Tag Archive for: keywords

How to Legitimately “Keyword Stuff” eBay Listings

/by

Keyword StuffingLets be ultra clear here, I do not endorse this practice. It’s the reason why I am publishing this, so that its noticed and then action is taken upon this practice.

In the next few minutes I’ll be taking you through the practice of how to keyword stuff eBay listings in a manner that gives them extra weight to normal search.

Ground Work

Before we can start we need to understand how the eBay search works. A while back eBay introduced something called ‘Best Match’, while I’m not going to cover all the factors right now that i suspect are included, one of the biggest changes that best match allowed was the inclusion of factors outside of the listing title itself and time the listing had left to run. A obvious variant to the search is the eBay Top Rated Seller (TRS) status, this I used to suspect caused a +/-20% increase in sales, now seeing this move on three accounts, its more like a sales increase/decrease of at least 30%, this is how pivitol a single factor can be in the eBay “Best Match” search.

So, we now know that eBay search is based (by default) on a process called “Best Match” and like any algorithm it can be bent and its this bending and the manner in which it can be bent I’ve taken a dislike to.

The eBay Title

In days gone-by, it was only the title that impacted the search result, however with the new best match method of returning search results can be influenced and as suggested its not only the title that can effect the results. However in this instance I’m going to be looking at how the title and crucially the variations can influence the “Best Match” results.

The eBay Title

Up to 55 characters, it used to be less than this and the extra 10 chars were welcomed a few years back. These for most sellers are the main focus of keywords.

Item Specifics

When these were first introduced, it was said that these would not influence the search results, however they do, but not all the time. I not looked at this properly, but it appears there are mixed results on the use of item specifics in main search results.

Variation Detail

Now here is the jackpot. Its become clear, as I will prove in the examples to follow, that the labels for the variations do appear in the primary search result and these effectively extend your items by an extra 31 characters per variation value.

Lets spell this out in plain English:

If you use variations and add extra variations, the values you place in the variation field directly influence the eBay search results.

And then to top this off, again in plain English:

This does not stop at just a possible extra 31 characters extension to the title, you can do this numerous times, if you did it twice, you load your listings up with 62 extra characters

Now, can you understand why I disagree with this?

No Apologies

I’ve pondered whether I should use a live example or not and decided that I just cannot show the results properly without using a real life example.

I strongly disagree with this abuse of search and make no apologies for highlighting this seller specifically, because I feel is wrong, a blatant abuse of the best match and in direct  violation with the eBay Search and browse manipulation policy.

The Example

For this I’m going to be including a new format to the site, video. Now I do apologise in advance, this one of my first attempts and just like the rest of the blog, its a learning experience and you’re learning with me. SO any feedback you have, good or bad, please post in the comments box below.

The Title

From the video, you will see that this seller has in fact three titles, extending their title by up to an extra 62 characters.

Original Title: LADIES PINEAPPLE TOE POST FLAT FLIP FLOPS SHOES UK 3-8
Sub Title: Girls Ladies Womens Woman Bell
Sub Title: Wedge Sandals Comfort Leisure

The following keywords were not in the main title:

  • Girls
  • Sandals
  • Comfort
  • Leisure
  • Womens
  • Women

However as clearly shown in the video, these are in fact part of the search.

I Need Your Help!

This is where I need your assiatance to help me. As mentioned before, this whole blogging experience is new to me and the video format is also very new too and I’m out of practice from the video’s I’ve made in the past and the format is entirely different.

Could you read the questions below and post any feedback either directly as comments or directly via my contact page I’d really value any input you may have.

  • What did you think of the video?
  • Did you like the insert of myself in the bottom right?
  • Did you think I looked a “tool” with the big headset I use?
  • What could I do to improve?

Part 2: Using the Split Keyword to Break up Your Data

/by

eSellerPro LogoThis article is a continuation of a previous article called Part 1: Comma Separated Keyword/Tag Blocks in Your eBay Listings? if you’ve not read this article then nip back and read through it, as we’ll need to know the original steps to where we are now.

