eBay Listing Optimization – 7 Tips to Make Your eBay Listing Better

When most people sit down to create an eBay listing, they think about how to describe their item, how to format the listing, how many pictures to add etc.

But one thing people rarely think about is how to create search engine-friendly listings!

However without proper SEO, your listing description doesn’t have a chance of getting found in Google. And with millions of people searching in Google for the products you sell, you want to make sure that people to find your eBay listings both on eBay and off!

Fortunately, creating an eBay listing that is also search-engine friendly needn’t be time intensive or require any special HTML coding.

You can do it by simply thinking differently about what you put on your listing description page!

Creating Search-Engine Friendly eBay Listings

Many people don’t realize that an eBay listing description is just a simple HTML web page hosted on eBay.

It’s no different from any other webpage. It’s open to the search engines to come and crawl it and index it.

But the search engines will only crawl and index your page if you set it up properly! All you need to do is follow these 7 quick tips!

- Think Keywords - Make this one shift, it will transform the way you do business online

Keep in mind that keywords are different from adjectives! Many eBay sellers use adjectives to describe their products: cute, pretty, fun, etc. in lieu of keywords.

People will search online for a “wrought iron 24″ window box”. They won’t search for a “Cute window box! You’ll love it!”

And while it’s fine to embelish your product descriptions with a few well-placed adjectives, using them in place of keywords will not give you any SEO benefits.

- Your Listing Title - Take your core keywords and create a listing title. Your title does not have to read like the cover of a book. It should only be a “string” of keywords placed in a sensical order.

- Create a 200 Word of Keyword Rich Description - When describing your item, you want to create a description of at least 200 words with keywords used naturally througout the description. Lead with a sentence that includes your most relevant keywords and continue with a description that surrounds the item with relevant keyword phrases.

- Don’t Keyword Spam Your Listings - When Google crawls a listing they are looking for “conversational content”. Naturally flowing content on a subject. So don’t just stuff keywords into your listing description page and call it good. Google will tell you otherwise by not indexing your page. And eBay will pull your listing.

- Make it Visible. The practice of using hidden text to bait the search engines is so 1990′s, you’d think that no one would even do this anymore. But just the other day, I was working with a client whose local SEO company had just put hidden text (text in the same color as their web page background) on their webpage.

- Bold the Headers. Did you notice in the description above that I bolded the words “Product Description” and “Product Features”. I did this both for aesthetic reasons and SEO purposes. The search engines pay special attention to words that are bolded.

- Use the Alt Tag Attribute on Your Images. If you host your own eBay photos, you can use the “Alt tag” feature on the photo to add relevant keywords “behind the scenes” of you photo. Alt tags are visible only to the search engines. Google will crawl you image looking for alt tags.