Hi Everyone,
Enjoyed reading this thread, some very good points about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It's an area that I've been reading up on a lot lately and am in the middle of making changes to many parts of eBid to help with our search rankings.
I'll just re-cap the main pointers that people can use to help get their individual auctions and also eBid Store pages higher in the rankings.
1) Most important is to include, where possible, the keywords that you think buyers will use on google within your auction title. An excelent example from NYKMEDIA
She has added the text "cheap paperback book" to her title for this auction and you can see here that it appears on the first page of google for the keywords "cheap paperback books"
2) When adding links in your auction descriptions make sure the "anchor text" is something that google can read and relate to the destination page.
e.g.
For antiques and collectables click <a href=my store>here</a>
In this example google will see a link to your Store and will associate the word "here" as a relevant keyword describing your Store. As we all know no-one is going to use the word "here" on google as a search term so this is a wasted chance for you to gain a "vote" for your eBid Store that would help boost its ranking. A better example would be:
Click here for <a href=my store>quality antiques</a> and also <a href=my store>collectables</a>
Here you can see I have used relevant keywords that I think people will use on google as my anchor text.
3) When adding links to eBid anywhere on your own site, on other forums and in blogs we'd appreciate it if you used the words "eBid Online Auctions" in the anchor text to help boost our relevance to these keywords on google.
The next ones aren't anything you can do but is something that we are currently doing to enhance our google listings.
4) To save you time adding a relevant title to each photo you upload we will be using the auction title as the ALT tag for your photo
5) We will be adding the TITLE tag to all photo. Currently we only use the ALT tag.
6) We wil be adding the auction title and the first 50 characters from your auction description into the META DESCRIPTION tag for each individual auction page.
7) We will be moving your auction title to the far left of the page TITLE.
8) We will be changing the URLs around the site to make them more search engine friendly.
Gazza