Hi Everyone,

My husband has worked so hard on my website! www.gentlespiritcreations.com. Please check it out and let me know if you experience any difficulties. Also, how can I get more traffic to my site? Mostly, it is just previous customers or robots. Let me know what you think of our site! Thanks. 

Hi Janine,

Your question is one that probably everyone in this entire forum has had several times. I will try to briefly touch on the major ways that people increase their sites visibility including ourselves.

There are 2 ways to obtain traffic to your site via the web.

1.The easiest way, but generally costly is to buy traffic from either Google or Yahoo’s advertising programs. You’ll generally pay anywhere from $0.10-$0.75 a visitor to your site. This can take some time to set-up and get your ad slogans figured out and will take refining over several months to figure out what words work best and deliver the best conversions for you. What is nice about these programs is that you can determine how much money you’d like to spend each month and you never have to deal with sales people calling trying to get you to spend more money on your advertising, you are in complete control of your ads, budget, etc, etc…

2. The next way is to get your website ranked in the search engines naturally, this can be very time consuming but in the end is the most beneficial as you won’t need to pay for traffic. There are many ways of getting this done and is commonly referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Most importantly you want other people to link to your website with the keywords that you think are most relevant to your site this is how search engines determine relevancy for your site and give it a ranking. There are many other factors involved in good SEO which if you do some research on the web you can get started in the right direction.
I hope this helps a little in getting you moving in the right direction, I can tell you from personal experience it’s a long uphill road that is time consuming and generally expensive but if you are persistent and don’t give up you will eventually achieve positive results that will result in more sells of your work. Let me know if you’d like any additional information or clarification and I’ll do my best to respond.

Hello Gentle Spirit,

                     Mason cover most points, but I would add that knowing exactly how people arrived at your site will help you access which actions are productive and which are not. Google analitics service is a great way to get all the information you need.

You should also note that changes to Rank are not real time.  I am not sure currently how often a sites rank is recalculate, but I believe it's months rather than weeks or days. You can check your sites current rank here.

 

 

Hi,

We actually had an article in Art Jewelry recently called "Lure More Hits." Check it out here: http://www.artjewelrymag.com/art/Default.aspx?c=a&id=799 

You have a lovely site, You need some publicity and time will take care of it.

Maria

I experience a huge blurry graffic when I go into your site. It has happened before when you first posted. I thought it was just me, but I have no problems with other sites. Then if I sit on your site for a couple of minutes, it goes to a normail logo graffic. If this happens to some people, they will not wait around for it to fix itself, they will leave. My question would be, why have a full website, when you have an esty account and are selling on it? I am getting ready to create a one page website for a fellow Jewelry artist who sells on esty. Her site never got any sales on it but it is on all of her marketing materials. So we plan to put her most precious pieces on the site and direct people to her esty page to purchase. Jenny

One way to get a quality link is to get listed in specialty indexes that apply to you.  One for art jewelry is JewelryArtistDirect.com

I'm not familiar enough with Etsy to be able to give any pros/cons between Etsy and an independent website.  I've got an independent website and it has always done more in sales than it costs to maintain - unless of course you count the time to take pics, which applies in either case :).  Last year it did 60% of my sales.  It is not a faucet - you don't turn on the tap and things start flowing - but over time, it builds up.  If you haven't done so, read "SEO for Dummies" and apply the logic to each of your pages.  Each page needs to be "optimized" - not just the home page.

 

BTW - I also saw the big blurry graphic!

 

One thing I do is have my links in all my outgoing emails. That way if they get forwarded on, then many more people see them.

 Also, hand out business cards whenever possible.

 

Just some suggestions.

Hi - There is some good general advice on this page. I can tell you there are certain things that will affect where your site shows up in Google for a relevant search. First, it takes time. Google won't list a site anywhere near the top unless it is online for over a year. Page count is important ... the more pages the better. Don't duplicate content ... keep the text and meta tags for each page in the site unique. Next, remember - search engines do not see images - only text. They need at least 3 - 400 words of relevant text to index your page. This text should be keyword rich without being spammy - repeat your keywords once for every 100 words or so. EVERY WORD in your keywords meta tag MUST appear in visible text on the page. Use your keywords in your navigation links as text instead of fancy buttons. And try not to sell ads on your page ...

 OK, I am not promoting here, just want to illustrate that I know what I'm talking about. Search on Google for silver chain, Bali silver jewelry, handcrafted silver jewelry, silver barrette ... I could go on but I am modest ... you'll find my site right away.

NOW, there are other factors. Incoming links, the age of your site, Alexa traffic rank and a lot more. But the basic guidelines above will help you a lot.  

Hi Gentle Spirit,

 First, your site looks nice, most of it loads up reasonably quickly. I also experienced the big fuzzy graphic on your home page as your main photo tries to load. It isn't loading properly, and needs to be changed somehow.

My son is a high school senior with a good deal of programming behind him, and he's begun working on my site, which will (hopefully) soon load quickly with proper thumbnails, as well as climb the ranks as he begins to optimize the site. SEO is definitely the topic for you to research. He has me searching the web for jewelry directories, such as the one mentioned by gypse in her reply to you. Submit your link to every one of these sites that you can find. The more of these links you have, the higher your site will climb in the ranks. When I asked him for advice for you, he stressed that SEO for Dummies is a good simple resource for helping to optimize your pages. He agrees with the suggestions by jewelry24seven as well, and passes along the following info:

"The MOST IMPORTANT thing you need to do when optimizing your site is to select a distinct group of keywords you want to own [aka: be top for in google]. For jewelery sites like my mom's, words such as Handmade, handcrafted, silver jewelry, art jewelry, etc are common. You need to choose words that best reflect your products and your site's overall theme.

Once you have your core of words selected, you need to implement them into the design of your page wherever possible. This includes using the words in your <title> tag, and putting them inside <h> and <b> tags throughout the page (Search engines deem words inside emphasis tags such as these to be a good reference to the site's content, so they will rank your site higher for these words). It is also important to put these words as high up in the page's layout as you can.

Just as important are external links leading into your site. You want as many links to your site as possible, as each one counts as a "vote" for your site in the search engine's eyes. These votes are even more potent when they come from pages related to your site, and when the text between the link's <a> tags containsyour site's keywords.

 Here are the main problems I noticed about your site:

• You rely too much on images in your site's overall design, which search engines cannot read. You must either replace these images with text, or add more text that can supplement the images for the search engines.
• Your site lacks an overall "theme" of keywords. You are not optimizing for any specific group of keywords, so the search engine doesn't rank you higher than those who have done so.
• You need more links to your site. Look for directories to add yourself to, put your link in your signature, and ask other related sites to link to you. Whenever possible, include keywords in your link text. (My mom says she is willing to do a reciprocal link trade with you on her site, www.silvervinejewelry.com)

I hope these tips helped you, and if you have any questiopns about how to implement them I'd be happy to help!"

 

Gentle Spirit,

I am enrolled in a program called the THIRTY DAY CHALLENGE and it is all about setting up a site and driving traffic to it for free. 

The link is  http://www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com/challenge/25193

I would highly suggest it to you.  I also have a website with an included book on setting up your website for a successful jewelry business www.kameronkay.com

Good luck to you :-)

Kameron Kay 

Hi there!

i saw your site and maybe you should join more networking site like flickr or myspace etc it could bring more traffic to your site :)

 

wish you the best!

 

Lissa