By far the most important, most critical, part of a web site is its ability to be found by all the major search engines. Not just found arbitrarily but found when car buyers search for any number of specific words and phrases that represent what people think they need to type in order to find the right car dealership.

That is a mouthful but it breaks down to this: consumers go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and type in thousands of search words and search phrases that they think will connect them with the best or least expensive or most convenient automotive dealership that meets their needs.

Search engines keep track of every single word on your web site. So in one hand they have, for example, the words 'Inexpensive Toyota Boston' and on the other hand the search engines have every single word from each Toyota dealership in Massachusetts. How do they match the two together and determine which Toyota dealerships should show up at the very top of the list?

The answer is simple: the search engines base their decision on the content of your web site. If your web site content convinces the search engines that you are the inexpensive Toyota dealership around Boston then you will be ranked as such and connected with a large audience of searchers looking for you.

The set of techniques used to convince search engines to hand you their searchers is a large, somewhat complicated and ever changing list. It is an industry unto itself, one that requires constant research, exploration and copious documentation.

Web Sites That Sell packages come standard with this search engine optimization (SEO). While we do offer an advanced optimization package every single DataOne dealer web site is optimized to take possession of as many of those searchers as possible.

SEO is an integral part of any web site and needs to be taken into consideration from conception and updated/monitored continuously. Having a site built and then tacking on optimization as an afterthought is less effective than having the web site itself be built around optimization. Core elements of the site may be incompatible with the optimizations performed, or the optimization may simply be ineffective.

DataOne Software takes this into consideration from the very first steps. Our system endeavors to make every page appear to be unique and fresh to the search engines, while maintaining a single base URL to make all pages appear to be 'older' and thus more authoritative to search engines.

It is important to note that no one knows exactly what and how search engines do to rank pages (other than the search engine creators themselves). Every individual in the SEO field relies on trial and error and general consensus to determine what the deciding factors are. DataOne Software is constantly ensuring that our methods utilize the latest proven discoveries by the SEO community.

DataOne has two levels of SEO that are available to our dealerships. The first is the system that is included with our standard web hosting. It includes:

• The ability to set your own keywords, description and title
• Place keyword-rich text on the site above all other content (so search engines read it first) and hide it from the browser viewer – but not the search engines
• Integrate page names into the page titles to improve page diversity.

Our enhanced system that is an additional feature includes those abilities as well as many more. It is important not only to optimize the pages of your site (each page needs to have optimizations made individually) but to optimize them against your competition. Your competition is the results that show on the first page when searching using your keywords. With that in mind our system performs many optimizations and improvements. Amongst them are the following:

• Reports on the keywords people found your site with and comparisons to the density of those keywords on your site. The system will make recommendations for alterations and can make some changes itself (depending on settings).
• Will check Yahoo and Google for overall usage of site keywords.
• Will suggest keywords based on Make, Models and Location of dealership.
• Analyzes keyword density on competitor pages that rank on Google and Yahoo along with yours and optimizes your keyword density.
• Indicates if keywords have increased or decreased in effectiveness
• Tracks keyword success by search engine
• Tracks your competitor's placement.
• Analyzes total page output to increase or decrease keyword usage.
• Ensures that the content of your page is not formatted in a fashion to be considered 'Keyword Spam'
• Adds keywords to title of each page based on page content
• Includes information in the page URL that search engines will pick up on and index. (such as http://yoursite.com/Toyota-Camry-Specials)
• Creates a hierarchy of page importance so that search engines will link users into important pages such as your home, specials and inventory pages rather than pages that contain less important information.

You will also receive reports on how effective your site is being at drawing in users and taking them to the pages that they wish to view. Total usage reports and reports indicating how many viewers using each keyword ended up viewing inventory and even filling out contact forms.

Contact DataOne Software for more information on how getting a site with us that uses our basic optimization or upgrading to our enhanced optimization can increase the position of your site as well as the number of people looking at your inventory!

FAQ:

[ + ] What are the major search engines?

According to Search Engine Watch, a guide to the major search engines on the web, the following search engines should be considered the most important engines to rank as high as possible on: Google.com Yahoo.com Msn.com AskJeeves.com A 'strongly consider' status was given to the following search engines AllTheWeb.com AOLSearch.aol.com HotBot.com Teoma.com A "other choices" ranking was given to the following search engines AltaVista.com LookSmart.com Lycos.com Search.Netscape.com

[ + ] What is a keyword? And why is it so important

Keywords are words or phrases that are related to your business. Essentially they describe your business. When people perform searches on the search engines using one of your keywords, your website may appear higher in the search results. In this way you are advertising to an audience that is already interested in you. Understanding which keywords to use and what keywords are popular is part of the Web Sites That Sell packages!

[ + ] How often does Google visit my web site and how can I get them to visit once a day?

The answer is that you need to realize that Google views every page of a Web site as an autonomous entity, so if you have pages that aren't updated for months at a time, they'll only be spidered infrequently, whereas pages that are updated every day or two (e.g., a weblog, etc) can end up being spidered every day. From an efficiency perspective, this makes a lot of sense: one of the goals of a spider is to visit as infrequently as possible while still ensuring that the search engine database has the most recent copies of all Web pages possible. That's one reason why Web Sites That Sell automatically pollinate your content changes throughout your site. The packages strongly encourage you to freshen your content on a regular basis and perform some of these content changes automatically through periodic changes to your new and used vehicle specials.

[ + ] I have a technical person on my dealership staff. Do we have the ability to optimize our DataOne web site ourselves?

Absolutely. You have full, low level, access to every aspect of your web site or you may choose to use the tools we provide to edit keywords, meta tags, etc.

[ + ] Can you explain a bit more about what keyword density is?

Keyword density is useful for helping dealerships achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms. Web Sites That Sell takes keyword density very seriously because search engines use this information to categorize a site's theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming�). DataOne's automated tools analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms. In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines).

[ + ] How does DataOne monitor my web site optimization?

First of all, every single time a person views any of your vehicles and/or submits a lead this flashes across flat screens at our DataOne support center. Along with monitoring all hardware and services running within your DataOne web server this lets us keep tabs on what is going on with your web site traffic. Additionally we can generate daily reports to show you which vehicles are being searched the most and where car buyers are spending the majority of their time on your web site. The advanced statistics we provide show you web site traffic broken down by time of day as well as weekly, monthly and yearly trends. Finally we show you which pages are most likely to cause visitors to leave your web site.