What every seller needs to know about Google Search

Seller Tip #10

To increase your customer base it helps to know how to take advantage of Google search. Your inventory is more likely to be found when a potential customer uses Google to search for related products.

Google has certain rules for items that it includes into the search. If your item does not meet those rules it is excluded from the search.

• Many sellers write their titles in all caps. This is a bad idea not only they are harder to read then proper case titles, but they also will be excluded from results of Google search. Google Base has a list of editorial guidelines. Here is a quote from these guidelines “Avoid any repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization or symbols. Don't use exclamation points in your item titles." Distilled site have done extensive analysis of Google search rankings and reported that excessive capitalization will cause your items not to be included in the search results. 
• Google made the "condition" property a mandatory field for products in Google Merchant Center feeds as of June 30th, 2009. Items without the condition field are excluded from search results.
• Google does not crawl web pages. It relies on feeds. Fresh data helps improve rankings, so items listed every 7 days will rank higher than listings created every 30 days. This is an interesting statistics to those who use 7-day auction vs 30-day fixed priced listings on Ebay. 
• Reviews are important. Distilled reports that Google Checkout reviews result in better ranking than reviews left on other sites. This could be because Google trusts their own review system or, or because they want more people to use Google Checkout. This is bad news for Ebay sellers, since Ebay does not allow Google Checkout on Ebay as they are fierce competitors.

When you create your item listing keep these rules in mind to improve the ranking of your items in Google search results.

 This is a weekly feature called "Seller Tips". I have been selling my artwork on line since 1999. I have learned a lot about successful selling and like sharing my knowledge. I even won Ebay's Community Hall of Fame Award in 2004 for my efforts. I decided to bring that knowledge and experience to my blog.

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