ScreenCrafters

How Many Cities

stcrim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:34:35 +0000

OK so you are a Honda dealer outside of Atlanta Georgia. There are dozens of little cities around you. The big question is, which ones would you want to target for search optimization? That answer in just a minute. First here’s just a little bit about how search engines think when trying to deliver the best on most relevant search results.

Though Search Engines look at look at many factors such as back-linking, and the text in those links, they also still look at the text and the content on a page. (Note: there is a huge difference between text on a page and content.)

It’s common for a car dealer to want to be found in every city around them for 100 or more miles, but that’s in part, “The Kiss of Death”. First of all, through Get Local technology search engines know where you are, what you are selling, and a whole lot more. If you add two cities, such as Roswell and Atlanta to a page, at that point you have two words, each with a weight of 50 percent. Now let’s say you have 10 models so there are 12 words on the page.

Now each word has a value of 8.3 percent. Now add an additional 10 cities and each word has a value of 4.5 percent. Now take the very common practice (with some SEO companies) of adding a bunch of FLUFF on the page and you have a word density that’s almost non-existent.

If those cities are non-competitive, meaning they don’t have a dealership with your brand in them, you may do very well in them. That and 3 dollars will get you a good cup of coffee – but it won’t sell cars! All it does is muddy the water for cities that are valuable to you, making them less successful.

The simple answer is to target your city and if you are outside of a major market, target it as well. To try to capture the whole world is a big mistake. Car buyers who are ready to buy have a very specific way of searching for their next vehicle. We call it searching for buyer terms. (That’s a topic for a later post) Those terms never involve cities that don’t have car dealers in them. They rarely involve the smaller cities just outside of a major market like Atlanta.

When you or your SEO company adds a bunch of words to one or all of your pages have they done you any good? No!!! FLUFF does not equal content. Content can actually be as little as one word – if that word is relevant to the site theme, back-linking and a few other factors.

Shoot for the right target, don’t get greedy and you could be well on your way to generating more traffic.

Steve
ScreenCrafters – No Contact, No Commitment, just results.

If someone asks you to sign a contact for SEO, don’t walk, run in the other direction. Requesting a contract is a strong indication they are not confident they can keep you based on their results.

Being Number One

stcrim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:59:25 +0000

What’s the value of being number one in the search engine results? Most car dealers have an expectation that being number one is the best position. For that to be completely true one would have to believe that people only look at one website while searching for a car.

Think about your own search habits – have you ever found what you were searching for by looking at only one website. It’s human nature to want to turn over one more rock. The magic is to be somewhere in-between the search zone which is from number 1 down to number 7.

But, it’s not enough to just be in the search results since most people look at so many sites before taking action of any kind.

Call To Action!!! We learned early in the ballgame that driving traffic is nice, it’s welcomed, but does little to add to a dealers Internet bottom line. Would you let people walk into your dealership and instruct all of your employees to leave them alone. Just let them look around and when they get ready to leave, just let them go. Probably Not!!!

Being number one is by far not the most important position. Being the last website they look at is. THE LAST MAN STANDING, wins.

Greet the at the door of your website and insure your site is the last thing they see before closing out. If you are somewhere within the window of opportunity and working with the right tools, chances are, you’ll be the one closing the deal.

Steve Crim
ScreenCrafters
251-990-9498

Pages Indexed

stcrim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:57:15 +0000

How much of my websites does Google actually have in their index? This is a great question because once you have it answered you’ll know a lot about how Google, Yahoo and MSN view your site.

For example if your website company displays your new inventory, (precious few do) if all that inventory can be seen by the search engines you have a great deal of indexable content to work with.

The same applies to pre-owned inventory. In most cases used inventory is a framed in, third party feed which adds no SEO value to your website.

Go to Google and type in site:yourdomainname.com for example site:Amazom.com and search. It will return you 1 of 10 of about X pages. The more pages you have indexed and the more that contain inventory the more potential search visibility you have. You should come up with number that exceed 100 in most cases. In some cases, you should have many hundreds of pages live.

Steve Crim
ScreenCrafters
251-990-9498

Got an SEO or website best practices question you want to see answered? Please send it to stcrim@screencrafters.com

MORE TRAFFIC – MORE LEADS – MORE SALES

Are you ready for more, quality website traffic and and more closable leads without the burden of a contract or commitment? No Contract – just results. Call to Action Lead Generation system exclusively by ScreenCrafters!

Domain Name Change

stcrim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:53:06 +0000

What is that line? Would a rose smell as sweet by any other name? On the Internet, the answer is NO. Today, dealer websites that do well in the search engines do so partly because their domain name has gathered some “seasoning” along the way.

Google, Yahoo and MSN take into account how long a domain name has been active along with amount of links back to it and times referenced on other websites in their algorithms.

In the simplest of terms, if you are thinking of changing your domain name, don’t or at least don’t do it all at once. To do so can and will make you disappear from quality search listings for a year to 18 months. In fact, you may never regain the positioning you had.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to change names - do it the right way and you’ll come through with flying colors.

Steve Crim
ScreenCrafters

Got an SEO or website best practices question you want to see answered? Please send it to stcrim@screencrafters.com

MORE TRAFFIC – MORE LEADS – MORE SALES

Imagine after someone visits your inventory or e-brochures – they can go anywhere they want. They can visit your competition, visit Amazon.com – but when they start to close out their browser, they’ll be presented with one last opportunity to do business with you. Patent Pending Website re-entry system exclusively from ScreenCrafters. 251-990-9498

The Title Tag

stcrim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:31:49 +0000

The TITLE of a web page is perhaps the most misunderstood and yet very important elements surrounding sound Search Optimization. The TITLE is nothing more that exactly that, it’s the TITLE of the page. In the good ole days search engines used the title and description to give clear text of what a page was about.

Early on TITLE tags were easily abused. The text in them was not compared to text in the body of the page or their relevancy to the text content of the site. Not so today! Spoofing the TITLE tag today will cause you untold amounts of grief.

The TITLE tag should be nothing more than the TITLE for that specific page. In the case of a car dealers website homepage, the TITLE should begin with (here’s a no brainer) the name of the dealership. From 70 up to as much as 90 percent of your traffic finds you under your dealership name. To risk missing that traffic can be a major mistake.

Every TITLE for every page should be independent – unfortunately most of the automotive website companies today don’t allow that option. AMAZON.COM has 8.4 million pages. Where it involves a product you will not find a single duplicate TITLE.

Steve Crim
ScreenCrafters
MORE TRAFFIC – MORE LEADS – MORE SALES
ScreenCrafters. 251-990-9498