You’ve probably seen eBay listings show up when searching for something on Google, Yahoo! or some other search engine. The following image shows a Yahoo! search wherein the top listing is for an eBay auction:

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wonder if I can get my eBay listings to appear on the search engines?”

The answer is a resounding YES! You just need to understand how search engines work. This will give you an idea of why a search engine might rank an eBay listing in their search results.

Understanding how Search Engines Rank Webpages

Google, Yahoo! and most other search engines place a lot of weight (importance) on inbound links to a webpage. In other words, the more inbound links a webpage has to it, the more important a search engine considers that page to be. The words that are used as part of a link add even more weight as the most important keywords for that webpage.

The search engine then looks for those same keywords in the body of the webpage. If it finds them, it adds even more weight. If the keywords it finds in the webpage body happen to be headlines, bolded, italicized, or are part of a bulleted list, then again even more weight is added on.

There’s a lot more to search engines than that, but it’s enough to get us started for our needs.

Optimizing Your Listing for Search Engine Ranking

From the previous section, we now understand that we want to create keyword rich links to our eBay listing. The easiest way to do this is through the use of your eBay listing’s title. The words you use in your title will become the most important keywords search engines pick up on.

Remember the Yahoo! search results page from the above image? Notice that it is ranked #1 for the same words that are used in the auction’s title:

This image shows the Pottery & Glass category listings on eBay. The words in the title link directly to the listing’s auction page. The words in the title (which are linked to the listing’s auction page) were picked up by Yahoo! as being important keywords for the page it links to (again, the listing’s auction page).

Seems pretty easy, right? Well, that’s only the easy part. Let’s get into the knitty gritty of what this seller did that resulted in his auction being picked up by Yahoo!

Most auction listings don’t get picked up by the search engines because auction sites are very dynamic. In other words, your listing moves around a lot as new auctions are listed and old auctions end. Since your category link never stays in the same location for long, the search engines don’t bother picking it up because they know it’s just going to move eventually.

Furthermore, when you first list an auction, it is buried on the very last page of results. Many search engines only look a few links deep when crawling a site. This means your category listing won’t even get looked at by a search engine until it’s on the last day or two of its life, in which case it won’t be around long enough for the search engines to bother with it.

So the trick is to get your category listing to stick around long enough – on a page the search engines will see – for a search engine to pick it up. This means getting and staying on the first couple pages of category listings.

There are only a couple ways to do this. First is to list in a category with very few listings. Being that eBay has several hundreds of millions of listings at any given time, that’s not a likely scenario. The second (and more reasonable) option is to purchase the Featured Plus! listing upgrade.

The Featured Plus! listing upgrade costs $19.95 and places your listing at the top of the category listings for the entirety of its life, however long that may be. You can improve the odds of it being picked up by search engines, as well as maximize the benefits of being listed by a search engine, by also purchasing the 10-day auction extension (giving it an extra three days over the normal maximum listing time of seven days).

To further improve the importance of the keywords you used in your auction title, use these same words in your item description. Make sure there is a good density of these words, using them in headlines when possible. Bold the appropriate keywords when not being used in a headline.

Italicizing keywords helps as well, though not as much as bolding them. Using keywords in bulleted lists will help as well.

Choosing the bold listing upgrade may help, as should using a subtitle with similar wording to the title.

You can give your eBay listing a further boost by placing an ad for it on the prominent online classifieds site Craig’s List. Be sure to link to your auction, using appropriate keywords (preferably your auction title) in your Craig’s List posting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 8:48 pm and is filed under eBay Marketing, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.