Thanks Marjet for the free online course my girl friend Janneke Smeulders won at the Bites & Business event a few weeks back! I knew most of the basics, but am happy to feel that now I know it all! Plus I learned some interesting new facts too.

My main wonder is how far away do you go from what you think your website really is all about when choosing your keywords? In FairMail's case I would say we are all about "fair trade photo greeting cards" so those keywords make most sense in explaining who we are and what people can expect on our site. But checking the adwords Keyword planner plus our google analytics shows that no one is (hardly) every typing in these keywords in their search engine. So that makes them quite useless to generate traffic.

According to the keyword planner I would be better off using high traffic, low competition keywords like "photo christmas cards", "fair trade products", "is fair trade fair" and "fair trade stories" but that doesn't feel right. People looking for discussion on if fair trade is fair won't find a balanced story about this subject on our website. And of course we have loads of fair trade stories, but our sight would become very weird if I added those words in the headings, as bullit points etc. And of course we have photo christmas cards which we want to sell and I try to use those keywords in the blogs about these images, but Christmas is only one month per year and I can't change the keywords with every season can I? I did change one of our headings and anchor links from FairMail cards & products into fair trade cards & products based on the keyword planner, so I hope that will help.

My 2 unsolved mysteries are:

1) How come hardly any images from our site show up on google if you search on images of fair trade greeting cards, even though we are ranked in fourth position and I am consiously using image alt tags for all the images I am uploading onto our blog for a few months now.

2) And even bigger mystery, why is our biggest competitor "cards from africa" getting higher ranks? When I look at their site I hardely see any SEO, but apparantly they are winning :-)

Thanks for any feedback you wish to provide.

Greetings from Peru, Peter

Peter Hond

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