i have been a fan of etsy for a while, and my wife is even more of a fan. she buys all presents for friends, and we buy presents from there too, as you get a whole range of home made exciting stuff (e.g. i got some interesting prints for my birthday, handbags for friends and monogrammed pillow cases)

she has just open a shop selling african fabrics (go there and buy some nice african fabrics for christmas), and it was an interesting experience for me to help set up the store. its pretty painless to get it up and running, they have pre-ordained fields and images that you need to fill in in order to get up and running, all pretty standard stuff. the costs are reasonable too, $0.20 to list something and 3.5% of the sales price.

my google attuned brain came on overdrive when i thought of how best to optimise your page for the most traffic. i had a look online and there isnt anyone who gives an overview about which are the topics that get most searched for and the algorithm that gets used to get you best noticed. there are a couple of paid services which you can use to profile your shop or products but it would be great to find a way to push as much relevant traffic your way as possible. the one workaround is to list on a regular basis, so that your items are pushed to the top, but this isnt a sustainable solution. any ideas to use the semantic side of this?