SEO - going beyond the basics
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.
Once your dealership site is visible to search engines, the challenge is to boost its ranking in search results. Web users who are searching for a particular kind of information may be confronted with 25 pages of results for a search query. Most users don't delve much beyond the second or third page of the results. So you want your site to appear as high in the rankings as possible.
This page contains some SEO tips that will help move your site up the rankings.
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Click the links below for SEO tips to boost your site traffic.
Building inbound links
Keyword optimising your content
Making your dealership content unique
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Learn more about SEO
Building inbound links
What does this mean?
Just as people often judge someone's worth by how popular they are, search engines judge a page partly according to how many other people have linked to it. It's assumed that if someone links to a page, they're recommending that you visit it. So the more links you can persuade other people to provide to your dealership, the more important your page will seem, and the more it will rise up the ranks.
Building positive inbound links
Building positive inbound links takes time and patience. But it's the single most important thing you can do to get ahead of the competition and boost your search rankings.
Exchanging links
Exchanging links with other website owners is a good start, and can pay long term dividends as their sites rise in the rankings.
Directories
You're probably already submitting your dealership to directories - paid or unpaid. As well as gaining you direct traffic (people finding your site via the directory) this is also a great way to boost your search ranking. The more links you have coming in, the better.
Forums
Inbound links from forum postings all add to your overall search grading.
Do make sure you read the forum's terms of service before adding your dealership to a signature line or making a post that includes a link to your dealership. Some forums discourage this kind of advertising and will delete your post or even ban you without warning for doing this. Self-promotion is often considered bad form by other forum members as well, and may provoke a negative reaction. But if you are already active on a particular forum or forums, or could legitimately become involved in that community (ie you have an interest in the topic) and mention your dealership in the course of conversation this can be a good source of targeted traffic.
Warning: Thou Shalt Not Spam!
But be careful. Some people 'cheat' - adding meaningless links to wikis, creating fake blogs purely to create inbound links for a site, and other spam techniques. But this can backfire. If you use these techniques, you can end up being banned from search results for good.
Keyword optimising your site content
What does keyword optimising content involve?
Just like you can tweak your page title and <meta> tags to improve your search results, well-structured pages can deliver great SEO benefits.
This is essentially an extension of the work you've already done to optimise your page title and <meta> tags. You're just going through and rewriting the copy on your site to make sure your chosen keywords are included in the body copy (the text that's visible to site visitors) as well as the HTML header.
The rules of thumb are pretty simple:
- Try and be consistent, literal and relevant in the language you use
- Try and write titles that include similar language to what's on the page
- Write anchor text (the text behind which a hyperlink is hidden) that's relevant to the target page
- Make sure relevant keywords are included in the body text on the page as well as the titles
- Use common sense: don't write on-page copy that sounds stupid just because you want to get a keyword in.
Making your dealership site content unique
The duplicate content filter
When you search for something on Google, at the bottom of your list of search results you will often see 'Duplicate content omitted'. This means that a filter has been applied by the search engine that removes from the results any websites that appear to give identical content. The search engine is aiming to add value for the searcher, by giving a list of results that aren't all identical.
What does this mean for me?
Your free dmABS site comes complete with structure and website copy. Great news if you want to get selling quickly! But you're not the only dmClub dealer: and if you install this site without making any changes to the text on the pages, your site will be an exact duplicate of sites installed by some other dmClub dealers. This means that if you're not the top search result for relevant keywords, your dealership may be omitted by a search engine as a duplicate result.
What can I do?
Scan the web for duplicate sites: Go to http://www.copyscape.com/ and enter your site URL. This will give you a list of other identical sites. Then you can use the Webconfs Similar Page Checker to assess which areas are most duplicated. Sometimes, just changing the wording a bit can be enough to get your pages past the duplicate content filter - meaning that you'll stand out from the crowd, rather than disappearing behind a duplicate content filter.
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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