Taming The Ebay Search Engine. Get the Trellian Seo Toolkit
Get our FREE SEO Guide
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive useful SEO tips, tricks, strategies, free ebooks that are available only to our subscribers and get this amazing SEO guide for free!

Your email is safe and will NEVER be shared with any other parties. And of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.

Name:
Email:
SEO Elite - #1 SEO Software

Who Else Wants To Finally Get A #1 Google Ranking In As Little As 7 Days... And Drive A Minimum Of 789 Unique Visitors To Your Websites Per Day?

Search engine keyword position check PHP Script

This script checks the position of your website in search engines based on a list of your keywords. Supports Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines

Only $9.95
Coming soon ...


Self SEO Store  
SEO forum
Website templates
Flash templates
Best hosting reviews.
Free Internet & IT Magazines.
Articles archive

Submit your article

Register
Login

Search
XML news feeds
Free RSS news reader
Contact


AddThis Feed Button

Taming The Ebay Search Engine.

Posted by Kirsten Hawkins on: 2005-10-11 01:11:27

Self SEO > Ebay Tips and Tricks


If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay – and the more you know about how buyers find you, the easier you’ll find it to be found. Here are a few golden searching rules.



Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings – you might find a few items here that have slipped through the cracks.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe an item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to look at results in that category only. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Don’t be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes ("") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” –(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.

Don’t get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine, though: a surprising number of eBay users don’t search at all, preferring to look through eBay’s category system and save their favourites in their browser. The next email will show you how to make sure these people can find you too.

About The Author:
Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit http://www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.




Print this article    Tell a friend
Post New Comment

This site does not allow anonymous comments. Registered members can login to participate. Registration is free and takes only a few seconds