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There is something that needs to be addressed, in most cases you will find posts on this blog of the educational type, and at its heart this topic is also meant to teach. This post deals with the very real obstacle people who sell search engine optimization must deal with, and as potential customers what you will need to understand as well.

To guarantee or not to guarantee results?

The reality is many search engine optimization companies are faced with the decision of whether or not to provide a guarantee on their services. Innately, clients feel more comfortable when they are offered a guarantee and you’ll close more business that way; however, the reality is—you can’t really guarantee anything and here’s why:

1.    We cannot know what your competition is doing
2.    We cannot know what search engines will do
3.    We cannot predict search volume accurately (long term)
4.    We cannot predict market demand (long term)
5.    We cannot  know exactly what timeline your site will be on

Expanding On These 5 Points

At the end of the day, it’s just too difficult to know exactly what is going to happen. We can make our best guess, but that’s all it really is—money back guarantee is just a calculated risk based on several assumptions.

When we say you cannot know what your competition is doing, that is true for the most part. You can look at certain aspects, monitor their site, and get a pretty good idea what their overall strategy is. The safest decision we usually make from looking at competition is simply whether or not it looks like they’re doing anything online at all.  Usually it’s pretty clear who is and who isn’t.  Though most businesses at least have a website—often times that’s about it.

The second, and most obvious, point is that we can’t know what the search engines will do. As internet marketers we are charged with the task of understanding as much as we can about certain search engines—and what they like and dislike. That said, we do not control the search algorithm and it’s impossible to predict. The best we can do is follow best practices and react when things change.

The last three points are all more about our inability to definitively see what the future will hold. We can use previous numbers, industry traffic trends, and make professional assumptions. To get a better idea, here’s an example: Let’s say you had a website about Swine flu. You’ve hypothetically owned it since 2001, had lots of information on it, had a great url, and some decent links. Now fast forward to spring of 2009, swine flu hysteria strikes and your website is getting a million hits a week. The influx of traffic wasn’t dictated by SEO; it wasn’t about anything other than being in the right place at the right time. While this is an extreme example, it still illustrates that we truly cannot know. We can only make our best estimate. An extreme case will always be pretty accurate, but we find that managing our client’s expectations is much easier than making bold predictions and hoping we are right.

Bottom Line

There are simply too many variables when it comes to predicating a sites traffic increase, and in reality, it’s not about increasing traffic in most cases—it’s about increasing the actions you want. If you were trying to generate leads, what good would 10X the traffic be if it didn’t get you 10X the leads or sales?  It is very easy to get caught up in terms like page rank, overall visitors, and time on site—when the real number you want to look at is ROI.  That’s what we focus on!

Anyone who works in Search Engine Optimization will tell you that anchor text from inbound links is one of the most important factors in boosting a site’s search engine rankings. Anchor text is the text you click on to follow a link to another webpage. Why is this important in SEO? In short, anchor text tells search engines what the linked webpage is about. If 100 links point to a page with the anchor text “Discount Italian shoes,” Google, Yahoo and the other major engines will say, “Hey, this site is a good place to find information about discount Italian shoes! Let’s place them higher in the search results for that term.”

The importance of inbound anchor text is SEO 101, but what many people want to know is how internal anchor text (links on a website that point to its own pages) will affect page traffic. The response to this topic is not as clear-cut as it is with inbound links; however, some of the world’s top SEOs have done extensive testing with internal links and come to some interesting conclusions.

SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin acknowledges that using internal links to point to less visited pages on your site can give them a “positive nudge” in the search engines. For example, if your homepage is a PageRank (PR) of 8, while an inner page is a meager PR1, it is possible to pass some of the stronger page’s “link juice” along.

To keep a consistent, hypothetical example, let’s say the inner page is an article about buying Italian shoes. You want the page to rank well for keywords related to this topic, so rather than placing a link to the article on the main page that reads “click here,” the anchor text should say “Discount Italian shoes buyer’s guide.” Note that the most important keywords are at the beginning of the text to grab people’s attention and because search engines weigh the beginning words of anchor text more heavily than those at the end.

Fishkin continues to say that this strategy doesn’t seem to work when the anchor text points towards the index page. You can spend a lot of time and effort crafting links to the index that incorporate great keywords, but results seem to show that the anchor text “Home” is just as effective.

