Use variations of search terms

February 22, 2008

When you create a store page you will want to enter as many possible spellings for that page’s item as you can think of. This is important because you want to show as many results as you can get from eBay for every item you promote.

As you enter words and terms into the search box think of abbreviations, misspellings, and more.

For example, let’s say you are creating a page for sand dollars. Here are some possible variations that you can enter into the search box:

• sand dol*
• sanddol*
• sandol*
• sand-dol*
• sand-$
• sand $
• sand$

You may wonder why I entered dol* instead of dollar*. People have a tendency to misspell words and this includes eBay sellers. I can easily see a seller spelling dollar as dolar, doller, and so on. By adding the * after dol you will catch variations on the word dollar.

You would enter the above list as (sand dol*,sanddol*,sandol*,sand-dol*,sand-$,sand $,sand$) in your search box.

I strongly suggest you check each and every page as you create them. There are several reasons for this, including:

• You may have put the page in the wrong category. If you can’t find it where you are looking then go back and check where you put it.
• You may not have given your page URL a name. If you can’t find it anywhere go back and where what you named it.
• You may have included a character in the page’s URL that you shouldn’t have, or included a space between letters. If the URL includes strange characters or is missing entirely, then go back and check these things.
• You may have auction results you don’t want. If so go back and use negative keywords to remove what you don’t want.

You can add negative keywords to remove the given terms by adding a - (negative) sign before any terms.

Let’s say the sand dollar page you created shows sand dollars from the sea but also albums from a rock group called ‘Sand Dollar’ and you don’t want these. Then you would add the following to your search area: -(rock,album,cd, dvd,artist,group) and so on until all the terms you don’t want are gone.

So, your search box will now look like:
(sand dol*,sanddol*,sandol*,sand-dol*,sand-$,sand $,sand$) -(rock,album,cd, dvd,artist,group)

Rochelle

Comments

Copyright © 2008 The Niche Store Builder - Succeed with Build a Niche Store