Craigslist Ads and Meta Tags

In my WEBSITE, IMPROVE & PROMOTE class, quite often I’m asked about Meta tags and how to effectively use them with your website or blog. I’m going to share a very practical tip because I was placing a Craigslist ad and a thought came to me as what could be of great use for my readers.

If you’ve done any ads at all in Craigslist, you may know that “they” can be a bit finicky about how you enter you ad. If it’s repeated with similar words in different ads, or if you use website addresses, “they” may say that you ad is listed and even give you a link to see it, but it has not been made available for the eyes of the world (OK, the Craigslist world anyway) to see; just yours! These are called Ghost Ads and you can find more details about Ghost Ads (if not available at the time you are reading this, it will be soon) at: www.terscott.com/ghostads.

CRAIGSLIST TIP: A way to “get around” using your actual website address in an ad would be to abbreviate it, but you run the risk of someone not really knowing how to “put the pieces together”. No worries, though because if the reader of the ad is truly interested, they will click “reply” to your ad and you can email them the full link in your response; they just can go directly to your link in the ad; which may be a time saver for you because then you’ll only get those who are really interested in your offer.

Here’s an actual Craigslist ad that I recently placed to attract people who might be interested in sharing my commission when referring businesses to my Promotional Products and I.D. site: www.MyImprintRep.com/promofinder5050:

Stay at home money? Additional Income for your small business?

Call local businesses, lead them to our site page: MyImprintRep DOT COM/ 123order (remove spaces, and modify to go there), they order from us (we do all the accounting and maintaining of the account) and we split our commission 50/50!

If you are a stay at home mom, a small ad or graphic design business, photographer, or have a similar situation, this could be an awesome way to make great weekly money. See the details!

MyImprintRep DOT COM/ promofinder5050

We are looking for qualified people in your area. Reply today!

Highlighted in yellow are two “hidden” website addresses. Now for the WEB TIP:

I want people to find “MyImprintRep DOT COM/ promofinder5050” when they copy and paste this in the address bar of their web browser, so I actually use that keyword phrase in my meta tag description; for that specific page.

For this particular website I’m using Yahoo Sitebuilder (to find out this and my other suggested Website building platforms; another question I’m often asked, please go to: www.terscott.com/createyourwebsite).

Here is a picture of the “back office” using Sitebuilder so you can see what I’m adding in the Meta Tag area:

 

Note that I’ve included the “MyImprintRep DOT COM/ promofinder5050” under the “Keywords” area for that page.

Hope this helps someone today.

Make it a great one!

Ter Scott!