1.) Sites Made Entirely Out Of Flash As any SEO can tell you, or nearly any web designer with the slightest data concerning the behavior of search engine spiders, coming up with a site entirely in flash may be a recipe for disaster. As search engines become a lot of refined, the sport of search engine optimization has become a lot of complex....indeed, the method of becoming a highly ranked web site has become quite a complicated task. However at the foremost basic level, sites designed in flash are basically invisible to search engines. A large element of determining the relevancy of a web site by a quest engine spider lies within the spiderability (ability of the spider to crawl) of top of the range, keyword made content. In the automotive trade, there are literally thousands of keywords that can be built into a web site to dramatically increase traffic. In west palm beach alone, the location of a second user automobile dealership I'm currently in the process of optimizing for, there are literally tons of automotive related keywords that will be used to pull new traffic. This suggests that any new content that can be engineered into the site, any content which contains keywords that customers might be looking out for, is content that may and should be seen by the search engines. It's content that should build it onto the web. If this content is presented in flash, however, it can never be indexed, and can thus provide fully no price to ranking goals of the site. The underside line is: 2.) Duplicate Content For those sites not engineered entirely in flash, a good more ominous problem is sometimes lurking. Duplicate content is abhorred by search engines. As many may apprehend, a great deal of keyword made spam sites are generated dynamically through scripts that scrape the web for content that is possible to be probe for by the general public. With a technique designed to make revenue through volume, huge spam networks have been created (thousands of web sites are generated) by scraping or stealing content from legitimate websites. Consequently, search engines approach duplicate content through a process known as canonicalization. What this suggests is the the search engines have a look at sites containing duplicate content and build a judgment concerning which site best represents the content contained on all of the sites. Whichever website is chosen as the most relevant for the content it contains then becomes the sole site that is given any weight by the search engines and all other sites are fully devalued...or de-listed. To illustrate how in depth this problem is, visit any dealer.com site. Then examine any non-flash content, choose a text string (maybe a bit of text from the concerning us section), and enter that text into dealership websites google or yahoo with quotes around it. The results are astounding. Google has crawled literally thousands of pages created by dealer.com that contain the exact same content. In fact, nearly every page created by dealer.com that's in the slightest bit search engine friendly (that means it was at the very least not built in flash), is keyword content that belongs to hundreds of pages already on the net. The bottom line is: Several Dealer Websites do nice damage to themselves by having their only spiderable content be content that exists in duplicate on the pages of dozens, tons, or perhaps thousands of comparable sites. Any site containing non-original content will very seemingly be heavily penalized within the SERPS (search engine result pages), or will be de-listed altogether. 3.)Hidden Sitemaps and Links One amongst the first ways in which to garauntee that a website can be utterly indexed (all pages can be crawled and included within the SERPS) is to include a sitemap on index pages or main pages that are sure to be crawled. A sitemap is basically a list of links to all or any of the pages on the positioning, organized in an organized fashion. The inclusion of sitemaps is seen by many seo's as essential, and is a step many dealer web site have taken in the correct direction regarding designing sites that have a probability to rank well. What they do wrong in this regard is the inclusion of sitemaps whose links are either a.) Hidden Behind Flash Movies or b.) Hidden using CSS. Hiding text behind a flash movie is fairly straightforward considering Flash typically floats higher than any site content when properly positioned, and is desirably for many designers wishing to create a seamless and immersive flash experience for their visitors. This has largely been the goal of many dealer designers like BZ results. While typically superbly designed, the templates set up by such corporations are usually designed in such a way that links, sitemaps, and often keyword wealthy text is hidden from human eyes in an try to lure search engine spiders into indexing deeper pages. This kind of design trick could are a work around resolution in the past, however it has become a serious no-no within the SEO world. A basic rule is that search engine spiders have a great aversion to any attempts at trickery. This means that if you've got hidden content on your website, whether or not it be links to other pages or simply text, you may be penalized within the SERPS, or de-listed. Search engines see hidden content as an attempt to trick search engines into thinking a page