When did Google Last Crawl my Shop?

By crawl I mean when Google last visited your site to gather data. It is helpful to know this during seo changes because sometimes it can take a few weeks after your changes for Google to check out your site again.

Instructions:

1. Open up Google
   
2. Enter in your shops address in the search bar
   
3. Click "Google Search", your shop should return as one of the top results
4. Click the "Cached" text right below your description
   
5. At the very top of the page it should give you the last date that Google gathered data from your shop.

More of a visual learner? Check out this video!


Don't understand something I wrote about? Have a related question? Post a comment and I will be sure to answer it. Have an unrelated question? Submit it here and I will feature it on my blog!

xoxo
susan.

Some Notes about SEO and Meta Tags

If you have been around the Etsy forums recently you more than likely were bombarded with lots of posts, questions and complaints about the SEO related to Etsy. I am going to be doing a few articles about SEO over the next couple of weeks and this first post will serve as an introduction.

Question #1: What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a process used to improve the traffic to a website from search engines. For your Etsy shop it means improving the number of people that find your shop from a search engine.

Question #2: How do I set-up SEO for my Etsy shop?

There are so many different answers to this question and I will explaining a few of them over the next couple of weeks.

Question #3: What does meta mean?

Meta is a prefix used when a concept is an abstraction of another concept.

Question #4: What is metadata?

Data about other data. In the case of your Etsy shop this is data that describes your shop.

Question #5: What is the metadata of my Etsy shop? How do I change it?

To see your metadata please follow the instructions below:

1. Navigate to your shop
2. In your browser menu click "View"
3. Choose "Page Source"

A new window should open that shows you the html of your page. If you look at lines 5 and 6 you should see
< meta name="keywords" content= ...
< meta name="description" content= ...

If you look closely at this meta data you should see that the keywords are your shop sections and your description is your shop announcement. These are the two major sources of data that search engines will look at when deciding to return your shop in a search.

Only the first 150 characters of your shop announcement will be used for you description. This means that if you have a long announcement you should write the first 150 characters in a way that they stand on their own. Additionally your section names should be keywords that describe the products in your shop.


Don't understand something I wrote about? Have a related question? Post a comment and I will be sure to answer it. Have an unrelated question? Submit it here and I will feature it on my blog!

xoxo
susan.