How Yahoo’s New Technology Affects Your Ranking
With spiders becoming more and more intelligent, it’s necessary to reevaluate your online brand marketing strategies constantly to conform to the new technology. And with Yahoo’s new phrase-based indexing, nothing could be truer. Here’s how you can use Yahoo’s new technology to positively affect your website’s ranking.
1. The first thing you can do to increase your chances of getting picked up by spiders is to place relevant keywords close together on your pages. This makes it easier for the search engines to recognize the relationship.
2. Use related keywords that have been optimized for a particular keyword. That basically means that you use several different words that mean the same thing as your keyword. When you do this, search engines can get a better understanding of the content on your page from the keywords that you use.
3. Optimize several pages of your website for best results. Use different search terms on each page, but make sure they are closely related so the search engines will notice them. This also shows that your content is relevant to your website’s topics.
Yahoo’s new application is different because it focuses more on concepts rather than simple keywords. This website’s explanation uses the concept of “tiger woods” as an example. When you do a search for “tiger woods,” the new application helps return stories that involve golf terms instead of stories about tigers in the woods. It does this by searching through the related keywords in websites and focusing on overall theme and concept.
This is a new and exciting innovation in the area of search marketing and brand recognition. It’s good to see that the major search engines are continually trying to make their services better for online users.
Puttin’ on the Ritz: Luxury Appeals to Customers
If you’ve stepped into one of your local automotive dealerships in the last couple of years, you may have noticed a change. Many dealers of luxury brands are making improvements to their showrooms to make them more attractive and appealing to their customers. If you didn’t know any better, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between the dealer’s facility and a five-star hotel.
That’s because customers enjoy luxury and style. And when they step into a place that’s all decked out, it instills a sense of confidence in the facility and the people who work there.
You can do the same thing with your online brand marketing campaigns. The more stylish your website is, the more attractive it will be to potential customers. Nobody has confidence in a company that has an amateurish website, especially in today’s world where visitors judge your company by its online presence. Here are a few suggestions for making your company’s website more professional and attractive to new and existing clients:
• Break the information up into smaller, easier-to-read chunks. Nothing turns off a webpage visitor faster than seeing a huge block of information with no spaces or breaks.
• Make your website easy to navigate. Visitors don’t want to guess about where clicks will take them. Label the links efficiently to take the guesswork out of navigating through your webpage.
• Put the most important information first. Internet users have dozens of options to get their information. Don’t make them search for it on your website or they’ll just go to a website where it’s easier to find the information they want.
• Write with search engines in mind. This is very important, because if you don’t catch the attention of the web spiders, people doing general searches won’t notice your website. Consider SEO tactics and other tools that ensure a high ranking for places like Google and Yahoo.
With these tips, you can make your company’s website the cyberspace equivalent of a luxury dealership. Cater to your clients by making everything attractive to keep them coming back for more and telling their friends about your website as well.
Automotive Providers not addressing Consumer Needs
Cobalt and Yahoo have been rolling out some good data on automotive consumer behavior trends and I had the fortune of sitting in on their training session Sunday at NADA in the San Francisco this year.
I was really taken at how they had actual data to show what buyers want today:
- Competitive prices
- A good buying experience
If you think about it though, what customers want today hasn’t really changed. What has changed is consumers’ access to the right information and the ability to attain real leverage in the buying process. Dealerships that are genuinely responsive to this are the winners.
The challenge though is “how”?
When I look at the Automotive Search Marketing products and techniques out there, I don’t see this “consumer interest” truly being met the way it should be. A lot of the reason why has to do with the fact that most providers are not responding to the consumers’ true needs and interests. They provide technology for dealers to manage a process, or, they provide marketing that caters to old-school dealer sales techniques. What confuses dealers is that they have outdated marketing strategies wrapped around complicated technology.
Blogging of course is changing this. Blogging not only addresses the SEO need. It also addresses the 32% factor, that is, the 32% of buyers that do not buy within 90 days of submitting their first web inquiry. A good blog that is incorporated effectively should accomplish what a newsletter does except that it works for you ALL MONTH LONG, not just one week a month.
If you break it down to the bare bones benefits (SEO and CRM), it shouldn’t be confusing to dealers.
My message today with dealers is that when leads and prospects come into their realm,
“The goal should be to attain a relationship, not a sale.”
Dealers need to demonstrate to customers that they can and will assist them with their immediate automobile needs and interests as well as their long-term interests.
