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1.) Sites Made Entirely Out Of Flash
As any SEO will tell you, or nearly any web designer with the slightest knowledge concerning the behavior of search engine spiders, planning a web site entirely in flash may be a recipe for disaster. As search engines become more refined, the sport of search engine optimization has become additional complex....indeed, the process of becoming a highly ranked website has become quite a complex task. However at the foremost basic level, sites designed in flash are basically invisible to search engines. A giant element of determining the relevancy of a website by a look engine spider lies in the spiderability (ability of the spider to crawl) of high quality, keyword made content. In the automobile business, there are actually thousands of keywords which will be designed into a web site to dramatically increase traffic. In west palm beach alone, the situation of a second hand car dealership I am currently in the method of optimizing for, there are actually lots of automotive connected keywords which can be used to drag new traffic. This means that any new content that can be engineered into the positioning, any content that contains keywords that customers may be searching for, is content that may and should be seen by the search engines. It is content that ought to build it onto the web. If this content is presented in flash, but, it can never be indexed, and will therefore provide absolutely no value to ranking goals of the site. The bottom line is:
2.) Duplicate Content
For those sites not engineered entirely in flash, a good additional ominous drawback is sometimes lurking. Duplicate content is abhorred by search engines. As many may grasp, a nice deal of keyword made spam sites are generated dynamically through scripts that scrape the internet for content that is doubtless to be hunted for by the final public. With a method designed to create revenue through volume, huge spam networks are created (thousands of web sites are generated) by scraping or stealing content from legitimate websites. Thus, search engines approach duplicate content through a process referred to as canonicalization. What this suggests is that the the search engines have a look at sites containing duplicate content and build a judgment about which website best represents the content contained on all of the sites. Whichever web site is chosen as the most relevant for the content it contains then becomes the only web site that's given any weight by the search engines and every one other sites are utterly devalued...or de-listed. To illustrate how extensive this problem is, visit any dealer.com site. Then examine any non-flash content, select a text string (perhaps a piece of text from the about 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 precise same content. Of course, almost each page created by dealer.com that's within the slightest bit search engine friendly (meaning it had been at the very least not built in flash), is keyword content that belongs to many pages already on the net. The bottom line is:
Many Dealer Websites do nice damage to themselves by having their only spiderable content be content that exists in duplicate on the pages of dozens, hundreds, or even 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 among the first ways that to garauntee that a site will be fully indexed (all pages will be crawled and included in 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 location, organized in an organized fashion. The inclusion of sitemaps is seen by many seo's as essential, and could be a step several dealer web site have taken in the proper direction with regard to designing sites that have a probability to rank well. What they are doing 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 on top of any website 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. Whereas often superbly designed, the templates set up by such firms are typically designed in such a means that links, sitemaps, and often keyword wealthy text is hidden from human eyes in an attempt to lure search engine spiders into indexing deeper pages. This kind of style trick may are a piece around solution within the past, but it's become a major no-no within the SEO world. A basic rule of thumb is that search engine spiders have a great aversion to any tries at trickery. This means that if you have got hidden content on your website, whether or not it's links to different pages or just text, you will 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 regarding one thing other than is being showed to that website's visitors. As you'll imagine, in the eyes of a quest engine, this makes such a site irrelevant to any or all search terms. The underside line is:
4.)Serious Reliance on Meta Tags
In the first days of the web, much less refined techniques were required to deliver terribly top quality search results to users. As the web became a place where revenue was considered by several to be directly related to traffic volume, sites hungry for profit began to use the system in place to deliver a lot of and more traffic. In the past, search engines used what are known as meta tags to work out what a web site was concerning, and so what sorts of searches it should be shown for. Meta tags are essentially tags written in the pinnacle of HTML documents that contain an inventory of keywords relevant to the location (as determined by the webmaster), plus an outline of the site. This data was once the first method for determining relevancy within the SERPS. Because of misuse, but, the employment of meta tags has become nearly obsolete. Unfortunately, several dealer websites have not kept up with the times, and still depend on meta tags jointly of the sole ways they inform search engines of their content. This can be typically done with a terribly massive list of words within the "keyword" metatag. This type of optimization will be seen by examining the supply code of any dealer.com, bz results, reynolds & reynolds, or cobalt site. What is even more disturbing is that the keywords in these meta tags are usually the most general and so a number of the foremost competitive keywords within the industry. As a poignant example, my current shopper's previous web site didn't contain the words "west palm beach" or "used cars" in its keyword list. These keywords were the foremost necessary keywords for driving traffic to the current site. Instead, dealer.com selected to incorporate in its keywords an inventory of each car manufacturer in the world....while my client rarely sells a range of these brands. Additionally, for the native keywords that were included, there were major spelling errors that during this case held absolutely no value for my client.