How to Craft Effective Internal Anchor Text

So how do you go about writing the best internal anchor text for your inner pages? There are a few strategies that SEO experts strongly recommend:

• Tailor internal anchor text to suit your strongest keywords – “Click here” or “Find out more” won’t cut it when it comes to writing anchor text. Use a keyword tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool or SEOmoz’s Term Extractor to find out what search terms to target. Internal anchor text is great for targeting “long tail” keywords (3 words or more) so use this to your advantage!
• Keep internal links at a productive level – You may get the urge to link to every page on your site from your PR9 index; however, this usually sacrifices any hope the site has of being considered “user-friendly” and makes it look just plain ugly. What’s more, stuffing keyword-rich anchor text on any page puts you at risk for a dreaded Google penalty.
• Keep older content in mind as you build out your site – Let’s say you’ve just written an article about upscale fashion for business men and women. Within the article you mention several styles of Italian shoes. Keep the link juice flowing to your discount Italian shoes buyer’s guide by pointing appropriate anchor text towards this previous post.

There’s little that can help your website’s search engine rankings more than links from a well-established domain. But if you really want to go the extra mile you must optimize your internal link anchor text. Use your most important pages with strong visitor activity to funnel traffic to articles, blog posts and content pages that are newer or have been forgotten by time.

The recent economic recession hitting the automotive industry has taken serious tolls on the auto dealership industry, which is why it is more critical than ever to optimize your dealership website for maximum e-commerce potential. No matter what auto manufacturers your dealership deals—know that any dealership can take simple steps to start ranking higher in the search engines. In this guide we’re going to give you the lowdown of 5 easy-to-do steps that’ll ensure your dealership website will rocket its way up the search engine results.

1. Establish A Strong Relationship With Your Website Vendors
If you’re currently working with a website vendor, know that it’s critical that you make the most out of your relationship and try to build a working relationship that’ll be conducive to more efficient workflow. Though many website vendors have a notorious reputation for atrocious customer service, you’ll have to be patient and work through the hurdles to ensure you’re getting the service you want and need.

2. Find a way to get search-engine friendly content on your website
Whether you’re using an in-house staff writer or you’re outsourcing your content to a third party—it’s critical that you find a way to get quality content regularly posted on your website.
•  Many auto dealership websites lack severely when it comes to search-engine friendly content. In addition, most auto dealership websites are ubiquitous with flash media, which the search engines can’t spider; therefore, most have difficulty ranking in the search engines. If this is currently the case with your website, try talking to your website vendor or third-party web master to fix some of the inherent web design problems preventing the search engines from spidering your site.

• To combat the non-spiderable components installed on your website, and to make sure you’re getting adequate content refreshed on your site—create a workaround system that’ll allow you to post new content on a daily-to-weekly basis. One of the best (and cheapest) ways to achieve this is with a blog.

• Where there sometimes seems to be a negative reaction to the word “blog,” know that a blog is simply a systemized way to easily post new content. Whether you  choose to write about newly arrived vehicle models, promotions or service deals—a blog is an excellent way to nail a handful of birds with one stone. A well-crafted blog will help you generate:

• Spiderable content that’s search-engine friendly
• Link Juice
• Potential customers
• Excellent promotional possibilities
• A chance to showcase other areas of your dealership, like your service department, to boost revenue

3. Systematizing a weekly schedule to post new content
Whether you choose to generate your content in-house or you choose to outsource to a third party—make sure your copywriters or third party knows what you’re aiming for short and long-term.

•  Whether it’s a blog post or an article, you’ll want to make sure the information is informative and not too promotional.

• You’ll also want to make sure to post one to two articles or post per week at the  minimum.

•  Whether you choose to shoot for 2 articles per week or 5 articles per week, commit    to a long-term schedule and continue to meet or exceed your weekly goal.
•    Again, make sure your content is authoritative, informational and top-notch. Make sure to have a proofreader proof all your content before posting live.

4. Website Health Check
Aside from content, you’ll also want to make sure and do a routine health check examination of your website. Whether you, your web developer, or your web vendor controls your website—make sure you check the following on a regular basis:
•    Check your website for broken links
•    Depending on your link report, you’ll need to fix any broken links you might have
•    Update your sitemap
•    Optimize your Meta descriptions, title tags, and Alt tags
•    Keep track of your analytics data and optimize, adjust and week according to what   you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong
•    If you’re working with a website vendor, remain persistent with your needs and be patient when dealing with customer service despite how challenging that might be.

