Getting Started with SEO - become visible
Search engines 'crawl' the Web on a regular basis, and assess the relative importance of websites based on a series of criteria such as number of inbound links, how closely the headings seem to match the content, and how often popular search keywords appear in your site copy.
This page contains tips for getting started with SEO, by including relevant keywords in your dealership site's HTML header. 2-4 hours' work on this will move you from being 'invisible' in search rankings to appearing in searches for your chosen keywords. Once you've done this work, you should appear in search results within 2-3 weeks, ie the next time the search engine indexes the Web - and this effect will last forever.
Once you're being indexed, you can start to move up the rankings.
Please note: If you're using the dmABS Affiliate sales site, you won't be able to make changes to the content of your site. But have a look at 'Inbound Link Building' on the Advanced SEO page for tips on driving targeted visitors to your site.
Ready to move from an Affiliate sales site to your own custom site? You can choose between downloading and customising the dmABS Adapted sales site or creating your own self-contained branded site using our embeddable sales eComponents.
Menu
Click the links below for SEO tips to boost your site traffic.
Step 1: Set your marketing objectives
Step 2: Pick your keywords
About page titles and <meta> tags
About destination URLs
Step 3: Get your keywords into your site
Related dmNotes
Further reading
Step 1: Set your marketing objectives
The dmABS site has around 70 pages in total. But don't worry - you don't need to optimise all of them. But you do need to think about your marketing objectives.
What do you want to sell? Why do you want to focus on that? Who are you selling it to? Pick the pages you really want to drive visitors to. Do you want to concentrate on selling UK Geographic numbers? Then focus your attention on those pages. Or if it's a particular service, then concentrate on those pages.
Spend half an hour thinking about this. You'll probably identify around 3-5 pages you want to concentrate on: your main landing page and key product/service pages that you want to focus your marketing on.
Step 2: Pick your keywords
Google Analytics: If you've got Google Analytics plugged into your site, have a look at the 'Keywords' section (under 'Traffic Sources' in the dashboard main menu). That'll tell you which search terms visitors entered into Google or other search engines before finding your site in results and clicking on it.
Check your competitors: Visit competitors' websites, right-click on their web pages, and select 'View Source'. You'll see a page of HTML code. If you look for the field called <meta name="keywords"> (it'll be near the top of the page) you'll see a list of keywords (as long as they've done their SEO homework). These lists can be a great starting point for keyword research.
Think about your customers: Who are you selling to? How would they search? Put yourself in the position of a potential customer searching for the products and services you are selling, and think of the search terms they might use.
Use the Google keyword chooser: Google AdWords provides a great tool for researching which keywords to pick. Just enter a few keyword ideas, and the page will not only tell you roughly how many people search for that keyword or keyword string, but also suggest other keywords you could use.
Spend an hour creating a list of keywords that are important to your dealership.
About page <title> and <meta> tags
Title tags
The title tags on a page tell a web browser what to call it. It's important to think carefully about your Title tags, as whatever you put in the <title> field will show up as the blue clickable link on Google search results.
Though your customers probably don't spend much time reading title tags, search engine spiders assess the text on them against the content on the rest of the site. If there's a match - eg the title tag mentions 'UK Geographic' and so does the content - then that's evidence to the spider that you're delivering web content that is consistent and relevant.
<Meta> tags - keywords and description
These tags provide information about your site. There are two meta tags to consider when optimising a page: Keywords and Meta description.
Keywords: Here is where you enter the keywords you've chosen for your page.
Description: This is a very important field. If you add a meta description, Google search results will display this text in search results - effectively giving you free advertising - in Google itself. Take some time to write your meta description; include some of the keywords from your keywords. But make sure it makes sense: think of it as a 20-word sales pitch.
About destination URLs
The URLs of individual pages on your dmABS site play a part in keyword optimisation along with keywords and <Meta> tags. If your URLs contain keywords relevant to the page content, that helps to indicate to the search engine that your page contains relevant content.
Alternatively you may want to tweak the URLs to reflect a particular set of search terms - for example if your target customer group is likely to search for 'Freephone' rather than '0800' you could change your 0800 numbers page URL from /numbers/0800.php to /numbers/freephone.php.
Step 3: get your keywords into your site
Once you've created your keywords, you need to get them added to your eComponent or dmABS-Adapted site. Add your keywords to the <head> section of the page, and edit the copy on the page to include as many keywords as you can manage without it sounding odd.
Related dmNotes
Advanced SEO tips for your dmClub dealership
Download page for the latest dmABS Adapted Business Site software
Learn more about SEO
Simple Effective SEO (blog)
Get to the Top on Google - and stay there (book) - recommended if you're serious about SEO