is about one thing different than is being showed to that site's visitors. As you can imagine, in the eyes of a search engine, this makes such a website irrelevant to any or all search terms. The underside line is: 4.)Significant Reliance on Meta Tags In the early days of the internet, a lot of less subtle techniques were needed to deliver terribly high quality search results to users. As the online became a place where revenue was thought of by several to be directly related to traffic volume, sites hungry for profit began to use the system in place to deliver more and additional traffic. In the past, search engines used what are known as meta tags to work out what a site was about, and therefore what sorts of searches it should be shown for. Meta tags are primarily tags written in the pinnacle of HTML documents that contain a list of keywords relevant to the site (as determined by the webmaster), and an outline of the site. This information was once the first technique for determining relevancy within the SERPS. Because of misuse, but, the utilization of meta tags has become nearly obsolete. Unfortunately, several dealer websites haven't kept up with the days, and still rely on meta tags jointly of the sole ways they inform search engines of their content. This is often typically done with a terribly large list of words within the "keyword" metatag. This kind of optimization will be seen by examining the supply code of any dealer.com, bz results, reynolds & reynolds, or cobalt site. What is even additional disturbing is that the keywords in these meta tags are usually the most general and so a number of the foremost competitive keywords in the industry. As a poignant example, my current consumer's recent web site failed to contain the words "west palm beach" or "used cars" in its keyword list. These keywords were the most vital keywords for driving traffic to this site. Instead, dealer.com selected to incorporate in its keywords a listing of every automotive manufacturer in the world....even though my consumer rarely sells a range of these brands. Additionally, for the native keywords that were included, there were major spelling errors that in this case held fully no worth for my client. The underside line is: Many Dealer Websites still see meta tags as a viable means that of communicating a website's content, and remain for many sites the sole technique exposure. The utilization of meta tags in SEO is, at best, a slightly useful means of optimizing a page, if the right keywords are chosen, and at worst, completely worthless as a tool in increasing search engine position or relevance. 5.)Poor Keyword Research/Decisions/Optimization As was mentioned in my treatment of the utilization of meta tags, the bulk of dealer websites fail to require into consideration the large selection of relevant keywords offered and optimize solely for the most highly competitive and least targeted terms. For sites just like the one being optimized for my consumer, a level on the "long tail" is the foremost effective dealer leads method in gaining quality traffic. What this means in terms of keyword selection and seo is that the keywords that are of most importance don't seem to be those that get the foremost searches and are the foremost competitive. What this means is that the foremost highly qualified keywords, and those presumably to bring in buying customers are those keywords that are on the long tail, bring in less searches, however are a lot of relevant to our consumers. This implies that choosing the key phrase "used cars in west palm beach Florida" would be much a lot of effective in bringing customers than the term "used cars," that is arguably a very competitive phrase. Additionally, keyword optimization for a word like jaguar wouldn't be nearly as effective in our treatment as, say, "jaguar s sort Florida." Several dealer websites ignore altogether the necessity to optimize each for specific key phrases, and specifically targeting and tailoring keywords locally. The more specific and tailored the keyword, the better. Though such terms will undoubtedly generate less traffic, they will be a lot of highly targeted. With effort, a large list can be compiled and can be used to get traffic that is cheaper (when employed in pay-per-click campaigns) and conjointly a lot of more effective. The underside line is: Many Dealer Websites are unwisely optimizing for keyword that are too competitive and not targeted (both in terms of attracting customers who are ready to shop for and in terms of attracting native clientel.) Keywords that are not well targeted are useless. They lead to high exit rates, wasted resources and WASTED MONEY. 