So we left off with me saying that we should not process further keywords unless we have qualified the custom field so that we actually have something worth continuing with. We did this by using this keyword setup:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]// do something }}

So if the value of ‘Other Colours’ is not blank we should ‘do something’; Well lets look at the ‘something’. This is where it really gets good:

{{Split/Value To Split/Spilt Character(s)/ __SplitValue__ }}

Scary? Na, lets pop some values in here and we’ll talk it back in plain English on what the ‘Split’ keyword is going to do for us:

{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colour}}/, / <b>__SplitValue__</b>}}

Keeping this simple, lets assume we have ‘Blue,Red’ in our custom field for ‘Other Colours’ and that you know that the <b> and </b> are HTML tags and make text bold. So here it is:

Foreach ‘Split’ of the value of ‘Other Colours’ we are going to make <b>__SplitValue__</b>

Easy eh? Lets no use this with the two values ‘Blue,Red’ in our custom field for ‘Other Colours’, it would make the following:

<b>Blue</b><b>Red</b>

Wow, are you getting the power of this keyword yet? I hope so, lets keep going and beef this out into something more usable. As the complexity of the keyword is going now grow rapidly, I’m going to be using syntax highlighting on the code so its easier for you to read:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]//

	

	{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}/, / 
		Find more items in __SplitValue__
		 , 
	}}.

}}

So this would make the following:

Find more items in Blue, Find more items in Red.

A quick note on the URL I used, I just simply went to eBay, picked the nearest store, in the search box on the left I entered ‘Blue’, but crucially ticked the box called ‘in titles & descriptions’ and chopped of the _SID=NNNNNN off the end, if you’re unsure, leave a comment on this post. I chose the ‘in titles & descriptions’ option, as I very much doubt any of you are spamming the titles with all the colour variations and for the super smart ones out there, instead of searching for just ‘Blue’, you would be prefixing these style colours with something like ‘sBlue’ so that the colour matching using this technique is absolute in its results (not clouded by junk results on ‘blue’).

Next Steps

Taking this further, lets assume you have made some colour swatches in images that are 50×50 pixels (we could do some further IF statements to use HTML colour codes, but thats way out for the purpose of example) and also you have entered your sizes into the ‘sizes’ custom field we first discussed, this could make something like:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]//

This item is available in other colours, pick you colour:

{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}/, / Find more items in the __SplitValue__ colour }}

	
}}
{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Sizes]]//

This item is available in other sizes, pick you size:

{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Sizes}}/, / Find more items in the __SplitValue__ size }}

	
}}

Summary

Thats quite a chunk of code to take in, but in simple terms for each colour it’ll bring in a swatch image of that colour and link it, then do similar task for image that are named ‘size-3.png’ etc… Neat eh?

Now some might say, ‘well eBay do variations now, I don’t need size or colours in the listing…’, thats right they do, but this example can easily be expanded upon for other values, like years of manufacturer if you’re selling roof racks, or perhaps this item is part of a range that is not being listed as multi level variations just single variations. You’re only limited here by your imagination the application of your data.

The point is with some thought and the right application of the tools & data at your disposal, you can actually have a targeted exit strategy to your eBay listings.

PS: For the XHTML junkies out there ‘border=”0″‘ is not valid, you’d want to use a CSS style or something :)

Part 1: Comma Separated Keyword/Tag Blocks in Your eBay Listings?

/by

eSellerPro LogoClearing out my old files earlier and I came across some old keywords I used on numerous occasions. Instead of  just detailing one, I’m actually going to join a few together here to make a example anyone using eSellerpro could use with a little thought.

