors. Teressa from Trusk4u is a perfect example as to why you should link to your shop from outside domains. Lets take a look at the result I received when I googled Handmade Artists Shop. Guess who’s shop popped up under the search results? That’s right Trusk4u! Why does google think this shop is so important to me. So I did a little investigating and found that when I logged out of google the results were different. So google wants me to see this because we have had many interactions with Teresa on other sites. But I knew there was more to this. So then I did a search on my google webmasters account for incoming links to the shop. Surprise, surprise, guess who was at the top? That’s right Trusk4u.  Now I know Teresa is a getting a whole bunch of mentions here, but it is a perfect example of why you should link to your shop from any where you can. She has even beat me as far as incoming links to her shop, granted we have concentrated more on the site as a whole than our own shop on it LOL. Anyway here is what I saw when I looked at the incoming links.

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Amazing don’t you think, and our very own Handmaden designs tops out the list! So where are all these links coming from. Of course I had to look deeper and guess what I found? Forums, blogs, social networks. So what I’m trying to say is, that the more you post on forums, blogs, and get involved with social networks the better your google rankings will be for your shop. There is one very important element here though, you need to put a link to your shop in your signature on whatever forums you participate in. We have a forum as most of you know The Handmade Artists Forum, and we have members there with hundreds of posts trying to promote their work and do not have a signature. I can’t believe it sometimes as I know how important this can be for getting your name out there. This is what I found when I looked deeper at Trusk4u.

So here is the proof, forum, blogger, other sites, individual dot com sites. So incoming links to your work is vital for getting your name out there and for branding your work. Hopefully Teresa will not yell at me for exposing her, but the example is perfect. Incoming links gives your shop more relevance in googles eyes and therefore will rate you higher in the search rankings for your shop.

I hope this article will help encourage you to take a look at the infrastructure that your building for your online presence. Go back and take a look at your blogs and forums you participate in and see if you have properly set up links to your shops no matter where you sell. You may be able to tweak a few things easily and jump up in the rankings.

Tags: buy handmade, Handmade, Handmade Artists, handmade marketing, Handmade Products, inbound links, market handmade, sell handmade

Posted in Handmade, Selling Tips