As we grow our SEO online presence we have learned a few things and we thought we would share some of the lessons and tools we have found.

1. Google dictates the way
   As the worlds number 1 search engine google is the gateway to being found on the internet. As you build your web presence remember Google’s mission statement ‘…organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful’
   So when building your SEO strategy it’s important to keep to Google’s mission statement.
   This was challenging for us as we wanted to create beautiful products and turn our passion into a business. SEO with Google is about unique content that isn’t replicated which is hard to reconcile for a small start-up group of artisans. Many products are made from the same materials and when writing product descriptions it is easier to replicate and have a uniform description of materials which Google’s panda and penguin algorithms penalize.
2. Building high quality back-links is important
   Back-links have to be authoritative and related to the content on your website. Having many back-links that are unrelated or not authoritative is penalized by Google. This has brought many challenges for us as a small start-up.We are competing against market places like ETSY, ARTFIRE, EBAY, etc. The have multiple user driven content and links continually growing.
   While you are small there is no real incentive for more established online business’ with authoritative content to link to the smaller start-ups as we are competition.
   Making unique products also makes it hard to find relevant link building partners.We have decided to incorporate link building into content generation. We initially spent a lot of time on trying to build back-links but without content for Google, that becomes a redundant pursuit. So back-link building is limited to ten percent of our time allocated to content generation for our SEO.
3. Finding SEO tools and using them to understand and access your websiteSome tools we found and use
   • Alexa
     Is an amazon search engine. This helps get your content indexed faster
   • Google+
     Setting up a business page with Google is a no brainier as its part of their own network and connecting your content can only be a good thing.
   • SimilarSiteSearch
     This is a useful tool in identifying sites that are like yours, looking at their links and their popularity
   • Moz Bar
     This is a plugin that allows you to see the domain authority and page popularity of websites right from your browser
   • Majestic
     An excellent reporting tool for back-links, domain authority, trust flow and more. Really helps with SEO
   • PingoMatic
     This a good tool if your website has a blog. It submits your blog to several services.

The challenges of SEO are ongoing as the internet continues to evolve but it is a journey that we are learning a lot from and we will continue to share what we learn on our journey.