Get More Visitors To Your eBay Auctions!
(and turn them into buyers – all for FREE)

Part II

From: Andrew Minalto  eBay PowerSeller  Registered TWF Seller  CEO of SpicyAuctionTemplates.com  Contact Me | FAQ

Hello & Welcome to the Easy Auction Business video newsletter!

It’s all about SEO for eBay or to put it simply – how to get extra buyers to your eBay business via search engines, like Google. Last week I showed you how to do a proper keyword research. Now, if you have done your home work, you should have a list of at least 20 keywords that relates to the products you sell. It’s essential to do a proper keyword research before we move on as without keywords that are relevant to your target market you’d be wasting your time!

As discussed previously, there are two types of factors that play huge role in how your eBay shop and listings will rank in the Search Engines:

	On-Page Factors
	Off-Page Factors

Without further ado, let’s get started!

On-Page Factors

There are dozens of on-page factors you should pay close attention to, but to make the life easier for you, here are the 7 most important ones:

	Use keywords in Title tags – title is the line of text shown at the top of the browser when you open a web page. On eBay, title tag is set by eBay it self – it uses your item’s title, so make sure you include main keywords in your items title. Also, do not stuff it with keywords, like this – first off, it just looks ugly and most likely people won’t click on your listing when doing a search on eBay. Secondly – Google will penalize your listings for keyword stuffing as by doing this, you clearly try to manipulate search engine results. When writing item’s title always keep in mind that it will be seen by real humans – your customers! Sure, keywords are important for eBay’s Best Match algorithm and Google BUT Google won’t buy from you anything! The real people will instead. Your item’s title will also appear in Google’s search results – so it has to be good! It has to give some kind of offer, ask for action – the click in the first place! So spend some time on writing quality titles – so that they’re eBay & Google friendly and in same time – action grabbers! It will pay off tenfold in long term.
	Include keywords in listing’s description – early & often! Search engines place more importance on keywords found early in the content of a web page. So make sure you have your main keyword appear several times in the first paragraph. Ideally, your first word in item’s description is your main keyword. But again I must warn you - do not over do this! The item’s description should look natural, easy to read and make overall sense. Remember, your potential customers will read it! Also, don’t worry about the keyword density – just use them naturally within all text and you’ll do just fine.
	Use text links to other pages – this simply means that all your pages on eBay should be linked together. How to do this? By simply inserting text link to your eBay Shop & About Me page in every listing. Besides, from the “About Me” page you can link to your website – this way all your web properties are linked together and it will be much easier for search engines to crawl your pages. Do not use only graphic images! Sure, you want to use Shop Promo banners in your listing as they work better as action callers, but if you do – please also add text links in the footer of your template – this way you can get both: o Functionality from banners o SEO from text links
	Use keywords in anchor text of your links – this is very important stuff and you should pay close attention to it. What is “anchor text”? Anchor text is simply the words you use in the link itself - so for example, in link Bosh DIY tools there are several keywords: o Bosh DIY tools; o Bosh DIY; o Bosh tools; o DIY tools. Hope you get the idea! You want your main keywords (the list you made of at least 20, most targeted keywords) to appear in links to your About Me page, categories, eBay Shop, Website, your eBay blog and other web properties you own.
	Don’t overdo with Flash! Flash can be used to create some effects or to make navigation bar to look more attractive or functional but please do not over use it! Search engines will have really hard time to crawl listings built entirely in flash!
	Optimal length item descriptions – this is really a simple one. As much as you hate writing, you have to do it. You want your auction listing descriptions to be at least 400 words long. I know, I know – for some of you it can be a really painful process but trust me – the efforts you’ll put into writing a description for item you sell on eBay, will pay you back tenfold in long term. If you’re really lazy or just a bad writer, why not outsource it to a writer? Check out Elance.com and post your project there! You can get 400 to 500 word long articles written for as little as 3 quid! I personally use this option very often. Keep in mind – you can’t just copy description text from other websites and copy into your auctions: • First off – it’s illegal! • It will be duplicate content – hence, your chances of getting good search engine results are pretty slim. What you can do though is – gather information about the products you sell from other websites and just re-write it with your own words. This way your hands are clean and you have unique, fresh content for Google.
	Add new content to your eBay account on a daily basis! Search engines just love fresh, regular content. The more often you’ll give it to them, the more traffic you’ll get – period! The easiest way to publish content on eBay is to use eBay Blogs & Reviews options.

Ok, that’s it! 7 on-page factors you can start with right now – just go out there and implement this stuff! Sure, this is a very simplified version on how on-page factors can help you get higher position in search engine results. However, we’re not trying to be some SEO geeks – and this information is just enough to successfully rank your eBay listings in Search engines.

Off-Page Factors

While on-page factors were very important a few years ago, situation has changed dramatically. While you still need to get the on-page factors right, these days off-page factors also play a very important role in Search engine rankings!

So what we’re talking about here? To put it simply – it’s all about links!

Years ago, SEO game was much easier – all we had to do to get that number one spot in the search results was to test & optimize on-page factors, such as title, keywords, ALT tags, text etc. On top of that – competition was a fraction of what it is today. Then Google entered the world and changed EVERYTHING!