5.    Actively pursue high-quality/authoritative links
Another key component to help your website gain authoritativeness, search-engine friendliness, and ultimately rocket your way up the organic listings is high quality, highly authoritative links. In order to achieve this, you’ll want to:

• Include your URL on all promotional materials

•  If you belong to auto associations, the chamber of commerce, or any other community, statewide, or nationwide organizations or institutions—make sure to use those links as well as generate back linking.

• Make sure to list your website in the top directories. Use Strongest Links to find the top-rated directories on the web as well as detailed information on each of the directories. Aim to list in the top 20 directories.

Bottom Line

Whether your dealership’s website is operating in the black or operating in the red, use these 5 surefire steps to outrank your competition and dramatically increase your web traffic and subsequently your showroom traffic.

Whether you’re new to search engine optimization or you’re currently using a marketing company or website vendor service for your dental practice’s e-commerce needs—you’ll want to make sure your website is getting the traffic you need to bring in the business you need. Extensive research indicates that many dental practices are significantly behind the times when it comes to web design, search engine optimization and e-commerce.

Does Your Website Compare to The Competition?

As you may already know—Yellow Page’s ads can run up to more than $50,000 per year to advertise in; however, the paper advertising industry (like yellow pages) is being phased out by the overwhelming number of internet users that (in today’s interactive market) rely almost entirely on the web to make their decisions. If your practice doesn’t have a website, you’ll unequivocally be passed up by the fierce competition of dental practices that have gone interactive. If your dental practice does have a website, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Generally, most dental practices don’t even have a website, and the ones that do are lacking in the fundamental marketing and SEO concepts that comprise a fully-optimized website that will drive the business and referrals needed for your business growth.

5 Ways To Improve Your Website For Optimal Traffic

With a vast array of specialties in the dental profession and oral surgery, it’s necessary to advertise and market your niche to drive business.

• Web Design: A major problem ubiquitous with websites in the dental profession is the overabundance of indistinguishable websites. By that, many dental practices opt to go with website vendors or niche dental/medical website management companies that service web development and optimization. The problem is, however, these types of vendors also service a multitude of other dentists in the local area. This poses a number of inherent problems because your website’s design appears identical to your local competitions’. In addition, many of these vendors comparatively charge exorbitant sums in monthly fees and deliver additional sub par services that make your website anything but friendly to the search engines. The cause can be related to a serious lack of quality content, web design, navigation, keywords analysis and SEO. To get the optimal results your practice needs, look for a company and web designer that’ll take the time to research your individual market niche and deliver the hand-tailored quality your website needs to stand out in the search engines.

• Opt Ins: If your dental practice puts out a newsletter or sends out mailers, an excellent way to boost business, referrals and clientele base is to take advantage of opt-in email blasts.

• Video: Whether you specialize in oral surgery, prosthodontics, pediatric dentistry or cosmetics—video and other multimedia tools used with appropriate alt tags can help boost your website’s authoritativeness and serve as a lucrative advertising vehicle for your practice.

•  Content: From general dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, patient education, dental tips, to FAQs—regularly updating quality content is key to ranking in the search engines. Fresh authoritative content serves as informative information for potential clients as well as the search engine spiders that crawl your website. The more authoritative content you have, the more authoritative Google and other search engines will deem your site, thus ranking you higher in the search engine results and ultimately bringing more traffic to your site.

• SEO and PPC Focused: If you’re practice specializes in a specific specialty, target keyword in both your PPC and SEO efforts to maximize your marketing potential.

Bottom Line

In a profession that’s significantly behind the times with interactive marketing and e-commerce, having a search engine optimized website is vital to your dental practice’s success. Today, just having a website isn’t enough. By optimizing your website’s design, updating content, and marketing your specific dental niche with an SEO and PPC focus—you’ll be outranking the majority of local competition in a matter of months.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get your website from the D-list to the A-list, listing in the directories can play an instrumental role in boosting your website’s potential in a number of ways including: Passes on page rank/ link juice, amplified website authoritativeness, and boosted traffic to name a few. The trick is, not all directories are equal, which is why the goal is to get the most out of the web directories.

Why Directories Are Important
Not all web directories are created equally, which means they don’t all provide the same results. Strongest Links offers info on over 200 directories on the web and gives you all the info on price, subscriptions, submission requirements, the directories page rank, and so on. The mechanics of listing in the directories as well as the bottom line benefits are as follows:

• The most authoritative directories help search engines understand what your site is about and help improve your relevancy and position.

