Ebay introduced Ebay Guides a few years back, a great resource for buyers, and a great opportunity for sellers. Ebay Guides are simply guides that Ebay users can create on any topic they wish. If you sell on Ebay, it can be to your advantage to write an informative guide about the items that you sell. This can drive traffic to your About ME Page, auctions, and most importantly, your Ebay store.

Ebay Guides do not allow linking to external websites, but they do allow you to link anywhere within Ebay. This is where you can capitalize and promote your store! You'll also want to take advantage and link to your other Ebay guides within your guide, so you'll have a good flow of traffic betwen guides. It all helps in building trust from buyers, entertaining them, and directing them to your store.

Nothing is worse than a boring, text filled page. Ebay allows you to add images to your Guide. Add some relevant pictures, along with a link underneath to a section of your store. For example, let's say you have an Ebay store selling sneakers. Write a guide on Chuck Taylors, and place a link underneath one of the pictures to the Chuck Taylor section of your Ebay store. Provide some information on the background of the company, tips on buying them, how the sizes run, and maybe a little history on that particular style. People want to know this stuff!

Ebay Guides index well with search engines...so well, in fact, that they often come up on the first page for search results of certain terms! They can also acheive a high PageRank status from Google. A link from your high PageRank guide to your Ebay store will give you a nice little boost in the search engines, especially if you have quite a few of these high ranking guides.

You'll also want to take advantage of the "heading" tags in the guides. Use the "heading 1" tag for the title of the article. Use the "Heading 2" tag for titles of specific sections within the guide, and reserve the "heading 3" tag for a subtitle for sections. Don't be cheap with the headings, add plenty of them to your guides!

Keyword research would also be a good thing to consider for your guide. Like any other page on the web, find a search term that you are targetting and focus the guide around that.

If you have enough guides, you can easily become a top reviewer on Ebay and have an extra icon next to your User ID. This is great way to establish your reputation, and instill further trust in your buyers. Registered Ebay users can vote "yes" or "no" on your guide, boosting it or burying it amongst the top guides. To encourage more votes, you can link to your guide within your auctions. Link to the ones that make sense for the best results. Of course, you could possibly lose a sale when a buyer clicks out of your auction and into your guide. That's why it's so important to link to your store throughout your guide multiple times.

Tags work different on many websites, but with Ebay, it's a way for other visitors within Ebay to find your guide. Keep them broad, but keyword filled -- maybe only 2-3 words at the most for each tag. You are allowed up to five.

It's not uncommon that you'll have thousands of visitors heading to your Ebay guide. Over time, you can expect that many of your guides might reach a PageRank status of 1, 2, maybe 3 or 4 even. Your hard work shouldn't end there though! Back up all of your guides in a text document, just in case Ebay decides to pull the plug on your guide. If you follow their agreement, you shouldn't have any problem, but  back it up anyway! That way you can either republish it on Ebay or elsewhere online.

So how do you know how many visitors are headed to your store? Install Google Analytics on your store, or analyze the traffic reports to see where the traffic is coming from.