When we want to sell our products online, we usually start by looking for the Online Venue to sell them on, when we find it, we sign up for an account, we browse through the options the site offers, and then we start creating.

We finally have a few items ready, we go back to the site, we click on "List a New Item" and then we face our first challenge: The name or title of my product.

Our goal is to get our items found on the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo and the right title for your item will greatly help that purpose, but why?, why is it so important to name your items properly?. Two words: search results. Your items are presented within the search results with the name you choose for them as the link/title, and a shortened description will go below (see image), but how the search engines find your item to index it in their search results is more important.

The importance of Naming your items properly.

By naming your items I don't mean naming your products "Stacey" or "Robert", the name of your product or title if you will, is probably the most important detail when it comes to search terms and results and you have to take your time choosing the appropriate title for each one of them.

If you sell jewelry, and you are adding a beautiful red necklace made with jade gemstones that has a turquoise pendant, you don't want to use "Necklace" as your title, or if you have multiple necklaces, "Necklace #1", or even "Red Necklace", instead you should use a more descriptive name, not as long as the actual description (which you will be able to enter later), but a name or title that can be searched for, a name that creates multiple combinations of keywords.

You will often be advised that you have to think like a customer, in this case to list your items, thinking on how your customers would search for your items on Google or Yahoo, when that is in part true and a good method, it is not the complete kit for you to properly name your items.

You have to go beyond your customers thinking, we as customers have different ways of searching, while we usually know what we are looking for, let's face it, sometimes we are clueless about our options, so we go ahead and search for different terms, for instance, someone could search for "red necklace with pendant", and someone else could search for "handmade necklace with blue pendant", both of those search terms apply to your item, your item matches perfectly!, but you named it "Necklace #1" remember?, so your item is very likely to appear in the very last set of results of the search engines for any of the terms mentioned above  or not appear at all.

You may ask, what if I entered a very detailed description of my item?, well, that is very good for when your customers are viewing your item, and in fact good for search engines, but we'll go in detail about it later.

So, how do I name my items!?

Well, you may ask yourself these questions:

1. What is it?
2. What is it made of?
3. What are the main colors?
4. Is it for men, women or both? or
5. Is it for children?, babies?, pets?
6. Are the measures relevant?

These questions are just a few examples and may vary depending on what you sell. Answering the questions above:

1. It is a Necklace
2. It is made of jade gemstones and it has a pendant.
3. Red, Turquoise  and don't forget turquoise is just a type of blue, so it is also blue!
4. It is for Women, in this case it may not be relevant, buy you may consider it.
5. If you make them specifically for children, or babies, or even pets, then include this.
6. When you sell items that are usually searched for by their dimensions, it is very important to include them, in this case, they are not relevant.

So what do we have?, we have a necklace that is red, turquoise, and of course, blue! made of jade gemstones and it has a pendant, and the best thing of all, it is handmade!, let's put it together:

My combination would be: "Handmade Red Jade Gemstones Necklace with Blue Turquoise Pendant".

This title creates many different keyword combinations that users could search for, for instance:

• handmade gemstone necklace
• handmade red necklace
• red necklace with blue pendant
• handmade jade gemstones necklace
• turquoise pendant, red necklace

And the list goes on...

So as you can see, not only the title is searchable, but it is more appealing, but be careful, don't use excessively long names, search engines will trim them to fit their layouts, so again, conciseness and effectiveness are the keys.

The often overlooked description

I uploaded 5 pictures of my product!, can't they see them!?. I have to admit I'm lazy when it comes to descriptions, in fact, I'm not good at describing things, mainly because English is not my first language, you may have already noticed it :), but going back to your pictures, yes, your customers can see the pictures of your item but they don't know how big the item is, what others materials it is made of, how it is made, and again, the list of questions is endless, depending of course on what you sell.

Make sure you add a description that includes everything your customer should know about your item, exact measures,  materials you used, you can even write about the making process, in the handmade business, we like to know about the love you put toward creating an item, your inspirations.

It is also important to include the uses of your item, what you can combine it with, and if you have that combining product, make a reference to it.

 Handmade items are unique and you should describe them as such, if you have a limited vocabulary (as I do!), grab a dictionary and look for synonyms for some of the words you are using to describe your items to make the description look more professional and well written, but be careful in not to confuse your customers with pretty words, or words not even a scientist or an English teacher could understand.

Search engines (yes!, I have to mention search engines one last time)  use AI (Artificial Intelligence) as well as mathematical algorithms (of which we don't want to know about!, we sell handmade items!) that allows them to determine if the content of a page, in this case your product description matches the title of the page, in this case, the name or title of your product, therefore it is important to have them in complete harmony, you don't have to rewrite your product title inside the description, besides you don't want to be redundant, but it would be useful to include certain keywords here and there that refer to the title.

Remember, a good description along with a good set of pictures (we will talk about pictures in another post) tell your customers how much you care about them and about your items, a well written description talks about your dedication and effort, your enthusiasm about creating and selling, it talks about you.

Keys to Listing an item

1. Do not repeat titles. This will only cause your items to be seen as duplicates and they will not be indexed by search engines.
2. Write useful/searchable titles
3. Describe your items properly, include everything there is to know about them.
4. DO NOT take your customers away. If you sell on other marketplaces, do not include links or mentions to your other shops, this will only confuse your customers, especially those who already made a decision of buying one of your items.

I am writing this article or post because I have been seeing many of these common mistakes about naming items and writing descriptions here at Craft Is Art, and also because I firmly believe that our dedication and effort is rewarded accordingly, and if we don't take our job and creations seriously, no one else will.

I hope this was helpful, thank you for reading.