• Having links to authoritative directories intrinsically helps improve your website’s authoritativeness and promotes link juice.

• Many search engines like Google make it extremely rewarding for a webmaster to  list their site in many different directories. In that, the more directories you’re listed in—the more Google and other search engines will view your site as authoritative and subsequently reward you with higher page rank.

• By listing in the top directories you’ll also inherently boost traffic from web surfers looking through the directories. In addition, you’ll also get the front-end traffic from the search-engine results as Google and other search engines continue to boost your authoritative web pages up the listings.

Nuts and Bolts of Listing In The Directories
Generally, to list in the directories your website has to be on point. Though many directories differ in their submission requirements, the general guidelines to be considered are:

• No broken links
• Must have highly authoritative content
• No pages can be under construction
• Every aspect of the website has to be fully functional
• Website content has to fall within acceptable directory criteria
• *In most cases, directories will not refund your money if they should decide that your website isn’t worthy of being listed, so you’ll want to get it right the first time.

Types Of Directories

As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to target the top 20 directories listed on Strongest Links. An example of some of these directories are as follows: Yahoo Directory, Business.com, and Best Of The Web to name a few off the top-5 list. A couple of other important directories and web guides are: About, the GoGuides, JoeAnt and Gimpsy. Know too, if you’re on a limited budget, there are several free directories that are excellent to list in like: DMOZ, Joeant, and Gimpsy.

Topical or Niche-Specific Directories

Many niche specific directories are focused on quality and provide static text links to your site. These directories not only improve your site’s relevancy in search results but also drive a significant amount of prequalified traffic to your site. Many niche specific directories are works of love and provide free listings.

Be Aware Of Bogus Directories

Some unscrupulous money hungry parties have established web directories that accept any site that pays them; the catch is that the directories are bunk and usually don’t last long before Google blacklists them. Most of these directories, which are created to Sell AdSense and cheap link rentals, have increasingly made it easy for other bunk directory providers to create garbage directories to collect your money. In addition, you’ll also want to be aware of duplicate directories, which are sites such as emfind.com, pearlfind.com, moonfind.com, findeyes.com, beyondfind.com, and findww.com. Generally these sites are easy to spot because they all look exactly the same. If you’re unsure about the directory you’re considering listing in,  just remember–the top 20 on Strongest Links is always  a safe bet. If, however, you’re going to venture elsewhere, know that well referenced directories with lots of high quality links from editorially robust sources are likely to carry far more value than those whose links stem from directory lists, SEO-centric communities or paid/affiliate links.

Bottom Line
For all intensive purposes, listing in the directories can dramatically influence your search engine rankings, organic traffic, authoritativeness, and overall link juice. If you plan on listing in the directories, make sure your website is completely functional and know that selective is good. If you’re site has all the right refinements, it’s worth paying the extra cash to list in the authoritative directories as it will pay higher dividends in the long run.

In our previous blog, How To Save $300,000 On Your Car Dealership Webpage In Over 5 Years, we discussed how dealer website vendors like Cobalt Group, BZ Results, Izmo Cars, ADP and others often offer SEM services with an expensive price tag and a host of unforeseen technical tribulations after you sign up. In today’s blog, however, we’re going to take an investigative look at the industry at large and disclose some of the shady business practices and conflict of interest issues that have steadily grown ubiquitous in the major-money-making auto-dealer website vendor industry.

Know What You’re Getting Into
For some time, a number of dealer website vendors have been suspected of unethical policies and shady biz tactics regarding conflict of interest issues and non-compete business practices with their auto dealership clients. Since dealer website vendors, by in large, monopolize the SEM markets for auto dealerships, it’s critical that the auto dealerships opting for the services first know what they’re getting into before they agree to relinquishing their e-commerce over to a vendor!

A Deeper Look At Auto Dealer Website Vendors
To get a better idea of the background of dealer website vendors, we’ll take a deeper look inside the Cobalt Group. Cobalt was one of the first auto web site vendor companies in the game; they made partnerships early on with some OEM’s. Recently, Cobalt made an agreement with General Motors that makes them GM’s preferred vendor. The result of this business marriage creates conflict for GM auto dealerships. GM dealers are now in many cases strong armed to use Cobalt solutions or else they can’t get a hyperlink to the local dealer. If, for example, Microsoft did something like this–there would be anti-trust talk; nevertheless, GM and Cobalt still get away with it.

