How We Sneak In Hidden And Visible Keyword Phrases To Craiglist☮ Advertisements For Better Ad Visibility

Craigslist and Keywords

What is important to know about keywords, when it comes to posting ads on Craigslist, is the primary way an advertisement or posting on Craigslist gets visitors and traffic is through search engines. People type what they are looking for in the search engines and the search engines try to show the searcher web pages that will represent and contain what the searcher is looking for.

The reason this is important and relevant to your Craigslist ad is if you can make the search engines think that your Craigslist posting is exactly what searchers (interested in the subject of your advertisement) are looking for then you are going to get a lot more traffic and people to your ad.

Craigslist front or home page. Craigslist is a great place to consider adverstising for any online business because of the sheer volume of traffic on Craigslist.

Craigslist front or home page. Craigslist is a great place to consider adverstising for any online business because of the sheer volume of traffic on Craigslist.

So how do search engines know that your Craigslist ad has what its searchers are looking for? The text/words that are in your ad. Keywords are the exact words and phrases people type into the search engines. Put these exact words and phrases in your Craigslist posting and Google, Bing and Yahoo will send people to your Craigslist ad.

Using the Right Keywords for your Craigslist Ad - Keyword Research

So how do you find out exactly what people are searching for (related to the subject of your advertisement) in the search engines? The use of some sort of keyword tool. A keyword tool scrapes one or more of the major search engines (usually Google since Google gets around 90% of the market share) for keywords phrases. For example, with Google Auto Complete Keyword Scraper software, you start with a root or starting keyword phrase. The software then goes out to the search engine and finds and harvests every single keyword phrase related to your starting keyword phrase.

The reason keyword research is important for your Craigslist posting, no matter what you are selling or advertising, you may have ideas in your head about what you think is important about the thing you are selling on Craigslist but a keyword tool is going to reveal EXACTLY what real people are searching for related to the thing you are selling.

Referring to the Specific Craigslist Keyword Example, when I input the phrase Camaro for sale in Google Auto Complete Keyword Scraper Software it revealed importants words and phrases I did not think to include prior to using the Keyword Research Software. Prior to running Google Auto Complete Keyword Scraper I was going to have this for the title 2014 Chevy Camaro for Sale. After running the software I saw people were typing these types of things into Google:

Google Auto Complete Keyword Scraper software reveals important Words and Phrases to Include in Craigslist Posting.

Google Auto Complete Keyword Scraper software reveals important Words and Phrases to Include in Craigslist Posting.

As you can see from the image of Google Auto Complete Keyword Scraper software above, people who were looking for what I was selling on Craigslist were also including actual words in their searchs like muscle, chevrolet, used, cheap, craigslist. Based upon this information I changed the title of my Craigslist posting to Used Chevrolet Camaro Muscle Car for Sale Cheap ☞ on Craigslist.org ☜. Notice the little pointing fingers in the title which is another trick revealed in the Special Characters for Craigslist Ad Posting section.

The right keyword tool will provide important information about exactly what words and phrases you should be including in your Craigslist ad. A keyword tool is also going to provide you with LSI keyword phrases (a fancy way of saying - other words and phrases search engines expect to see on a web page that is about the subject of your Craigslist ad).

Visible Keywords on Craigslist Postings

After you run your keyword software and find RELEVANT keyword phrases that are CLOSELY RELATED to your original starting keyword, think of how you can NATURALLY weave in many of the keyword phrases within your Craigslist ad posting. Note the words that have been capitalized to illustrate the importance of using keyword phrases that are relevant and directly related to what you are selling or advertising on Craigslist. For information about the importance of this I suggest you have a look at the topic of keyword spamming your Craigslist ad.

Where to Insert Keywords in Craigslist Ad Posting

Here are the places you should put relevant keywords you have uncovered and how:

1. In the Posting Title. This is the most important place.
2. At the very start of your Craiglist ad insert a header tag. Refer to this image. To do this...
1. Copy and paste the exact text you used for the posting title in the first line of the posting body.
2. Place <h1> at the beginning of the text and </h1> at the end of text.
3. As much as you can in the posting body text as long as you are not stuffing the keywords in. Search engines today are too smart to fall for keyword stuffing tactics and this Black Hat SEO tactic will hurt and not help you.
4. Be sure to include a different keyword phrase in the image file names you upload to Craigslist. For example, if a keyword phrase you are targeting is used camaro for sale name one of the images you upload to Craigslist used-camaro-for-sale.jpg.
5. Don't forget, at the end of your posting insert about 15 - 20 <br> followed by your list of 10 - 30 keyword phrase in list format. (refer to the video at the top of this page).

