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About Us 2007 is when I began creating niche stores. Many kind and giving people shared their knowledge with me, making it easier to improve my sites. I have gathered much of what I've learned and put it here, on this site, as a way of giving back. It is my hope that this site will help you improve your niche stores and sites, too. ~ Rochelle
How to Think of Variations on Search Query Terms
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Rochelle in As you create pages for your niche store you will need to enter words and terms into the search query box. Do not simply use a single word as you will miss out on a lot of auction results by doing this. Get creative and think of as many variations on each word or term as possible.
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, spelling variations, and more.
For example, let’s say you are creating a page for sand dollars. Here are some possible variations that you can enter for your search query:
- 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, as well as plural results, such as dollars.
You would enter the above list in your search query box as follows:
(sand dol*,sanddol*,sandol*,sand-dol*,sand-$,sand $,sand$)
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)
Here are some additional terms that can be spelled in various ways to help you look for variations of your own terms:
break / brake
sea / see
dear / deer
two / to / too / 2 / II
one / won / 1 / I
five / 5 / V
christmas / xmas / x-mas
Remember, just because you know how to properly spell a word doesn’t mean an eBay seller does.
Also, if you use negative keywords on your v1.x or v2.x stores then you need to add a mod to your sites. You can read my instructions to add this mod here.
Rochelle
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3 Responses to “How to Think of Variations on Search Query Terms”
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Rochelle
Rochelle
Has anyone solved the problem of the search box function, which is more or less useless if you use search queries to build your pages? I cannot see how you can build a site without using search queries and many of my sites I’ve built by creating each store page, rather than using ebay categories.
When a search is made on the site, the search query is included with whatever term is searched and therefore, more often than not, no results are returned. I first noticed this on my golf shoes site. If you search for “golf boots” (without the quotes) there will be no results, even though there clearly are boots, as I have a specific page for them in the index. The reason is that the search actually made by the system is “golf shoes golf boots” and this brings no results.
You can check the actual search term submitted by putting in your search term, obtain your results then click through to ebay on the “view more items at ebay” link and it will show you the search that was actually made. I just wonder how many visitors search, get no results and move on somewhere else? I also saw your question on Mark’s Forum about having 50 blank searches and I’m wondering if the above is the reason?
If anyone knows the answer to this, I would be grateful to hear from you.
Denise
Denise,
Do you add a search-wide term/keywords in your site’s Admin ‘Setup’ tab? I don’t do this and don’t usually have the problem you are mentioning.
FYI – If people are using your search and most searches are made using your home page, or you are using the basic search option, then results are based on whatever keywords/phrases you entered in your site’s home page (found in the ‘Content’ tab in Admin).
You bring up a good point regarding the blank results for Mark’s search results mod, but I don’t think this is the cause of the blank results. The site where I have the most blank results is on my My Little Pony site. I haven’t seen any examples of no results showing for searches.
Rochelle