This is a post I made on DealerRefresh forums (http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/advice-newbie-search-engine-optimization-931.html)
Taking a look over the website, I do have some critical thoughts that I would like to make, some of which have already been pointed out by others (credit due to the first posters), and others will be new. I hope you take this as constructive criticism and use it to better your website.
As many of you car dealers know, Carfax has introduced a new section to their Carfax reports called ‘Price Calculator’ and placing phrases such as …
“This vehicle is worth $310 less than the retail book value based on the information reported to CARFAX.”
… on the vehicle reports visible to your customers.
I have come to a very disturbing realization that many of the individuals in my industry are just plain crooks. They hold the domain names of their “customers” hostage in an effort to extort additional monies out of them. The thought of stealing a customer’s domain name or holding it hostage is so alien to the way I choose to do business, I am surprised to find that for others it is common practice.
“Often a plaintiff’s lawyer has a choice about where to file his or her client’s lawsuit. Those choices can involve whether to file the suit in state court in an urban or rural county or whether to file the action in a federal court rather than in a state court …”
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I went to your website and you have already shot yourself in the foot in so far as the Google rank of your inventory pages are concerned. You are making a HUGE mistake by depending on a company that frames your inventory content instead of having it hosted under your own domain name. Doing a Google search for all pages under your domain, Google sees no cars for sale at all coming from your domain name. This is because all your cars that you have for sale are all listed under another domain (your dealership management system in this case) and all you are accomplishing by doing this is improving the rank of your website provider to the expense of your own domain.
The logic behind this is as follows: I can easily create a site and put a frame in it that contains the contents of any site on the web that I choose. For example, I can frame the entire website microsoft.com in my personal homepage. Google looks at only the content that comes from my own domain in determining my rank. They are smart enough to know that the content that comes from microsoft.com does not belong to me and I get absolutely no credit for it at all.
I know that this has strayed from the initial topic here but I felt obliged to bring it up because I see many dealers making this mistake and since all dealers want to get the best Google rank possible (which does have to do with the initial topic here) I thought I would pass along this important bit of useful information.
The Auto Corner System is a powerful dealership inventory and website management system designed for new and used car dealerships, by a seasoned automotive professional, not some web-geek who thinks he knows the business.
Using the Auto Corner System you will be able to:
Beyond the legalities and beyond the immediate profit, you need to also
look at the long term balance sheet. What is the cost of customer acquisition per vehicle sold in your place of business? In most dealerships this can easily be in the $500 - $1000 range. Make your customers happy and they will not only be a great prospect in the future, but they will also tell their friends and family about your honest business. Piss them off and they will surely tell everyone about your rip-off tactics. The difference being that honesty will result in much lower customer acquisition costs over time and dishonesty will always increase the cost of doing business no matter how you slice it.
1) Google cannot read flash words UNLESS whoever programmed the flash portion of your website has taken the time to have those words coded in such a way that they are discoverable by a search engine. Unfortunately, most flash that is produced for websites out there are not coded in this way because they were created by “click and shoot” flash development tools. You have to be able to dive into the actual flash code to allocate the words you want to have read by search engines.
Look in your windows directory on your PC for a file called “HOSTS” (not “HOSTS.bak” or “HOSTS.SAM”, just plain “HOSTS” w/o any extension on it). Open this file in notepad so you can edit it. Please be aware that some versions of Windows keep the HOSTS file buried somewhere deep under the system or system32 directory so you might have to perform a “find file” search to locate it on your machine.
First of all, there is nothing in the future that says tables will become obsolete. Tables will always be there for creating tabular data for the simple reason that they are a whole lot more efficient at that task then CSS. Plain and simple.