How to SEO Your eBay Auctions

When it comes to building a website, people spend hours doing keyword research, SEO, and optimization to make sure their website ranks well. Selling on eBay should be no exception. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely under used tool in the auction community.

All too often, sellers expect that their auctions will just "show up." And the do, but that's all they do. In order to really get first-rate traffic to your eBay auctions you need SEO. eBay provides various outlets that many sellers don't take advantage of. Sure, you might have an "About Me" page, but is it really helping your auctions SEO?

Most of the basic SEO rules still apply within eBay. For now, we will cover the basics of good SEO for your online auctions.

eBay SEO - Listings

As an eBay seller, I'm sure you are already aware of how important your auction's listing title and description is. If not, you might want to do a little more research before you continue to sell on eBay!

Some sellers have their auction titles down to a science and achieve great SEO without even knowing it. In order to create a good SEO auction title, you will follow many of the basic SEO principles. These basic SEO principles are:

Repeat your keyword and/or phrase at least twice, if possible. If you cant repeat your keywords twice, try to include around three keywords in the title. Keywords are important in an auction title because the more keywords you have near the top of your page the better.

Don't try to jam pack your auctions title with word spam or nonsense, just to try and grab a buyers attention. Buyers are not impressed by this lack of marketing. They won't think twice about not looking at your auction.

It is important to remember to repeat your keyword in your auction description as well. This is a must for good SEO practice. The eBay search engines checks auction descriptions when looking for search results. Not to mention, buyers can chose to search auction descriptions.

Search engines start reading pages from the top, so it is important to have as many keywords and phrases as you can near the top of the page. When writing your auction description, try to use your keywords and phrase as much as possible. You don't want to over do it though. This may annoy your potential buyer, not to mention search engines aren't much found of keyword spam either. So, use your keywords as much as you can in moderation. This is a sure fire way to boost your SEO in eBay.

Another good SEO tip to make your keywords stand out to search engines is a very simple one. Make your keywords larger and bolder where appropriate. This will help catch the search engines "eye."

eBay SEO - About Me

In the last few years eBay sellers have started to notice the importance of and "About Me" page. No longer is it simply a spot to post family pictures and endless ramblings. Now it is used as a portal to teach customers more about your business and yourself as a business person.

The basic SEO rules still apply here as well. You want use your keywords and phrases as much as possible, but within reason. You should still bold and increase fonts on keywords when fitting. One of the new SEO tools here are "Alt" tags.

Alt tags are lines of HTML code that are associated with images. Usually your image host, like Photobucket, will take this over with their own text. You however, can change this text and add in keywords to the images title and description. The great thing about Alt tags is that they are code, which means, as a web viewer, you won't see them. Consider Alt tags as camouflaged SEO. They are there helping, you just can't see them.

eBay SEO - Reviews & Guides

Reviews and guides are both, a great marketing tool, and a great SEO tool.

They work well as a marketing tool because, if written well, buyers will start to see you as an expert in your field, thus, making you a more desired seller to buy from.

From an SEO stand point they work well because you can of course add your keywords. Adding key words to guides help your auctions due to the fact that if your keywords match your auction and your guides, they will come up on the same page of search results. If people click on your guide and then in turn notice you as a seller, well it goes back to the marketing importance of guides.

The real SEO power of guides and reviews comes from their links. Your guide will show you as the author and people will click on your seller id to find your store, this isn't enough. You want to add a few links back to your eBay store in your reviews. Why? Search engines base stores popularity on the amount of links going to it. So the more links you have going to your eBay store, the more popular your pages look to search engines.