This article concerns the important but very often overlooked issue of properly titling your eBay auctions.
If you follow these ideas you should see a greater increase in bid amounts, watchers and overall eBay traffic.

You have 55 characters in the title bar of your auction. This is the prime real estate on eBay, it’s the most important aspect of your auction. It’s the first thing the customer sees, and what’s in it will determine the search results.

So lets look at the two basic ways that people search eBay.

• The first is the “browse” feature. When eBayers use this feature they’ll click on a category, a leaf category etc. and there’s a chance they’ll stumble across your auction. If they do, they may place a bid and end up winning. This would fall under the “impulse” buying theory.
• Although we don’t want to cast aside any interest in our auctions, this is not the ideal eBayer for your auction because this is only passive interest. The odds greatly indicate that this looker will quickly bounce from your auction to another location. It’s good for eBay because they will probably buy something on the site, but odds are slim that it’s going to be your item.
• To prove my point have you ever been approached by a salesperson in a store and your reply to their offer of help is that your “just browsing”. You may buy, but that person is not going to hover over you with baited breath. As a seller on eBay, the browsing phenomenon is mostly out of your control.
• The second way people use eBay is it’s very powerful search engine, this is what I’m concerned with in this article. You see, too many people title their eBay auctions for browsing shoppers, when they should target people who are looking for exactly what they have. The title bar in your eBay auction is in your total control.
• When you narrow you scope by entering only the most important keywords, you get the benefit of targeting a more serious customer, but you don’t lose the wide net effect that may entice the browsing customer. Voila, the best of both worlds with this method. So let’s look at the difference.
• Let’s use as an example an eBay auction I just closed for a 1964 Boris Karloff 12cent Dell Comic Book that was hand signed on the cover. The typical way one would think to do this would be to title it “1964 autographed Boris Karloff 12cent Dell Comic Book “. This will fill the title bar. This is in my opinion, a poor title. It’s wonderful that it perfectly describes what the item is, but it’s not great for eBay’s search engine.
• You really have to think about how the buyer will search for it. What are you looking to sell, a comic book? No way. This comic itself would only be worth about $25.00 to $35.00, your looking to sell Boris Karloff’s autograph, which happens to be on a Dell 12 cent comic. You lose valuable money in the title space by entering the unessecary words “Dell Comic Book”.
• Instead, it’s better to enter what Boris Karloff is associated with. So a much better title for eBay on this item would be “Boris Karloff autograph Frankenstein Monster Horror”. This is just right for an eBay search, and I’ll admit, terrible if you were placing it in a printed ad format. In a printed ad people wouldn’t know what you were selling. But this is search engine marketing and it’s a lot different.
• Now after they’ve searched and your auction pops up, then they can see it’s on a 12 cent Dell comic etc. But comic book buyers are not usually autograph hounds and vice versa. So think about how you use a search engine when your looking for something.
• Also it’s best to try to stay away from superlatives like beautiful and gorgeous in your title. If you must use those kinds of words, save them for the description of your item. When was the last time you punched into a search engine, “Beautiful Wallace Nutting Print”? More likely you typed in something like, Wallace Nutting, interior scene. Right?
• Use this Philosophy in all your eBay auctions, start thinking about what you punch into a search engine when you want a quick accurate result, it’s much different in many cases than how a newpaper ad would read.
• Below are a few more examples:
• Wrong: An old Scott Stamp Album Catalog full of Antique Stamps
• Right: Scott Album US Stamps Centennial ed unused mint blocks
• Wrong: Beautiful Maxfield Parrish Print in antique Art Deco Frame
• Right: 1920s Maxfield Parish Dinky Bird Art Deco House of Art
• If you get the hang of how keywords work on eBay and in search engines in general, your searches and your auctions will be much more profitable.

Good luck and thanks for reading.