Lets Make a Real-Life Example

Lets assume that you have two customfields the first with ‘Other Colours’ and another with ‘Sizes’, both in the custom fields group called ‘Variations’. These are two very common fields for anyone who deals with variation products, they could of course be ‘Languages’ for say DVD’s or ‘Years’ for of applicable models and so on…

So lets get right in and cover the first keyword, which is lets get value of the first field out so we can use it:

{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}

This keyword is in the format of ‘CustomFields:GroupName:FieldName‘. CustomFields calls the Custom Fields, GroupName is vitally important because it was found that the keyword only pulls in the values of the customfields from previous customfield calls, so if the value we were looking for was in a different group, then it would not be resolved; And finally the FieldName which is the internal name of the custom field (as opposed tot he display name which can be different).

So using the keyword ‘{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}‘ we can pull out the values in the ‘Other Colours’, for the sake of this example these other colours are ‘blue,green,red’. Noticing they are separated by commas, this is extremely important, as we’ll be using the ‘comma’ to spilt them up shortly.

Wait!! Lets Error Check

Now before we go any further, we need to error check ourselves. What do I mean by this? I do not think its a good idea to show or process any further code if there are not any ‘other colours’ to be showing to the viewer, we do this using another keyword.

There is two variations of this new keyword, IF and IFNOT. Both of these allow to check to see if a condition is true (there is another for IF/ELSE and IFNOT/ELSE but thats not required for this example, plus you could just alternate the IF/IFNOT to capture the alternative if its a 1:1 check, anyway back on topic…). These keywords are in the format of:

{{IF/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}}
{{IFNOT/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}}

Looks scary right? Naa its easy, lets do a real example. Lets pretend we have an colour blue in our custom field ‘Other Colours’ and IF we find blue, lets bring in an image that is the colour blue (for the smart ones, you can see where we could go with this):

{{IF/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]/Blue/ <img src=”some-blue-image.png” />}}

Now you’ll notice the use of [[  & ]]  and not {{ & }}, this is for a very good reason, image the custom field value contained ‘Blue/Red/Green’, this would break the earlier format of {{IF/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}} and a good practice is to always use the ‘square’ brackets and also do your best to avoid forward slashes ‘/’ in you data.

So if the value of the ‘Other Colours’ was ‘Blue’ then we would have had an blue image appear and if there was not, ‘nothing’ would have been output from this statement.

That brings us very nicely onto ‘nothing’, going back to previously mentioning its not a good idea to show or process code when there is no need, we need to check to make sure the ‘Other Colours’ actually has something in it, so we can continue, we do this by using this keyword set up:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]// do something }}

This says in plain English: IF the value of Other Colours is NOT blank (thats what the // is ) then do something.

End of Part 1

This feels a good place to stop, I’ll cover off the next stage of this little session in my next post. I hope I have at least got your creative juices flowing, I know what I’m thinking, perhaps we could have a set of colour images and those images being linked, so that customers could pick their alternative colours or sizes using a user friendly block to your eBay listings or may be a ‘year picker’. Hey the options are endless!

View part 2 here:  Using the Split Keyword to Break up Your Data

Google Does Not Use The Meta Keywords Tag

/by
Amazon Meta Keywords HTML Tag

Amazon Meta Keywords HTML Tag

Myth, hear-say or Truth?

Truth! Google does not use the meta Keywords tag. Contrary to popular belief usage of this tag for anything meaningful was lost years ago when it got spammed & stuffed by everyone and his dog.

Offsite ‘factors’ were not being taken into account and pages were judged by search engines only on their content. Seems crazy now looking back.

Here is a YouTube video from Matt Cutts, a personal idol of mine [for his relaxed presentation style and the way he conveys his personal interest in the subject matter] on this very topic:

Although other search engines out there (no there really are) which do take the meta keywords into consideration. If your website solution already makes these automatically from other data fields, great, if not, I’d not suggest you loose any sleep what-so-ever. Spend the time on writing better content, site promotion or sipping G & T’s as the sun sets (sunrises and G&T are just wrong).

That said, if I asked myself the question “do I use the meta keywords tag?” the answer would be…
Yes, the day Amazon stops using them, I will do too. No G&T’s for me :(