Here is both a lesson for those of you seeking an SEO Professional, clients and potential clients, and a good laugh for those SEOs landing on this page.

One day I stumbled upon SEOCertification.org thinking, “hmmm, maybe I should get one of these slick Certified images that will convince visitors to my site that I know what Im doing?”. I had seen this SEO certification image before. I see lots of them actually, and I have none. Maybe that is a problem?

Read more about SEO for Small Business Certification

In the pursuit of the best Automotive SEO company, those who are masters of the art of SEO would be expected to know the search terms by which their potential customers will find them online.  And then they would need to use these keywords to promote their website, using the search marketing skill and talent they purport to have.  Lets see who is on their game and who is not on the radar at all.

So the first step; find the most popular search terms:

In general these keywords apply but are too competitive to produce results that contain automotive SEO providers. (the number of searches per month)**

search engine optimization (9,140,000)
SEO (7,480,000)
online marketing (1,000,000)
search optimization (1,000,000)
search engine marketing (368,000)

The following search terms are what we are looking for:

automotive search engine optimization (4,400)
automotive seo (1,900)
dealer seo (1,300)
automotive digital marketing (720) (*this term seems seasonal, event driven)
automotive search marketing (590)
automotive search engine marketing (590)
car dealer seo (480)
automotive dealer seo (320)
auto dealer seo (260)
dealer website seo (110)
auto dealer search engine marketing (91)
black hat automotive seo (73)
automotive seo company (46)
automotive seo services (46)
automotive seo specialists (46)
automotive seo specialist (28)
automotive seo for dealers (22)
best of automotive seo (22)
automotive seo articles (12)

There is not much ambiguity in the choice of keywords one would use to attract the maximum number of visitors to your automotive seo website.  Automotive search engine optimization is the clear winner.

“automotive digital marketing” seems to be an event driven search term, it is useful to piggy-back on the event if desired.

You can use the Dealercomp list of Automotive SEO Vendors to see all the known SEO providers, including those that claim to provide SEO services.  Please let me know if you wish to be included on this list.

**This list of automotive search engine optimization search terms was conducted on November 13, 2011, on Google, your results may vary.

SEO Analysis

Google has been making lots of changes lately. Are you paying attention to your code?

Anytime I visit a website, it’s a reflex, I put on my SEO hat. I don’t even read the content anymore or look at the visuals, I hit {ctrl-u}.  (View Source Code on Firefox.  IE has no shortcut, its > View > Source on the pulldown menu)

This is my version of a first impression.  I simply scan for a few key SEO conventions.  re. Is the Title Tag at the top of the Header?, etc.

And I always look to see how vendors handle tracking on their dealer websites.  Why would I look for web analytics software installed in car dealer website when there are other more important items on the SEO checklist?  Because it shows a dedication to building SEO-ready websites. Only 7% of websites are truly search optimized!  Also, installing analytic is so darn easy vs the benefits, why wouldn’t you? (if a vendor claims to do any automotive SEO that is)

Installing internet traffic tracking software is a fundamental step in setting up a website.  It should be the first step actually.  A dealer would have to be completely indifferent to not care about those statistics. (OK, there are a few of them out there and they are not going to be reading this article about car dealer website SEO)

As a website vendor, what are you providing for your customer if you are not building-in those basic SEO features every dealer needs? You don’t provide an inventory module? OK, you truly only design websites.  (and you too, won’t be reading this article about car dealer website SEO)

Google Analytics is free, so why wouldn’t you at least install it?  I won’t even mention the implications of not using Googel Analytics while using Google Adwords (Vendors who offer PPC and don’t install Google Analytics…That’s a double penalty!). And I also wont go into why you don’t use Google Webmaster site verification.

Part II : Google has been making lots of changes lately. Is the tracking code up-to-date?  One of my pet peeves is that a dealer pays a hefty monthly fee. So I would expect those websites to be kept up-to-date rather than have to wait for a contract renewal to get the latest BASIC infrastructure.

Google stopped supporting Urchin in 2007 simply warning that it may not report accurately. Decommissioning Urchin means it will stop working altogether, but no deadline exists and Google had said it will be sure to warn when it does. With Google introducing a third generation of tracking methods, Asynchronous Tracking, it seems to me that using Urchin is not the way to impress your SEO peers.

If a vendor is still using the old Urchin tracking code, I think that reflects poorly on their SEO reputation.  Two years is plenty of time to change a snippet of code. 

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/04/08/40-still-use-old-google-analytics-script/

I setup Google Alerts so anytime someone writes something about automotive SEO or automotive internet marketing, I read it.  The more often I read the same broadcast, the closer I look. Today I got this in the alerts for the 10th time:

http://www.paschconsulting.com/automotive/automotive-digital-marketing.html

(Brain, you do an amazing job of blogging everyday and propagating them across dozens of other sites.  That makes you an SEO Blogging God.  But it also why you’re up.)

