What is SEO?

by : David Hein

Over the past year, many companies have begun selling the virtues of search engine optimization (SEO) to your dealership.  Do any of them know what SEO is or what it should do for your dealership?  Is that costing you car deals and profits?

As we begin looking at SEO, it is important to note that search engine optimization and search engine marketing are two completely different activities and should always be treated independently.  Because they are often misrepresented and lumped together, I will explain the differences.

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of modifying the content, layout, style and tags of an individual web site to improve the organic ranking it will receive from a specific search engine. 

Search engine marketing or SEM differs in that SEM is the act of marketing your site (or sites) within search engines to maximize the occurence of your site appearing under specific keyword or key phrase results within search engines.  This often includes purchasing keyword placement, buying banner advertising space and arranging specific content delivery to the search portals to use in their niche content-based communities.

The two differ because SEO usually is a fee-based service for a comprehensive evaluation of your site rankings within the search engines that can best generate organic (free) traffic to your site, where SEM is a recurring marketing fee paid to generate exposures or clicks into your site. 

It is not advisable to begin using any SEM service (even if they are calling it SEO) until you have completed a comprehensive SEO of your site. Doing anything else would be spending too much money for leads that you should be getting for free. 

The process of SEO
Optimization begins with understanding how search engines like Google and Yahoo find sites to display in their results when someone types a keyword or phrase into their search box. 

Keep in mind that the search engines are an advertising medium, like TV, where the programming is the relevance of results that the search engine displays to the keywords that are typed.  The quality of these results is the only thing that will keep visitors coming back to search more (thus generating more revenues for the search engine). 

Because the results that are displayed are the content that keep customers coming back, the search engines are continually adjusting the algorithms they use to evaluate sites for inclusion in their results.  This “fine-tuning” is what helps them ensure that the results are as accurate as possible and when they find sites that attempt to spoof their results by including content that is not relevent, the search engines will quickly (and permanently) blacklist those sites from future listings. 

It is not advised that you ever include any content that does not represent the value or content of your site to gain organic listings on any search engine.  

To evaluate your site and how it appears on the search engines, go to those search engines and type in the keywords where you think you should be listed.  After you type the term, view the first several pages to see where and how often your site appears.  After you are satisfied that you know where you rank, look at the top three organic results.

1. Click through to the page and look at the site 
a. Note the number of pictures that load on the site. Look at the text descriptions that appear behind the pictures (usually if you mouse over the image it will display the text).
b. See if there are other active areas of the site (flash, streaming media, etc.)
c. Read the text that is on the page you click into
d. Review the meta-tags on the page

2. Record each of these above and then move onto the second and third results and do the same. 

3. Evaluate the common elements of those three pages and compare them to your site.  If your site differs in those areas that are common to the top three, your site is not “optimized” for that keyword.
 
4. Make changes to improve your results. 
The search companies continually change what they look for, and how they “score” different content within your page, so it is an ongoing process of testing and tweaking to get the best results. 

Great SEO companies are continually evaluating your pages to make sure they are getting the highest possible results for the keywords that will drive traffic and business to your site.  Organic listings on search engines tend to get click-throughs at a higher percentage than paid listings, so optimized sites see more traffic. Because you do not pay per click, or pay at all for the traffic, the fees charged by these great SEO companies are typically warranted because the volume of unpaid traffic well offsets the fee for the optimization service. 

It is important to note that you can have many pages within your site that are watched by the search engines, so it is important to optimize each page so you can increase the likelihood of getting listed and then clicked into your site. A great example of this is your home page typically does not have any specific information on a new model.  You probably have a page that has lots of detailed information and pictures of the new models you sell.  A person looking for that information is going to be happier with you and with the search engine if they click directly into that page, rather than having to click from your home page to one, two or three pages deep to find the information they were really looking for. 

Now that you have your site optimized and have free traffic clicking and submitting leads to your Internet department, you can start to look at how to expand your traffic by adding pay per click keywords and banners directly with the best search engines or through a SEM company. 

If you have someone that has sold, or is trying to sell you SEO, and they do not want to spend time under the hood of your site getting dirty, thank them for their information and keep looking.  True SEO professionals are out there for you.