In addition, Cobalt’s 2009 revenue is expected to hit $170 million this year. By the end of next year, John Holt—CEO of the Cobalt Group—anticipates that his company will be operating Web sites for 10,000 of the 22,000 auto dealers in the country! This is bad on a number of levels. For one, Cobalt (as do most all auto dealership website vendors) pay little attention to conflict of interest issues between competing clients. If you live in a metro area and own a GM-based auto dealership with a Cobalt website—chances are your competing GM dealership down the road also uses a Cobalt website. Secondly, dealers currently pay a monthly fee of about $500 per month for a Web site, with added services such as e-mail and search engine marketing bringing the total bill to as much as $10,000 per month for some dealers. With Cobalt’s projected growth and increasing monopoly over GM dealers, those rates may quickly jump to unprecedented levels.

Conflict Of Interest
Aside from Cobalt, many other vendors like BZ results, Izmo Cars, ADP and others are also known for having conflict of interest with their clients. If you’re curious as to how many of your dealership’s competitors also use the same website vendor, simply Google the competitors in your area and have a look at their websites. The results will undoubtedly be staggering. Another huge con to vendor services is that they offer you a website that’s not even conducive to SEO. BZ results, for example, offers “solutions” that include webpage design littered with “bling” and “flash.”  Though you may initially think it looks good, the truth is—search engines can’t even read it, much less rank it! In addition, there are much more technologically advanced programs that are more cost efficient and SEO friendly.

Bottom Line
When you look at the cost breakdown of most website vendor’s e-commerce solutions, the attached price tag is astounding: An inventory solution like IOL or others may run 200 dollars a month.  A good web site may run $2500 to $5000 a month, while a good CRM tool can cost well over $1000 a month plus all the other necessities with heavy premiums. So, if you look at the total cost these companies are charging ($5,000 to 6,000 per month) it comes out to be about $60,000 a year or more per client. The real knee jerker is that most of these companies like Cobalt serve more than 5000 dealers nationally, which equates to a revenue of upwards of $300,000,000 annually!

Why pay someone this amount of money when they clearly don’t have your dealership’s best interest in mind?

With the recent economic hard-hits to the auto and auto dealership industries, many dealerships are finding it more and more difficult to generate the sales they need to stay operating in the black. One key marketing tool that can help boost your sales is email marketing—when done correctly. Recent research done by the Direct Marketing Association revealed that email marketing in 2008 generated an average return of investment of $45.06 for every dollar spent on the initial campaign!  In this blog, we’re going to show you the top 10 ways to correctly run your dealership email marketing efforts so you can separate yourself from the competition.

1. Quality Content Is King

Above all else, quality content is king. Leave out all the noise and fluff and stick to what’s important. Spend the time getting to really know your market and send only what interests them the most. Don’t send a bunch of junk as filler. We are all familiar with the ubiquitous spam emails that pile up in our junk email boxes, yet when it comes to email marketing copy, many dealerships continue to make the same mistakes by loading their emails with a plethora of sales copy that no human wants to read. The consequence is little-to-nill conversion.  In addition, your emails are likely getting picked up by spam filters. The key to writing effective copy that will promote sales is to write engaging copy that’s authoritative, easily digestible and informative. In time, these types of emails (with the right message) will build loyalty, trust, and sales.

2. Build Your Email Lists: Once you’ve started to build loyalty with customers, keep the momentum rolling and start collecting email addresses. Use regular freebees and specials to lure them in, and once you’ve gained their trust, ask your future customer for their email address so you can inform them of upcoming, even more personalized special offers.

3. Build Trust by Announcing Regular Specials

Once you’ve started collecting email addresses, you can send your customers and subscribers regular updates letting them know what your specials are. Sending regular discount offers is a great way to get your customers familiar with you and your site. Ideally, you want to turn first-time customers into regular customers who will buy from you again and again. Offering free services like carwashes, detailing and tire rotations give the perfect opportunity for new potential customers to come down to your dealership and peruse your auto selection while they wait for their free services!