6.)Major Style Flaws (not anticipating the shoppers wants) As anyone involved in the new Web 2.zero Culture can tell you, the internet is shifting. Internet users are increasingly hungry in their search for information. They are finicky and impatient and are most involved with finding the information they are wanting for in a an efficient manner. The times of flashing lights, rotating banners, animated gifs and marquees is far behind us, and the times of flash intros and bandwidth hungry animations appears to fading away as well. To switch the previous web may be a come to simplicity, a come back to what matters most on the internet; information. In some ways in which, many dealer website have taken this sentiment to heart in that they need begun to incorporate a giant wealth of information about individual cars on their sites. In fact, this was a significant selling purpose for my shopper in his initial call to outsource his website development to one of the main dealer site developers. Where Dealer websites have largely missed the boat, but, is in creating sites that are very flashy and appear good in their attempt to attract customers, however are off the mark in anticipating what their client is actually wanting for once they visit a website. Every hit a dealer site receives is an opportunity for that web site to convince the client of the trustworthiness, helpfulness, and price that may be offered by that dealership. In print and tv advertising flashy advertising has worked well, but on the web their has been a serious shift. Folks have learned to tune out anything that tries to hard to grab their attention. Nobody clicks on those popups claiming you've got won $10,000, and peoples eyes are no longer drawn or remain fastened to text that scrolls. Web users, as the philosophy of Web 2.zero emphasizes, are a lot of drawn to well organized, easy to understand information. We have a tendency to skim the pages we have a tendency to browse, switch windows quickly, and ignore content and data that's not readily at hand. I would even go as way to mention that any extraneous material isn't solely unnecessary, however is an obstacle in helping customers to seek out the information that they're primarily searching for. Additionally, several Dealers make the error of making an attempt to mirror their real life presence on the web, meaning their web site become the equivalent of the everyday ways in which dealerships have hooked customers within the past. A Dealer Web site ought to not be giant stickers and balloons in cyberspace. Whereas a loud looking sign and gimmicks could work well to attract drive by customers, it doesn't work well on the internet anymore. The underside line is: Dealers waste their customer's time and insult their intelligence by attempting to hook them on the internet the identical method you hook them on their lots The bulk of web users are less impressed by flashy style and are more glad when presented with the data they are looking for in an simple to understand fashion. 7.) Very little to no use of analytics For any web marketer, the employment of analytics (measures of web site usage) is crucial in making highly effective sites that provide the most effective come on investment. In the past, analytics programs were beyond the scope of tiny businesses or beyond the flexibility of bound suppliers to offer their clients. Nowadays, but, highly refined analytics programs can be obtained at very little to no cost, and several dealer site developers provide restricted or maybe additional extensive analytics as a worth added service. For those providers who do provide top quality analytics, kudos, except for many out there (like dealer.com)....analytics that are useful in creating changes to the site that can truly increase traffic, productivity or ROI are severely lacking. There's more to web site statistics than merely variety of clicks. Analysis of page views, exit points, conversion ratios, and abundant additional is important to tweaking a website therefore that the most leads can be generated. Trying at a real life example of this lack of analytics comes from my expertise with my current shopper and their use web analytics. Once my very own analysis of their web site and therefore the implementation of google analytics (which far surpassed their previous measures), we were in a position to determine that their landing page was losing almost 0.5 of all new visitors. This was astounding, not solely as a result of it meant that they were losing 0.5 of all of their traffic when the first page load, but conjointly with the realization that traffic could be greatly increased merely by redirecting to the main inventory page. (that makes sense considering our model of the new internet client, who is a lot of inquisitive about data than anything else.) The bottom line is: Dealers are losing giant parts of consumers to style mistakes that can't be tracked due to poor analytics. Furthermore, Dealers do no typically have the ability to configure their websites to the degree necessary to assist their website improve. Web web site design isn't a one step process....it needs a degree of testing with trial and error. 8.) Illegal redirections Illegal redirections are the backbone of the spam industry (if it can be called that). Their use through javascript, meta refresh, and several sophisticated methods of cloaking (exchanging one website for an additional behind the scenes) is an art that has been perfected....and also the search engines are perfecting new ways of detecting this sneaky redirects. Now, it can be argued that redirection and cloaking has its advantages, and it does. For instance, one might use javascript to detect browser versions and then redirect to the page most easily viewed by the detected browser. Or perhaps a redirect may be place in place in order to do testing on totally different ads or lead generation techniques. If you examine several dealer websites, you'll be able to see this type of redirection taking place. After all, you will