The bottom line is:
Many Dealer Websites still see meta tags as a viable means that of communicating a web site's content, and stay for several sites the sole method exposure.
The employment of meta tags in SEO is, at best, a slightly useful manner of optimizing a page, if the proper keywords have been chosen, and at worst, completely worthless as a tool in increasing search engine position or relevance.
5.)Poor Keyword Analysis/Choices/Optimization
As was mentioned in my treatment of the employment of meta tags, the bulk of dealer websites fail to take into consideration the big selection of relevant keywords accessible and optimize solely for the foremost highly competitive and least targeted terms. For sites like the one being optimized for my consumer, a degree on the "long tail" is the most effective dealer leads method in gaining quality traffic. What this means in terms of keyword choice and seo is that the keywords which are of most importance are not those who get the most searches and are the foremost competitive. What this suggests is that the most highly qualified keywords, and people presumably to usher in buying customers are those keywords that are on the long tail, usher in less searches, however are additional relevant to our consumers. This implies that choosing the key phrase "used cars in west palm beach Florida" would be abundant additional effective in bringing customers than the term "used cars," which is arguably a very competitive phrase. Additionally, keyword optimization for a word like jaguar would not be nearly as effective in our treatment as, say, "jaguar s kind Florida." Many dealer websites ignore altogether the requirement to optimize both for specific key phrases, plus 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 more highly targeted. With effort, a large list will be compiled and can be used to get traffic that is cheaper (when used in pay-per-click campaigns) and also a lot of more effective. The bottom 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 prepared to buy and in terms of attracting local clientel.)
Keywords that aren't well targeted are useless. They end in high exit rates, wasted resources and WASTED MONEY.
6.)Major Style Flaws (not anticipating the purchasers wants)
As anyone involved in the new Web 2.zero Culture can tell you, the web is shifting. Internet users are increasingly hungry in their hunt for information. They are finicky and impatient and are most involved with finding the knowledge they are trying for in an exceedingly an efficient manner. The times of flashing lights, rotating banners, animated gifs and marquees is far behind us, and the days of flash intros and bandwidth hungry animations seems to fading away as well. To exchange the previous web may be a come back to simplicity, a return to what matters most on the web; information. In some ways that, many dealer website have taken this sentiment to heart in that they need begun to incorporate a massive wealth of information regarding individual cars on their sites. Of course, this was a major selling point for my consumer in his initial call to outsource his website development to 1 of the major dealer site developers. Where Dealer websites have largely missed the boat, but, is in making sites that are very flashy and appear smart in their try to draw in customers, but are off the mark in anticipating what their client is really wanting for when they visit a website. Each hit a dealer site receives is an opportunity for that site to convince the customer of the trustworthiness, helpfulness, and value that may be offered by that dealership. In print and television advertising flashy advertising has worked well, but on the web their has been a major shift. People have learned to tune out something that tries to laborious to grab their attention. Nobody clicks on those popups claiming you've got won $ten,000, and peoples eyes are no longer drawn or stay mounted to text that scrolls. Web users, as the philosophy of Web 2.0 emphasizes, are additional drawn to well organized, easy to perceive information. We skim the pages we tend to browse, switch windows quickly, and ignore content and data that's not readily at hand. I might even go as way to mention that any extraneous material isn't only unnecessary, but is an obstacle in helping customers to seek out the information that they're primarily looking out for.
Additionally, several Dealers build the mistake of making an attempt to mirror their real life presence on the internet, that means their web site become the equivalent of the typical ways in which dealerships have hooked customers in the past. A Dealer Web site ought to not be big stickers and balloons in cyberspace. While a loud wanting sign and gimmicks might work well to attract drive by customers, it does not work well on the net anymore. The bottom line is:
Dealers waste their customer's time and insult their intelligence by attempting to hook them on the internet the same means you hook them on their heaps
The bulk of web users are less impressed by flashy style and are more happy when presented with the knowledge they are wanting for in an easy to understand fashion.
7.) Very little to no use of analytics
For any web marketer, the use of analytics (measures of website usage) is essential in creating highly effective sites that offer the best return on investment. In the past, analytics programs were beyond the scope of small businesses or beyond the power of bound suppliers to offer their clients. Today, however, highly refined analytics programs will be obtained at little to no value, and several dealer web site developers supply limited or maybe additional in depth analytics as a worth added service. For those suppliers who do offer high quality analytics, kudos, but for many out there (such as dealer.com)....analytics that are helpful in making changes to the location that will really increase traffic, productivity or ROI are severely lacking. There is additional to web site statistics than simply range of clicks. Analysis of page views, exit points, conversion ratios, and a lot of additional is important to tweaking a site so that the most leads will be generated. Wanting at a real life example of this lack of analytics comes from my expertise with my current consumer and their use web analytics. After my very own analysis of their web site and the implementation of google analytics (which way surpassed their previous measures), we tend to were ready to determine that their landing page was losing virtually half of all new visitors. This was astounding, not only as a result of it meant that they were losing 0.5 of all of their traffic after the primary page load, but also with the belief that traffic may be greatly increased simply by redirecting to the most inventory page. (which is smart considering our model of the new internet consumer, who is additional fascinated by info than something else.) The bottom line is:
Dealers are losing massive portions of customers to style mistakes that can't be tracked because of poor analytics. Furthermore, Dealers do no typically have the power to configure their websites to the degree necessary to assist their website improve.
