Cat from UK Handmade was kind enough to get in touch and say that the section about alt text from Our previous blog post could have been clearer. So I tried to clarify it to her and this is more or less what I said:

How you use the alt text depends on which site you’re updating. You don’t need to worry about the alt text if you’re uploading things to Etsy or Folksy, or if you’re selling with us at makers-online as these sites automatically set the alt text of any images to the title of the product, which is fine. However, if you were editing a Wordpress blog, like this one, you need set the alt text when you add the image – it’s the caption field and it has Also used as alternate text for the image underneath it. Similarly with other blogs, or if you’re running your own site, this will be under your control.

An example of where this would be relevant is if you had an image of one of your products, like Cat does on her blog or like I do here:

and you wanted to make the image also be a link, like this

then the alt text would really be important as search engines would use it to figure out what the page on the other end of the link was about.

In the example above I’ve set the alt text to Blue vintage, which is okay, but not great. People who search for the phrase Blue vintage might not actually be looking for brooches, so if I wanted to be clever I would change the alt text to be something more specific like Blue vintage ceramic brooch so that product page would stand a better chance of featuring in relevant searches.

Sadly there’s no easy answers with this sort of thing, these changes take weeks or months to have an effect, and the effect of just one link is small. But if you get into the habit, it can help you a lot.

Launching a website is difficult. Lauching a store on another website like Etsy is not quite the same, but still difficult. Even if you’ve done a lot of research, it’s likely that you won’t get everything right. In some cases screwing up early on can put you at a disadvantage for months to come, even if you correct the mistakes quickly. Getting traffic from search engines (this is more or less what SEO is) will probably be crucial to your store’s success, in the case of makers-online.co.uk it’s super crucial. So one month in, here are 10 lessons we’ve learnt.

1. Launch slowly

Don’t go for months with only one page visible and then overnight launch hundreds and hundreds of pages. Search engines are complex beasts and things which seem unusual can be flagged up by their indexing algorithm for real living Google employees to come and check. They’re fussy people and so you don’t want them poking around your site – if they see something which they think is spammy they might impose a penalty or ban you, especially if you’re a new site which doesn’t have any good inbound links (which show trust).

For example, it’s common for sites before they launch to have a holding page – ours had a logo and some text which more or less said ‘an online store launching late 2009′. Then when they launch they ditch the holding page and replace it with the finished site with loads of category pages, product pages and so on. It might be better to launch slowly, one category at a time so as not to get noticed.

2. Think about product titles

From a search engine point of view, it’s probably the most heavily weighted thing that you control. So ideally your product titles contain words that people might use in their search term when trying to find an item like the one you’re selling.

3. Make some friends

If you’re going to succeed you need some friends, you need to work with the community rather than compete against them. Visitors come to your site mainly from articles on other sites and from search engines, both of which require other sites to link to yours. No one will link to you if they don’t know you exist or if they don’t trust you. Find some people who are also starting out and say hello via Twitter, Facebook or one of the handmade communities. Start a blog and link to their sites from it. Share advice and work together. If you’re in the same industry as us, you’ll have to compete against the big high street stores and the big sites and you’ll need to work with those around you to stand a chance.

We’re on Twitter by the way, would be good to hear from you.

4. Alt text on all images

Alt text is what internet browsers will display if the , Internet Explorer displays it when you hover your mouse over the image. If you’re familar with HTML then it looks like this:

<img alt=”handmade daisy earrings” src=”daisy.gif” />

It’s good to have this anyway so if partially sighted people who use screen readers are visiting your store, then can still get an idea of what’s going on. Another set of visitors to your store who can’t see images very well are the search engine crawlers, they can’t make much sense of images yet and rely on the alt text to tell what it’s about. When we launched none of our product images had this and they do now. It’s a good idea to have them from the start.

5. Be careful where your early links come from

To make the search engines happy, you want links from relevant trusted places, blogs and articles related to your subject are ideal. You don’t want links from the comments sections of irrelevant articles or any other places which might look spammy. Early on we had links from some trusted web directories like Yahoo Directory and Best Of The Web, but also we had some links from some slightly dubious ones and none from relevant sources.

There are many sites which have have dodgy links and still do very well in the rankings, but it’s better not to risk it. If you’ve been going for a couple of years and then your store gets banned you can’t take those links away, so it’s pretty much game over. Be clean from the start.

6. Get unique text on each of your pages

As I said before, Google can’t interpret images, so you can have the prettiest pictures in the world and your users may love them, but it means nothing to Google. Each of your pages should have a healthy amount of text which is unique to that page. If the only thing that changes between your product pages are the images, titles and prices then they might risk being labeled as duplicate content and they wouldn’t feature at all in the search results. It’s hard to write 50 words about a product, but users like to read a little about what they’re buying and it’ll also make Google happy, so it’s worth the effort. Some of our products and categories lacked this text initially and some still do. Now we have a rule that all new products must have a decent description.

7. Grow slowly

As a general rule, the more pages you have on your site, the less important each one becomes. So if you’re struggling to get enough traffic from search engines for the ones you have, it’s probably not going to help to add lots more.

8. Experiment with paid adverts

Register with one of the paid ads providers like adwords and set up a couple of ads to your product pages. Don’t blow all your money straight away, set a £5 maximum daily spend and experiment. Depending on how much you are making per product and how competitive your industry is, paid ads might be profitable for you. For makers-online, we would mainly need to target jewellery related terms like earrings and brooches. These are very competitive as there are many stores on the internet who sell these items and many of them make tens or hundreds of pounds per item. For them paying 50p per click is no problem, but it’s not possible for us. Experimenting with paid ads gives you a feel for how competitive your field is and is worth doing early on.

9. Don’t be too clever, too soon

If you do a lot of research into the technical side of SEO you can hear about some complicated methods which can help you to rank higher. This has the potential to backfire if you get it wrong and with serious consequences. So it’s not wise to try complicated techniques out before you’re even up and running. Start slow, keep it simple.