Moving the Fan Page

I had to move my glass bead fan page and as I write this...I'm still shaking my head at my own stupidity.

It all started because the one of the colleges where I teach has a new admin. And this new admin insists we create flyers for our own classes (I feel the college graphics program should do this but it affects my income... so...). Since I can't / won't create a crappy looking flyer, I set about looking for high quality photos of my cookie bouquets. Realizing the best ones were in my book, and those photos were on a disk, I spent several hours trying to get both Windows 7 machines to view the disk. Finally, in desperation, I pulled out an old xp computer that I was getting ready to sell on Craigslist. It could view my disk but would only transfer the the myriad of photos one at a time. ARGH.... (It's times like these I swear I can feel myself dying!)

I picked my new favorite focal - Catfish -  for my avatar on the new fan page. 

So what does all this have to do with the fan page???  As I sat there slowly copying photo after photo (literally one every 5 - 15 minutes), I decided to kill a little time on the Windows 7 machine and google my keywords. I spent hours and hours (still transferring pictures) searching and searching and not finding my sites.

This ticked me off for several reasons: 1) I've spent a great deal of the last year studying SEO. (That's Search Engine Optimization) 2) I've attended meetings and seminars on improving SEO. 3) The last time I checked... my numbers were decent... but now they are not.

Basically only Chinese bead sources are coming up first on google... Which tells me someone is way ahead of us in cracking google's complicated ranking code. And terms that I know fellow lampworkers have tried to teach our customers (sra, self representing artist, American (or Canadian, Australian, German, etc) glass beads) don't even come up in the ranking as what people are searching for.

About the ONLY thing that does come up in the search is Facebook. And you know what??? I don't care how people find me... just FIND ME! You would think it would be easy enough to just add a few words to your fan page name... but anyone who partakes of Facebook know that Mr. Zuckerberg and his ilk don't cotton to easy. So... I had to walk away from a fan page with hundreds of fans in order to look at the bigger picture. I feel like I'm moving backwards but I know in the end...it will be much better for the future of my little glass bead business.

So if you fanned be before, won't you follow me to the new page???