4. Split Testing

So you’ve spent the time to write great copy for your email blast and you’ve sent it out to no avail. One of the key things to remember is that nobody gets it right the first time, which is why you need to test, test, and test again—until you get it right. It is critical that you or your marketing team test the numerous variables (one variable at a time) that combine together to create an effective campaign. These variables include the offer, the creative, the list, the links and the landing page. It may take several test launches, but in the end its worth it to take the time and really examine what you did right and what you did wrong so you can better amalgamate the right marketing components to your to-be customers.

5. Landing Pages

One of the biggest offenders in email marketing is the landing page. Do not just “drop off” the recipient onto the marketers’ home page. Instead, take the time and send them to a custom-designed landing page that is consistent with the offer in the email. Landing pages prevent the recipient from getting lost and ensure that they see what you want them to see first.

6. Link Placement

Perhaps the second biggest offender in email marketing is the placement of the links. You or your marketers should make sure the link is placed either as the (call to action) or just following your email’s call to action. You’re recipient’s attention span will generally be a fraction of a second unless you hook them right away!  Position your call to action and links within the first paragraph of the message. One of the biggest blunders that’ll cost you is to make the email recipient search the message by scrolling to find the link and the overall meaning of the message.

7. Follow up With Your Leads

You can use email to follow up with people you have spoken with personally, but who have not made a purchase. Offer to answer any additional questions they may have, and let them know that you are available to speak with them at their convenience. This can dramatically increase your chances of closing a sale by providing your leads with extra information they’re not expecting.

8. Market Other Departments, Not Just Auto Sales

More often than not, auto dealerships fail to market the other departments of their business including parts service, body shop finance, and auto repair, which are all huge opportunities to generate a ton of cash even when sales are down. Use engaging copy to inform both current and potential customers of your service and why its better than the competition. Let your customers know your mechanics are manufacturer-certified and are more thoroughly trained than the average Joe Shmo mechanic.

9. Make Sign-Up Easy

If you’re trying to run an email marketing campaign, remember—you only need their email address. You might want their first name, so you can personalize their email, but even this should be optional. Don’t require postal address, last name, and especially phone number. Requiring a phone number can often cut your signups by at least 80%. If you choose to go with fields like: prefixes, birthday, or gender—be prepared to get zero returns. Why make it hard?

10. Stay on Target

Know your target market and don’t allow yourself to stray off course. Some marketers randomly send emails to people who have absolutely no interest in what is being advertised. Not only will this type of desperation deliver a very low response rate it can increase your spam complaints. Ask every customer and site visitor if they are interested in receiving e-mail advertisements and promotions from you.

If your email marketing efforts are unsuccessful, take some time to mull over these points. If you think that your email marketing is loaded with sales copy, it could be a sure-fire indication why your efforts are unsuccessful. Take the time and use these tools to pinpoint what your customers want, and then give it to them.

Are you considering using a dealership website vendor for your auto dealership? If your answer is yes, then you need to know that website vendors offer a host of costly tribulations you can otherwise avoid by using professional web design services from the get go! In fact, if you factor in the costly fees associated with most website vendors, the average amount your dealership could be saving over a five year period is nearly—$300,000 dollars! Here are some of the dealership website vendors you may already know about:

• Izmo Cars
• Dealership.com
• bz.com
• Dealeron.com
• Dealersedge.com
• ADP Business Solutions

The Cons Associated With Dealership Website Vendors
Along with the sheer cost of the services, dealership website vendors also present a host of problems you probably want to avoid incurring! Here’s a list of those problems:

• Many dealership website vendors give you very little when it comes to your website’s overall control.

• If problems arise or something needs to be fixed—you’re at the dealership website vendor’s mercy.

• If you want to add a page to your website it can cost you up to $750.00 dollars just to do so.

• If you can’t pay the premiums, the dealership website vendors will literally take your site down.

• You don’t own the rights to your own site—the dealership website vendor does!

• The average cost of service is between per month is around $2,500 to 3,000 dollars!

Many of these dealership website vendors claim to offer marketing solutions that’ll generate Internet traffic, leads, profits and conversions. These services also claim to give you the best in Lead Management Technology and are conducive to Search Engine Optimization. The truth is that none of the above is true, and in the end—your website will be anything but search-engine friendly.

Start Bringing The Traffic Right To Your Showroom

If you opt to go with professional web design and and use SEO principles, your dealership will just keep gaining momentous authority in the search engines. You’ll have someone working for you, not against you. Not to mention, you’ll always be entitled to all your website’s rights regardless if you drop the service. In the end, you’ll save thousands of dollars in expenses; you’ll have your own website custom designed to where you have total control; you’ll be able to add specials easily; you’ll be able to easily support PPC and SEO marketing efforts; and you’ll be able to update inventory for well under $7000!