You know why Google has become so popular and is dominating the market today? Because Google has always strived to give the most accurate search results! Without going into details, one of the most important elements Google count to give a page ranking is – How many other websites are linking to your website. As simple as that! The more “quality” links you have, the higher are your chances to appear on that first page in Google’s search results under your desired keywords.

And there are only 2 important things to keep in mind when we talk about links pointed to your web pages (eBay Shop, About Me page, Product Category Pages, eBay Blog pages & Review pages):

	Number of links & quality of those links. The number of links pointing to your page. The number of links to websites that link to you. The quality of all those links. So basically – the more high quality links you have, the better.
	Link (Anchor) text – again, to simplify things here, the more relevant keywords you have in the links pointing to your eBay pages, the better for you. So if you sell “Bosh DIY Tools”, you want them to appear in the anchor text of the incoming links.

So where to get those incoming links? The easiest way to achieve this is to publish outstanding content so that other webmasters, bloggers, vloggers and other content creators start naturally mentioning you and publish articles, blog posts, and videos with links back to your web pages.

However, in real life it’s not that simple – you’ll find that not many people will want to write about you... BUT there are ways you can fix it! You can simply publish and distribute content with quality back-links to your web pages by yourself! Here are few ideas on how to do this:

• Ezinearticles.com – it’s the world’s largest article directory. You can become an author there by just signing up for a free account and start publishing articles about almost any topic you can imagine! You’ll find several articles written by me there as well. In the resource box you can include links back to your eBay Shop, About Me page, website or any other web page. Don’t forget to use keywords in link anchor text.

• YouTube.com – yes, you can use YouTube and other video sharing sites to promote your business and create quality back links at same time.

• Blogger.com – why not create quality blog around niche you’re working in on the Blogger.com platform? Again, use your keywords in back links.

• Squidoo.com – yet another place to publish your content absolutely for free and get high quality back links.

• HubPages.com – works similarly to Squidoo.com.

The easy part of this SEO strategy is that you don’t have to publish totally unique content on each of these websites – you can just write an article, then re-write it 4 times and publish on those websites. This way you get unique & fresh content in Google’s eyes without having to think about 5 different topics to write on.

Also – link those resource sites together in the same way as you linked your eBay listings with Shop, About Me page and other pages. So for example, when publishing an article on Ezine Articles, add a back link to your Squidoo account or specific lens. The same applies the your other websites.

WARNING!!! Do not spam! I won’t go in details here on that, just don’t spam in any way with articles, links, keywords and anchor text. Make it look natural, change anchor text from post to post and change linking structure. Believe me, Google is much smarter than you or me – they’ll spot any spamming activities and they can penalize you! You don’t want that!

These are just 5 quick examples to help you get started, but there are hundreds of other places where you can publish content and earn quality back links. There are also other ways to create back links, like posting in related forums (use your signature line for text link back to your eBay Shop), participate in discussion groups, commenting in other people’s blogs etc.

But the main idea remains the same:

“Get as many links as possible from many different high quality sites linking to all pages within your eBay account, and using the keywords you target as anchor text”.

You can write this down and hang on the wall :-)

Putting it all together

If this is the first time for you to hear about SEO – your head probably is spinning now @ 10 000 rpm. I can understand that – SEO is a science rather than art so it can take some time while you get to grips with it. BUT, no one is waiting for you to become the next SEO guru! Not at all! All we need here is some action from your side. If you spend just a few hours on getting your on-page factors right and building some quality back links, you’ll already be ahead of your competitors as 99.99% eBayers don’t do anything SEO related!

So let’s recap on what we have learned so far:

1. Keyword research – start your SEO plan by conducting proper keyword research. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find at least 20 keywords related to products you sell. If you don’t know how to do it, please watch our previous video newsletter.

2. On-page factors – just spend a few hours on optimizing your eBay listings, About me page & Custom Shop Pages. Open eBay blog and start publishing daily blog posts related to products you sell. Write a couple of Reviews.

3. Off-page factors – Open accounts at the 5 online services I mentioned earlier – EzineArticles.com, YouTube.com, Blogger.com, Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com. Publish at least 1 article (or video) on each of these sites every week.

This looks like a pretty good start, don’t you think? It will take you a couple of hours each week and if you have picked up good keywords with small competition (as shown in previous video newsletter) you should see results within 2-6 weeks. You’ll see the first signs of results by checking your Traffic Reports under “Marketing Tools” in your eBay Shop.

Ok, that’s it for today! Hope you now have a better understanding on how SEO for eBay works and will start implementing some ideas shown in these 2 newsletters straight away!

Next time I’ll show you how to make most money out of Christmas shoppers by using clever up-sell techniques! Thanks for watching and see you next week! Have a profitable auction!

Until Next Time,

Have a Question? Click Here!

About the Author Andrew Minalto is founder and CEO of the Web's largest auction templates company SpicyAuctionTemplates.com. Andrew runs successful information publishing business as well as an eBay store and an online retail store. At the age of just 23 he has achieved a phenomenal success in selling both physical and information products online. Hard work and belief in his dreams enabled him to leave a dusty Dublin warehouse in winter 2006 to go full-time online. The recently launched EasyAuctionBusiness.com website is dedicated for all people trying to achieve financial freedom or just to make some extra money by selling on eBay.co.uk

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