Hidden Keywords on Craigslist Postings

Changes to Craigslist make it so you can no longer do a lot of thing you use to be able to do and insert hidden keywords is one of them BUT, there is a way to add hidden keywords in the sense that they will be hidden to the typical visitor of your Craigslist posting.

The way you do this is make your ad, and then for the hidden part you want to add 15 - 20 <br> follow by your list of keywords. Remember to put a <li> before each keyword and a <\li> after each keyword and them put <ul> before all the keyword phrases and <\ul> after all of the keyword phrases, in other words ...

Special Characters for Craigslist Ad Posting

One little trick you can use to make your ad visibly stand out more in search results is to including a couple of special ascii characters like this ☜ ☞ ☝ ☟ ✔ ★ ☆ ♺ ☼ ☂ ☺ ☹ ☃ in your posting title.

Inserting one or two of these in your Craigslist ad title can really make a huge difference in how quickly seen your ad is among other search results.

Specific Craigslist Keyword Example

Lets say, for example, you are advertising a car for sale on Craigslist. I actually have a 2014 Chevy Camaro so we will use that for the example.

Using Infinity Google Keywords software, I will insert the starting keyword 'camaro for sale'. Looking at the image of the keyword research software you can see some of the exact words and phrases people were typing into Google related to my starting seed keyword. The image below shows the text of my ad post. The keywords and phrases have been weaved in as much as possible, in a natural manner, and these words and phrases I have underlined with a dotted green marker in the image below.

My Craigslist.org for sale listing show keywords and keyword phrases that have been inserted in the ad.

My Craigslist.org for sale listing show keywords and keyword phrases that have been inserted in the ad.

Multiply and Duplicate your Craigslist Ad Posting

Once you have successfully created and posted your keyword optimized Craigslist ad there are three things you want to do:

• Ping your Craigslits Ad: pinging is process that sends out a notification to content aggregators and search engines about you new Craigslist ad posting. Search engines would still find and index your posting without a ping but manually doing a ping immediately after publishing your Craigslist post will speed this up. To ping your new Craigslist post visit one of these sites and fill out a few simple text fields about your Craigslist posting:
  • scrapersnbots.com blog ping.
  • https://pingomatic.com/.
  • http://googleping.com/.
  Where it asks for the Blog Name copy and paste the posting title. Where it asks for Blog Homepage insert the full web address of your Craigslist posting.
• Post the Same Ad on Other Classified Ad Sites: for even more traffic and visitors to your Craigslist ad place the same exact ad on other classified sites like:
  • ebayclassifieds.com.
  • oodle.com.
  • recycler.com.
  Be sure to insert the link to your Craigslist posting in all your other ad postings. This will give your Craigslist post what is called link juice and help make the Craigslist ad appear higher in search results.
• Socially Share your Craigslist Ad: sharing your new Craigslist ad to places like Twitter and Facebook might get you some visitors directly but it will also give your Craigslist posting link juice.

Definition of Terms uses on this Page

• Black Hat SEO: tactics used to try to trick search engines into believing a web page or blog post is more relevant and of higher quality.
• Header Tag: an html element that visually, makes the text contained between the header tags much bigger and bolder than the rest of the text. From an SEO standpoint, text that is contained within header tags is given more importance by search engines.
• Link Juice: search engines give higher priority to web pages that have lots of links pointing to it. (This includes Craigslist ad postings). This is because search engines conclude that if a lot of other websites are link to one particular web page, that web page must be very good and have lots of valuable information people love.
• LSI Keywords: words and phrases that are related to a main keyword phrase that search engines expect to see when the subject of a web page is about the main keyword phrase. Ensuring your web page (Craigslist ad) contains some of this LSI keywords will send the message to the search engines that your Craigslist ad is highly relevant to what their searchers are looking for when they type in the main keyword phrase into the search engine.
• SEO: arranging and laying out a website and/or web pages in a manner that search engines approve of.
• Keyword Spamming: the practice of overstuffing content or text with a certain keyword or keyword phrase in the attempt to manipulate search engines that your content is more releveant for that keyword than it is. An old practice that no longer works (exept on Craigslist)