Although many people are not aware of it, each individual ad on this site can be found by internet search engines. If you write your classified ads in such a way to make them contain the words people are searching for, you greatly increase your chances of receiving visitors looking exactly for what you are selling.

The All-Important Title

The first thing you are asked to enter for each classified ad you place is the title. When entering your titles, think far bigger than just who may read them on this site. The words in your title will be given very high importance by search engines, so they should be chosen carefully.

To write effective titles, put yourself into the shoes of someone staring at a blank search box on a search engine website. What are they most likely to type in that would describe the item you are about to list for sale? That can be a difficult guess, but it's almost a sure bet they won't type in words like "awesome" or "look" or "Very loving and sweet!" You frequently see words like these in ad titles, but they're seldom used by searchers looking for an item.

So what is a good title? Let's say you have a team roping horse for sale. We'll assume he's a 10 year old gelding, ropes both ends, and gentle enough for about anyone to ride. For a horse like this you frequently see titles something like: "Awesome! Big, eye-catching gelding!" or "Beautiful, stout, gelding with more potential." The only word in either of these titles, though, that someone might be likely to type in at a search engine is the word gelding.

Someone looking for the type of horse described for sale in our example would be more likely to search for "team roping horse," or "team roping gelding." It's also a good guess they would also put the words "for sale" into the search box, too. So, a more effective title would be something like "Solid team roping horse for sale" or "Team roping gelding for sale, Utah" or "Team roping horse for sale, both ends, gentle." While some people would feel like our second set of examples lack flair, they nonetheless are a better guess of what searchers using search engines would be typing in and searching for.

Short And To The Point

If you haven't already noticed, you are restricted to 50 characters when putting in your title while placing your ad. While this restriction might be annoying for some, it's likely to be for your benefit. If you go past a certain limit of characters in your titles, the search engines don't like it. No one really knows how many characters are ideal, but a limit of 50 characters should be about right.

A Little Repetition

Once you have your title, repeat it in your ad. You don't have to repeat it word for word in the same order (but it probably won't hurt), but you should try to reuse the important words close together. You will probably also even want to repeat the words "for sale." When folks are reading your ad they might think you were a bit odd to state the obvious (that the horse or other item is for sale) but again, you're thinking about how a search engine is going to read your ad then compare it to what searchers are typing in. One repetition should be enough, but if your ad's description is unusually long (more than 5 or 6 thick paragraphs), consider repeating the title at the top and at the bottom of the ad also (you probably won't need to say "for sale" at the bottom).

Will This Really Work?

Yes! Here at Cowboyway.com we study search engine patterns on the ads on this site a great deal, and know that the simple tips listed above can drastically increase the amount of visitors an ad receives. Since this type of search engine traffic is free and also highly targeted, it can be well worth a small amount of consideration when wording your ads.