Bottom Line
Here’s the breakdown between dealership website vendors vs do it yourself:

* $3000 per month multiplied by over 5 years = $300,000

*  Do it yourself = $10,000

*   Savings = $290,000

Though the numbers are staggering—this is not a sales pitch. It’s a reality check! Why waist $290,000 in over five years when you could get far superior results for a fraction of the cost by opting with a website of your own?

TITLE TAG

A title tag is the keyword that appears at the top of your browser and in search engine results like: “Discount shoes – Shoebuy.com – Free Shipping & Return Shipping.”

The title tag is a fundamental component of a webpage.Not only is it the first thing people see as the page loads, but it also helps breed continuity and increase click-through rates in the search engine results.  Some general tips are:

• Put your keywords in front

• Keep title tags below 65 characters to make sure the entire message displays in all search engines. This is one of the most influential aspects to generating website clicks in search engines.
• Use synonym-rich terms to reinforce the overall continuity of on-page content

META DESCRIPTION
A Meta description is the keyword-rich description that appears under the title tag in search results such as: “Discount shoes – on Sale! Here you’ll find a wide variety of discount shoes, all marked down at exceptional values and include free shipping and return shipping…” Notice how the keywords are positioned in front where they belong.

Meta descriptions are also a fundamental aspect of SEO success. Here’s what you need to know about Meta Descriptions:

• Use your keyword research to help determine what words to include.
• You’ll want to work in a variety of keywords and rich synonyms into your Meta description; however, you’ll want to put your keywords right in the front.
• The general rule of thumb is that your Meta Description should be the maximum amount of characters (160) with the important keywords listed in the front. Make your Meta description reinforce your title tag and embody the continuity of your website. Many websites overlook title tags and Meta descriptions; consequently, there’s huge opportunity to attack your market niche.
• Use SEO tools for your keyword research to optimize title tags/Meta descriptions.

OVERALL CONTINUITY
Whether you’re writing title tags or Meta descriptions, continuity is critical. In both your title tags and Meta descriptions, you’ll want to use relevant key words to reinforce your on-page content. If your webpage’s title tags and Meta descriptions repeat the same thing over and over—you’re going to lose a great deal of traffic. Google and the “humans” considering your site aren’t going to be enticed by a repetition of the same key words over and over. If you want your website to be search-engine friendly and hook readers’ attention, then spend the time optimizing your title tags and Meta description. The key thing to remember is that optimizing your title tags and Meta descriptions is one of the quickest ways to increase your website’s traffic without search-engine positioning.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words you choose in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you’re linking to. It tells search engines what the page is about. For example if your car dealership webpage includes a link to an article about “financing your new Chevy Silverado with an APR that won’t balloon,” then your anchor text in the link should reflect those keywords: How to finance a Chevy Silverado without ballooning interest

What Not to Use

If, on the other hand, you use keywords like “click here” or “part 2”—you’re telling people the page is about the subject “click here”. If you use “Part 2″ as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing “part 2″. As you can see, Google and the “humans” reading your anchor text will find well-crafted anchor text much more authoritative than “click here for more info”. The point is to make your anchor text authoritative and digestible. If your anchor text incessantly rambles, it may be a good indication you need to revise: How to go about finding really, really awesome financing deals for your brand spanking new Chevy Silverado so you won’t have to put your kids up for adoption next month and your wife will still love you Know too, to keep your actual links relevant to the content on your page. If you have a car-dealership webpage then make sure your links are about car-related topics and not about World of Warcraft! Here’s some key place to be including anchor text:

• External links - links from other sites
• Internal links - links on your pages’ Navigation maps
• Links on your main page

The Benefits The benefit of wisely using authoritative anchor text is it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. If you’re wondering why Google would even care about something like this when considering page rank—they do! Here’s why: The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages because search engines give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. Google has a special operator: “allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate query-able data, thereby making it evident that Google considers anchor text to be a key indication of page relevance. Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text. Bottom Line

• Yes, Google cares!
• Use anchor text and links that match the content of your webpage
• Make sure your anchor text is both authoritative and digestible for humans and search engines
• Use the right type of links