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How to get your eBay auctions listed with the major search engines like Google!

Posted September, 2003.

Many people are not aware that they can have people find their eBay auctions from general (off-eBay) Internet surfing. If you have your own web site, you're most likely familiar with the major search engines, and terms like SEO (search engine optimization), etc.

Search engines are in the business of providing information for those searching for it. Their job is to go out and "crawl" as many web sites on the Internet as they can find, analyze them by keywords, and produce an index that can be quickly accessed when a surfer is searching for a specific product or topic.

There are many techniques available to make your web site "friendly" to search engines, that subject is more than I'm able to talk about in this article. The point of SEO'ing is to make sure that the search engines know what your page is all about so that when someone is looking for your product or information, your page will be presented to them. Of course, there are often many thousands of competing sites attempting to be first on the list for the same search terms, so getting on the first page of results and staying there is an achievement that can make or break an Internet entrepreneur.

If you're an eBay veteran, you've performed searches on the auction site yourself, perhaps many times per day. Ebay sellers should know that the title of their auction should be set up to contain the keywords that someone will be searching for most often. Using garbage words like L@@K and rows of !!!!!!!! and other nonsense is a waste of valuable real estate (the 45-character auction title). A better technique would be to find another keyword to insert, or a common mispelling of your main keyword. But I digress, this article isn't really about searching on eBay, it's about searching on the Internet.

There are a handful of main search engines that handle most of the search requests. Even if you don't directly go to that engine's main page, many of the top ones make their service available to AOL, MSN, and other major portals. So getting your site indexed properly by the main engines is crucial. Forget the spammers that say they can submit your site to 10,000 search engines (for a small fee), all that will accomplish is to line the pockets of the people scaring you into believing that you don't have the time to submit to 10,000 yourself. The real truth is there are only a few to worry about, and we'll list them soon.

Now, let's suppose that you don't have or want a web site. Do you care? Well, yes, I think so, if you're a frequent eBay seller. Wouldn't it be nice if someone searching on Google or Altavista or AOL or MSN found your eBay auction? It's possible, and here's how.

First, set up an eBay store if you don't have one already. There is a monthly fee involved, but if you're really sincere about establishing an Internet business, and have a standard line of products for your target "niche", the $9.95 per month is less than the cost of setting up a web site and the monthly hosting fees normally associated.

In your eBay store, all your auctions are automatically listed and categorized (you do organize your eBay auctions by category, don't you?). Now, unlike a traditional web site, there is not a lot you can do with the SEO tricks, but you do have a store description (accessed by the store builder utility) that can contain up to 250 characters of descriptive information. You should make those 250 characters very keyword dense, in other words make sure you include all the major types of items you specialize in. For an example, look at the description on my eBay store:

http://www.stores.ebay.com/mdmsports

So how do you make sure the search engines find you? Well, actually the best way is to have them find you all on their own. If you have another web site currently in their index, just post a link on one of your pages, and the next time the friendly spider does its "crawl", it will find new pages (including your eBay store) that you've linked since the last crawl. Google especially likes finding it's own content, but if your page isn't linked from anywhere, the other choice is to submit your page to the major engines.

Here are the ones you should start with, and links to add your eBay store URL:

· Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

· MSN: http://free.submit-it.com/msnsubmit.htm

· Yahoo!: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

· All The Web: http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/submit_site.html

· AltaVista: http://addurl.altavista.com/

Obviously it's important to update your eBay store with a new description if you add or change your types of products, the quickest way to disappoint a prospective customer is to have them come to your store expecting to find beanie babies and seeing a store full of baseball cards, for example.

Good luck and I hope to see your page on my next Google search!

Dennis Becker, www.auction-tips-and-techniques.com