sometimes see the script run quickly before the page loads....being confronted with a "determining properties" title page before you're brought to the main site. This tactic is very illegal in the SEO world, the globe of google, and is a recipe for disaster if utilized on your website. It's almost unfathomable that this type of redirection remains occurring, especially with the common information that such tricks are a certain fire means to be de-listed completely. Another problem plaguing dealer websites is a lack of proper redirection on sites that carry a lot of than one domain name or exist with multiple sub domains. As was mentioned earlier, duplicate content hurts the listing of your website. The means search engines see it, duplicate content exists if two domain names purpose to the identical site. Thus, if a site like my shoppers: usedcarwestpalmbeach.net points to the identical IP address as his other domain: autoadviceoffl.com, google can see duplicate content as a result of it sees both domains as seperate entities. This is also true in terms of the employment of subdomains...especially the WWW. For many dealers, their website can be accessed at dealersite.com] or dealersite.com. Google treats these as totally different entities, and a lot of typically then not, punishes each versions of the positioning for duplicate content. This needs to be fixed with a properly configured 301 redirect, that could be a permanent redirect. 9.) Backlinks For Google, one amongst the most important measures of a site's relevance is the quantity of links pointing to that site. This is often true for the opposite search engines additionally, and appears to increasingly be a main measure in the ranking of websites in the SERPS. Quality backlinks from sites that the search engines deem "authorities" are the foremost valuable links which will be obtained. Additionally, backlinks ought to have anchor text (the text that's hyperlinked) that are relevant to the keywords on the site. Google's infamous Page Rank, relies upon this model of backlinking, and consequently has facilitated the increase of google as the internets most used search engine. Backlinks are arguably the most vital side of SEO. Building backlinks is additionally arguably the MOST IGNORED seo tactic by nearly all of the foremost players in dealer site game. Searches for cars in most major cities reveal results targeted to dealership sites solely within the pay-per-click side. Dealer sites nearly never show up within the organic side, and those that do have little question concentrated their efforts on backlink building. This can be a true drawback in the industry. Dealers are doling out thousands of dollars a month to websites that are paying for traffic they may be getting for free....with proper backlinking and minimal optimization techniques. The bottom line is; Dealers are losing customers by not doing proper backlinking, thus separating one amongst the most important ways for increasing ranking in the organic SERPS. Backlinking isn't an automated method, but requires a arrange of actions and follow through. 10.) Poorly Fashioned URLs Making URL's which will be simply spidered is easy if a few key rules are followed. Initial and foremost, URLs should be properly fashioned and must clearly link to their correct destination. Whether in a flash movie or as a simple hyperlink, I am often shocked to see how usually broken links exist. (these serve only to require off from the credibility of the dealership and causes users to go away your website). Additional importantly for SEO purposes, though, is the employment of URLS that are created dynamically....which means they appear one thing like /vehicle_model?id=12324213. This URL is not search engine friendly because search engines don't usually properly crawl dynamically generated URL's, and if you're lucky enough to have a dynamic URL indexed, additional usually then not, the dynamic content is stop, leaving you with one thing like: /vehicle_model. This URL will not result in the supposed page, and will result in duplicate content being indexed if such links are crawled at all. Any server running apache with mod rewrite access can fix this simply, and should fix it. Properly formed URLS that are further optimized to contain keywords will go a protracted way in serving to the ranking of a site, and as we have mentioned, getting more pages indexed properly means that more content and more hits. The bottom line is; There is no excuse for broken links, malformed and seo unfriendly URLS Rewriting URLS so they're search engine friendly is not necessarily a tough process and is one that can greatly improve the ranking a relevance of a site.
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Sites Created Entirely Out Of Flash As any SEO will tell you, or nearly any web designer with the slightest knowledge about the behavior of search engine spiders, planning a website entirely in flash could be a recipe for disaster. As search engines become additional sophisticated, the game of search engine optimization has become additional complex....indeed, the method of turning into a highly ranked site
Is your dealership spending thousands of dollars per month on 3rd party lead providers? Are you slashing your front end gross profit for your lead prospects
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