Selling your product on Amazon doesn’t start with the description. It starts with the title.

But how do you know what information to include and what you can leave out? How do you know what sells products and what makes Amazon’s search engine work for you?

Here’s a brief guide to getting your titles right on Amazon so you can start selling your product. We’ll start by looking at what Amazon has to say about your title and then how to approach optimizing your title from a search engine perspective.

Amazonian Advice

Amazon’s “Seller Central” provides plenty of useful information right from the source. Some points they share are more obvious than others. For example, they recommend you don’t use misleading or inaccurate information. Which, I think, is a wonderful principle to live by, in general.

As for the less obvious ones, here are a few you should know about. No use of HTML or symbols (including special characters and Type 1 High ASCII characters – Æ, ©, ô, etc.) is permitted. You can’t use any information that’s temporarily true, so you can’t mention a limited time offer in the title or anything similar. Leave out any and all contact information, including your website. Pointing buyers away from Amazon is not something Amazon fancies and well, that makes a lot of sense.

Amazon suggests a general format for posting your title. While there are slight variations between different categories (different types of items have different key identifiers), they tend to follow either this structure (in order starting with the top):

Brand Model #

Model name

Product type

Color

For example: BLACK+DECKER TR1278B 2-Slice Toaster, Black

Or this one, which is geared towards items like towels or blankets:

Brand

Line/Pattern

Material

Product Type

Quantity (is it a set of three?, etc.)

Color

For example: Pinzon Egyptian Cotton 6-Piece Towel Set – Grey

Well, that covers the basics – now you can get something down on paper that looks like a proper title.

However, you’re probably still wondering how you’re going to get your item to sell with just your title. To answer that question is to answer the question, how do I get my item to place on Amazon’s search engines?

SEO – Yes… More SEO

Alright, if you’re well informed on how Google’s search algorithms work, that’s wonderful.

Forget most of it.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm cares more about relevancy and customer conversions. There is no room here for backlinks or social media or any external factors, for that matter. It’s all internal to Amazon. Your title, your description, the amount of time people spend on your product page and the number of product sales (catch-22 stuff, I know) all play a part in determining where it will show up on the search engine.

Sticking to the above mentioned format is a biggie. Go ahead and search Amazon for “toaster” and then keep the page open. I’ll wait. As in, I’ll wait for a reasonable amount of time. Please note: this is NOT the time to get toaster happy!

Okay, you’re back. You’ll see that almost two pages, every toaster has at least the formula of brand name followed by model number.

Fortunately enough (and with good reason), there is an exception on the bottom of the second page at the time of this writing that happens to be titled “Darth Vader Toaster.” If you need a moment to go purchase that toaster, just go and do what you need to do. That’s what 1-Click is for, right?

The formula is important because your product title fills in the slots that the search engines read. There’s a slot allocated for brand and then model number and so on. So, don’t get creative here.

Unlike Google’s preference for solid, useful content that people interact with and long tail keywords, Amazon gives you the option of packing in as many keywords as you can in the 200 character limit. However, I should tell you (and I know I’m not alone) that if I see a product title that is overloaded with keywords, I personally tend to skip it and move on to the next. I’m more likely to buy a product with a title that strikes a balance between the aforementioned formula and useful keywords.

Don’t forget that sales are a factor in placing on the search engines and that your product description can include the keywords you’d like to use, as well.

And if you feel that your title should include variations of the same term in order to reach people who type things into the search bar differently, don’t. In fact, this is one of the main points on Amazon’s “Seller Central,” so you don’t need to include “1TB” and “1 TB” in the title.

And that does it! These are the basics but if you want more in depth information, just head on over to Amazon’s “Seller Central.”