Search Engine Optimization: Ten Years Later
If you’ve done any work at all with SEO, you might’ve wondered about the history of the concept and some of the changes it’s made since it began. I know I’ve wondered about that several times. Here is an article that explains some of the big changes in the last decade, but I’ve pulled out some of the highlights for quick reference.
• Minor changes in the SEO market have taken place over the years, and they often escape the notice of those in the industry. Taken as a whole, howver, they constitute major changes between today’s techniques and those from ten years ago.
• In the year 2000, Google had just over one billion pages indexed. Today, there are about 10 billion pages indexed. Of course, that figure is ever-growing. The only way the article writer could find the number of pages was to type “the” into the search box and see how many results came back.
• There is now about ten times more competition in the search engine optimization industry than there was in the year 2000.
• Search engines still look for things like keywords, key phrases, body text, title tags and frequency when indexing pages. The article writer suggests not wasting time on meta keyword tags, though, as they are of less importance today than they were years ago.
• Submitting your URL to a search engine is no longer necessary, as the spiders take care of that for you.
• Yahoo and Google are generally the two accepted search engines today, whereas there were several more popular and widely-used ones ten years ago, including Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite and Lycos, among others.
Luckily, the fundamentals of SEO are still a major part of online marketing and other Internet-based industries. We’ll continue to see changes in the near future, but the basic concept will likely remain the same.
Three Ways to Drive Dealership Business with Your Blog
There are several ways you can increase the number of customers that visit your dealership. But any marketing professional will tell you that word-of-mouth is one of the most effective means of advertising. The Internet and online marketing have taken that concept to an entirely new level, though. Here are some ways that you can create an effective blog for your dealership and attract more customers by virtual word-of-mouth.
Show Testimonials on Your Blog
This is the 21st century’s version of telling your friends and family about your great experience as a customer. Ask your satisfied customers to write positive reflections of their experiences and grant you permission to post them online. Some companies even have pre-printed testimonials and ask customers to sign them if they agree with what they say.
Add Content Frequently
In terms of search engine recognition and the greatest chance for exposure, content with specific keywords relevant to your dealership is ideal for advertising your company. Google and Yahoo are more likely to pick up on original and fresh content that is updated frequently. And by frequently, I mean at least five times a week, but ideally every day or even more often than that.
Allow Subscriptions and Feeds
These two simple additions to your dealership’s blog ensure that your customers have easy access to the website without needing to remember the URL. With subscriptions, the customers who have subscribed to your blog receive an e-mail each time you update the blog. Feeds are slightly different, but they essentially work along the same concept.
Come back next week for more tips on how to make your dealership blog work for you.
Yahoo and Google the Odd Couple of Search
Optimizing your site for one search engine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also optimized for others. But in the world of online marketing, optimizing is vital for getting your auto dealership recognized. Unfortunately, your site could be ranked high with Google but much lower with Yahoo. That’s because each search engine is different, typically looking for different things when ranking sites. Following are some differences and similarities to consider to ensure that both major search engines rank your website as high as possible.
Inbound Linking
With Google, inbound links are the bread and butter of your website. The more websites that link to your website, the higher your website ranks. But there’s more to it than that. The Google spiders look at each website’s Page Rank, too. If you have many inbound links from high-ranking pages, your rank also increases.
Keyword URL
Yahoo places greater emphasis on your website’s URL than Google does. To achieve a higher Yahoo ranking, make sure your keyword phrase appears in your URL. If it doesn’t, make a new page or add a keyword-relevant URL as a new page from your website’s front page. Google also looks for this, but only when other websites link to your page by using strictly the website’s address.
Keyword Density
In addition to using your keyword in the website’s URL, it’s also important to have keywords scattered strategically through a site. The ideal amount of keywords is between 6 and 8 percent. Anything over 8 percent could adversely affect your website’s rank.
Link Building
This is similar to the idea of inbound links that Google focuses on, but it goes a step further by encouraging website owners to build linking relationships with other sites. Ask others to link to your site if you link to theirs. Or you can even offer something free to those who link to your site, such as a complimentary web tool or download. Google spiders like to see this, and it radically improves your chances of getting ranked higher.
Site Maps
Site maps used on your site make the spiders’ jobs much easier, allowing them to quickly search your page. Be sure to keep the maps updated so they continue to offer the latest information to searchers.
It’s extremely difficult to know exactly how the Google and Yahoo ranking systems work, as the algorithms and other procedures are confusing and ever-changing. Following the tips above, however, has increased many website rankings, and these are still the most basic ways to get your website noticed.
