Has anyone seen anything helpful anywhere regarding SEO on Makerplace? Short titles, long, tag best practices, etc.?
I’m adding my listings - doing a sort of hybrid of Etsy & Amazon for titles. Repeating in tags, which isn’t what Etsy wants, but I figure maybe MP does.
This snippet was in the Saturday email:
Shoppers looking for deals search “Sales” or “Sale”, and you can tap into that traffic by deploying these search terms on your product page. You DON’T want to add these terms to your product titles, however, as this will automatically
keep them from being featured in our marketing.
So it seems to imply you can show up for words in your tags that are not in your title?
I have not tested much seo since it seems to take 24 hours for listings to appear in search or updates to them. So I have no idea if you can search by tags only? I think I vaguely remember doing some testing but I can’t remember what the results were it was months go 
if I remember right my items that had sales didn’t seem to rank higher…but things may have changed since then.
I wonder how many of us are likely to be choosen to be featured in their marketing, even if we follow the rules/guidelines.
I did a test to see what happens if someone looking for sales on MP by enter the word “Sales” in MP search bar, and all the items that has the word “Sale” in the title showed up in search result, including many of @ModernSwitch’s items.
I don’t use the keyword “sales” so I think it does sale/sales interchangeability?
I did search for gift/gifts and one of the top rankers uses it like 6 times in the title. Who knows how many times they used it in tags. 
On Etsy if I search gift or gifts I get a wild amount of different results. If I search gift or gifts on makerplace it’s pretty dang similar. So while plurals of words are treated differently on Etsy it looks like they could be treated the same here??? Or maybe there just isn’t enough sales history of items to make a difference between the two search terms.
I don’t really know if they are ranking high because of sales? It’s really hard to tell who has had sales and not if no one leaves feedback.
I am thinking also it prioritizes the words closer to the front.
For example I’m not ranking very well at all for “light switch cover” even though it’s in my tags and titles. I tend to put it in the back of my titles.
I’m seeing all the results on first few pages with light switch cover upfront and titles are very short.
Now if I search for something like “boho nursery decor” I appear right at the front…thats something that is at the front of my titles.
I’m just not sure how longer vs shorter titles work.
My items don’t show up in a search for my shop name, so I added my shop name to several of my listings’ tags. That was weeks ago and still nothing shows up in search. I emailed support weeks ago about it and have heard nothing. Maybe my shop is just broken.
Have you gotten any emails from support? I know for awhile my email address was bugged and either I wasn’t getting support emails from support or they were not receiving my emails about it. They were able to fix it, are you in the Facebook group? You might ask in there if you think your emails are broken.
Buggy platform for sure.
I believe some Makers saw success with adding holiday/seasonal tags and search terms.
Some info here:
Otherwise, I haven’t seen any official guidance or policies or best practices, unfortunately. I suspect Michaels is still working that out for themselves–you are the guinea pigs! So with that thought, I would recommend following general ecomm SEO recommendations for now.
Some recent resources (not endorsements):
I’m pretty sure having sales of an item, doesn’t make it higher in ranking. My 2 items that had sale, never showed higher than my other non sale items.
To tell the truth, I really don’t think there is a “sale rank” as far as in relationship for the item to be displayed in the beginning of the keyword search result or search by “Catagory”.
Recently I have one item that didn’t have any sale but showing up in the first pages when I look by catagory for Dangle Earrings. There are 4642 results, and I have no idea why it showed up within the top 20. On the other hand, showing up on the first page didn’t result in any sales of it either.
It’s a mystery that I’m not going to devote to much time to understanding, mostly because I don’t want to do all my listings on what I might think only to have them change their minds later.
Mostly just looking at “Nursery Decor” and “Home Decor”…
It seems like either repeating the word lots of times in a long title, or it’s just a super short title (maybe its some sort of percentage of that keyword vs all the total words in a title???). Neither of which to me seem beneficial 
It makes no sense and I can’t see building a functional website selling products if you are promoting things that are not selling or might not ever sell. So I am going to assume eventually they will change how search results are?
If they didn’t want to do it by sales rank, then they should just do it by recently listed. It blows my mind that some of my uglist products rank high for nursery decor, and yet my popular nursery decor items that have sold don’t rank high at all LOL.
Anyone have any added insight, now that we’re two more months out?
Search is just like kind of weird. Sometimes you can search for something, and it will give you results and then you refresh and the amount of results will jump much higher.
In my keywords for search stats I often have duplicated keywords with different amounts next to them.
It doesn’t seem to factor in sales history. I’ve had a few sales and they don’t rank higher.
I am on the professional plan, also doesn’t seem to make a difference.
I haven’t a clue. I just throw stuff in there and cross my fingers!
That seems to be the case.
When I do keyword search, my items that never sold shows up before my things that had recent sales, and when I search by category, I can never tell why some of my things are showing up earlier than the other, and not always or ever were the things that had sales.
Maybe there isn’t a sales rank for SEO.
Definitely not. One of my items has over 50 sales and when doing a general search of the main keywords, a similar item with no sales comes up ahead.
Search is just broken. I’ve added my business name to a lot of my item’s tags and when a search for my name is done, not a single item shows up. Based on amazon searches, I know that people search for my stuff by name so maybe I should add that to the titles. Doing a search for random shop’s names, it seems clear to me that some shops get indexed and others don’t. For instance “courage and calling” results in zero items from that shop, but “sea stamped” shows all of that shop’s listings.
If you do a search for “st patricks day earrings” you get different results than for “St. Patrick’s Day earrings” and “St Patrick’s day earrings.”
I do have my shop name at the end of the title and when searching with that, it does come up with all and only my listings.
Good to know. I have my name in the tags, maybe I need to add to titles. Hmm.
I wonder how long changes get updated (for search). I added my name to a dozen or so titles several hours ago and it still doesn’t show up in search.