Saturday, February 23, 2008

How to get more people to find your eBay Auction

When doing a search on Google for an item, it is quite common to get eBay auctions to pop up in your search results. If you want to get your eBay Auction found on Google or other search engines, I recommend that you follow some of eBay's search term guidelines.

Use Keywords - Pick three to five keywords that relate closely to your item. Ask yourself what words people are likely to use in a search engine when looking for what you're selling. Once you have these keywords, use them appropriately in your listing title and item description.

Take Care with Titles - Your listing title is a key factor in natural search. Include the most important keywords or keyword phrases in your listing title.

Get the Most Out of Your Item Description - Your item's description is the most valuable tool for creating search engine-friendly listings. While your primary goal is to describe the item you are selling to your eBay audience, here are several ways to use your description to its fullest:

  • Create Good Content: Describe your item the best you can and in as much detail as possible You should include approximately 200 words of visible text in your description, with the most important keyword phrases comprising 5 to 7% of the total. (In 200 words of text, you'll want to use your keywords 10 to 14 times.) Note that search engines only read a certain amount of information per page, so overdoing your description with non-relevant information isn't a good strategy.
  • Avoid Keyword Spamming: Do not overuse keywords in an item description as it can reduce the effectiveness of content. Moreover, keyword spamming is a violation of eBay policy as well as an irritation to prospective buyers.
  • Avoid Hidden Text: Do not add invisible copy; search engines will not read it.
  • Vary Font Strength: Use bold headers and use a font size of 12 or 14 maximum.
  • Include Links: Add links to other products, to your eBay Store, and so on. The words that are linked should be relevant to the destination. For example, "Visit my Store" or "See other items" are more effective than "Click here."
  • Use Image Alt Tags: These are keywords associated with the images you use in your listing. If you do your own HTML, be sure to include alt tags. This provides yet another opportunity to optimize keywords or keyword phrases that both describe the image and are consistent with your content.
Source: Search Optimization

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I sell odds and ends part time. I want to start selling, on average, 1 full page at auction (25 items) per week. Would you recommend getting a custom template and/or spending the money to hire one of the auction management companies?

Thank you.
Faye

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the great post.

Just a thought- free Mpire or Terapeak ebay research tools can help to discover what the best keyword combination to use is. They look at past sales and give an overview of what worked for each product - for the US market only though.

Anonymous said...

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