Published On: October 12th, 2011

Search engine optimization is arguably the single most important aspect of website-based Internet marketing. Many if not most people start their searches online with popular and relevant keywords. The higher and more frequently your website ranks on search engines for these keywords, the more visitors your site will receive. SEO is the practice of improving your website’s ranking by optimizing it for both visitors and search engine algorithms. Succeeding at search engine optimization requires a deep understanding of how people interact with your website. There are several factors that determine whether a website is optimized for search engines, and these are the main areas where you can improve your site’s SEO: content, link relationships, social media, and website infrastructure.

When search engines crawl or index your dealer website, they look at the quality and quantity of the content you have to offer. The quality of your website’s content is measured by factors such as relevance, timeliness and uniqueness. Content that is updated, relevant and unique is deemed more valuable to users, so it is always better to tailor your content towards specific, targeted topics and avoid anything overly broad or ambiguous. Additionally, if you have highly ranked websites linking to your website’s pages, your site will subsequently rank higher in search results. Google uses its ‘PageRank’ scoring system to weigh the importance of websites, and achieving a high PageRank requires establishing more links from other websites that also have high PageRank scores. Getting more links back to your website can be accomplished when you provide quality content.

When you provide quality content, visitors will navigate deeper and longer within your website as they read the information you share. Users will share a link to your website through social media or social bookmarking if you have something interesting or useful to offer. As your website receives more links and is spread through online social channels, it ranks higher in search engines. For auto businesses, your car dealer website achieves better search engine optimization when it interacts with and is deeply woven within the ecosystem of existing networks such as Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Facebook and Twitter.

The more technical side of SEO involves optimizing the code infrastructure of your website to make it easier for search engine algorithms to crawl and identify what your site is about. Accomplish this aspect of SEO by making sure your dealer website has an organized internal link structure and link hierarchy that makes it easy for both users and search engines to navigate between pages. As for main identifying factors, you can optimize HTML page title tags and header tags with highly focused keywords that precisely describe the content of each page.

Why Your Car Dealership Website Needs SEO
While SEO is not a precise science, it has become more sophisticated as people begin to test and experiment with ways to optimize for higher search engine visibility. By having SEO successfully performed on your dealer website, it will organically rank in search results, leading to an increase in website traffic and more leads. Ranking “organically” means your site gradually moves to the top of search engine results for specific keywords that pertain to your business. These keywords can be paired phrases like the name of your city and the automaker brand, such as “Los Angeles Toyota”. Car dealers need SEO for their websites precisely because their businesses serve surrounding local areas, and potential customers are most likely searching for terms that include a city name and make. It is highly beneficial and worth the investment for car dealers to add search engine optimization to their websites, because they can more effectively capture visitors to their websites through Google, Yahoo and Bing. To learn more about search engine optimization, explore the additional resources below, or work directly with a professional firm that can provide you with specialized SEO services.

Additional Resources:

SearchEngineLand.com: “What is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?”

SearchEngineLand.com: “Writing HTML Title Tags for Humans, Google & Bing”

SearchEngineLand.com: “HTML Code & Search Engine Ranking Factors”

SearchEngineLand.com: “Content & Search Engine Ranking Factors”

SearchEngineLand.com: “Social Media & Ranking in Search Results”