Web website design isn't a one step process....it requires a degree of testing furthermore trial and error.
8.) Illegal redirections
Illegal redirections are the backbone of the spam trade (if it will be referred to as that). Their use through javascript, meta refresh, and many subtle strategies of cloaking (exchanging one web site for one more behind the scenes) is an art that has been perfected....and also the search engines are perfecting new strategies of detecting this sneaky redirects. Currently, it can be argued that redirection and cloaking has its advantages, and it does. For instance, one may use javascript to detect browser versions and then redirect to the page most easily viewed by the detected browser. Or maybe a redirect would possibly be place in place in order to try and do testing on completely different ads or lead generation techniques. If you study several dealer websites, you'll see this type of redirection taking place. After all, you will generally see the script run quickly before the page loads....being confronted with a "determining properties" title page before you are delivered to the main site. This tactic is highly illegal within the SEO world, the globe of google, and could be a recipe for disaster if utilized on your website. It's virtually unfathomable that this type of redirection remains going on, particularly with the common information that such tricks are a sure fire manner to be de-listed completely.
Another downside plaguing dealer websites may be a lack of proper redirection on sites that carry additional than one domain name or exist with multiple sub domains. As was mentioned earlier, duplicate content hurts the listing of your website. The way search engines see it, duplicate content exists if two domain names purpose to the same site. Therefore, if a website like my clients: usedcarwestpalmbeach.net points to the identical IP address as his other domain: autoadviceoffl.com, google will see duplicate content because it sees each domains as seperate entities. This is also true in terms of the use of subdomains...especially the WWW. For many dealers, their website will be accessed at dealersite.com] or dealersite.com. Google treats these as completely different entities, and additional typically then not, punishes each versions of the site for duplicate content. This wants to be mounted with a properly configured 301 redirect, that could be a permanent redirect.
9.) Backlinks
For Google, one in all the most important measures of a site's relevance is the number of links pointing to that site. This is often true for the opposite search engines yet, and seems to increasingly be a main measure in the ranking of web sites within the SERPS. Quality backlinks from sites that the search engines deem "authorities" are the most valuable links that may be obtained. Additionally, backlinks should have anchor text (the text that's hyperlinked) that are relevant to the keywords on the site. Google's infamous Page Rank, is based upon this model of backlinking, and thence has facilitated the rise of google as the internets most used search engine. Backlinks are arguably the most necessary aspect 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 only within the pay-per-click side. Dealer sites nearly never show up within the organic side, and those that do have little doubt targeted their efforts on backlink building. This can be a real problem within the industry. Dealers are distributing thousands of bucks a month to websites that are paying for traffic they might be obtaining for free....with proper backlinking and minimal optimization techniques. The bottom line is;
Dealers are losing customers by not doing correct backlinking, therefore pruning one among the foremost vital methods for increasing ranking in the organic SERPS.
Backlinking is not an automatic method, but needs a plan of actions and follow through.
10.) Poorly Shaped URLs
Making URL's which will be simply spidered is simple if some key rules are followed. Initial and foremost, URLs must be properly shaped and should clearly link to their proper destination. Whether in a flash movie or as a easy hyperlink, I'm usually surprised to work out how often broken links exist. (these serve only to require off from the credibility of the dealership and causes users to depart your web site). A lot of importantly for SEO functions, though, is the employment of URLS which are created dynamically....that means they give the impression of being something like /vehicle_model?id=12324213. This URL isn't search engine friendly as a result of search engines do not usually properly crawl dynamically generated URL's, and if you're lucky enough to have a dynamic URL indexed, more typically then not, the dynamic content is bring to an end, leaving you with something like: /vehicle_model. This URL will not result in the intended page, and can result in duplicate content being indexed if such links are crawled at all. Any server running apache with mod rewrite access can fix this merely, and should fix it. Properly formed URLS that have been more optimized to contain keywords can go an extended approach in serving to the ranking of a web site, and as we have discussed, obtaining additional pages indexed properly means a lot of content and more hits. The bottom line is;
There is no excuse for broken links, malformed and seo unfriendly URLS
Rewriting URLS therefore they're search engine friendly is not necessarily a troublesome method and is one which will greatly improve the ranking a relevance of a 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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