So I ran a quick SEO check of the car dealer websites listed there.  Of the 11 representative sites, only 1 is setup with current Google Analytics code.  Four (4) of the sites use the old Urchin code.  Three (3) of the sites have no tracking installed.  And bmwgeorgia 404′d! Ouch!  bmwcarsnc is parked, ouch!  losangeleshonda.org is an almost blank wordpress installation, ouch!

Every vendor knows its the biggest job to maintain their many car dealer websites, let alone upgrading to the latest technologies.  Its a big job for an SEO just to maintain a dozen or so websites for just one dealer.  But as mentioned, 2 years should be enough time to upgrade.

Installing the cornucopia of Webmaster and Analytics Codes on a car dealer website should be considered a best practice. These things preemptively inoculate a website (and an SEO) from a host of problems that one can encounter.  Upgrading Google Urchin to Google Analytics might be reaching the critical stage before Google Urchin is decommissioned.

***Google stopped supporting Urchin in 2007 simply warning that it may not report accurately. Decommissioning Urchin means it will stop working altogether, but no deadline exists and Google had said it will be sure to warn when it does. With Google introducing a third generation of tracking methods, Asynchronous Tracking.

Cobalt has resolved the issue concerning multiple Body Tags in their car dealer websites.  I published an article earlier about The Cobalt Group car dealer websites having a critical problem in their CMS (content management system) inserting Body Tags throughout the user editable text areas.  This was probably causing search engines to fail to index content properly on their website pages.    The obvious gravity of the problem got a lot of attention.  Cobalt has taken swift action to correct the problem.  I appreciate how much work is required to manage so many dealer websites, and the complexity of propagating those changes across multiple versions.

Cobalt has also changed the robot.txt file to include the reference to the sitemap.xml  file.  I still found the sitemap.xml files are still missing the XML.  And there are no Priority or Frequency Tags.

But the cleaned-up HTML should be a big help to search bots, and hopefully helping Cobalt dealers to move up a notch or two in their SERPs.

Dealers take care where your websites are linked and with whom you are linking to.  Most dealers have no idea how to determine where their websites are linked and whether there is a risk.  But given the direction of Automotive SEO, you cannot afford not to know.

In the interest of providing more robust lead generation for their dealers, some automotive SEO vendors are moving into the very dangerous business of building linkfarms (large networks of linked websites).  This is a seduction all webmasters flirt with sooner or later.  To go over the line that search engines have drawn very clearly in the sand has grave consequences. Any SEO knows this. The question is, do the clients?

A linkfarm is a group of websites whose only purpose is to promote each other via interlinking.  The quantity of links is meant to trick search engines into believing these websites are more authoritative than others in the same “theme” (Theme is a term used in the search business referring to the business category of your website as understood by the search engine.  i.e. Ford dealer websites).

If your website is identified by a search engine as belonging to a linkfarm, and Google is the most sensitive, you will certainly loose significant page rank (position in the search results) and in some cases, your website may be blacklisted (deleted from the search results altogether).  You’ll need to discard your domain name and start over – very expensive.

That is why quality matters.  Thats why your Page Rank matters.  Linking to websites with no or lower page rank will cause search engines to lower your page rank.  An alert SEO will avoid linking your site to bad neighbors.

Linkfarming is a seductive path in SEO. Its like a stack of bills left on an unattended table. There is the chance no one will see you grab the cash.  Do you want to go there?  You’ll get away with it for a while, but linkfarm long enough and your chances of getting caught approach 100% – as seems to have already happened in this video.

Google’s webmaster Matt Cutts has mentioned that there is a threshold of about 10 interlinking sites. More than that and you could become noticed by Google as a linkfarm.  A dealer with a dozen dealerships all interlinked has nothing to worry about.  There are other little clues the search engines pick up on; too little content, keyword stuffing, the age of the websites as a group and the C-block of the host IP addresses.

Legitimate large dealers and even large dealer groups run no risk of having their interlinked sites perceived as linkfarms.  But joining a network designed for this purpose is a risk a prudent business person will not take.  Take care, and check your backlinks.

There is always something hyped. If its not Social Media, its SEO. But dealers need to know that most vendors don’t deliver on the hyped stuff.  Its too new.  They dont know anything about which they pitch. This video will give you an idea what passes for automotive SEO today from car dealer website vendors. In this video I take you through a typical SEO quick-check that any amateur SEO could do. What you will see does not even rate as SEO 101. There is no SEO here! (you should view in fullscreen – button is on bottom-right of video)

Maybe I’m obsessing about a small bit of text accidentally added to the website – it can happen. I’ve done it myself, proclaiming I’m the “The Best Damn Search Engine Optimization Guy”, only to delete it the next day when I realize I have much to learn – everyday. So I checked VinSolutions website and on their SEO product page http://www.vinsolutions.com/sem-seo.aspx

“VinSolutions.com provides a range of search engine marketing packages to help fit your internet budget.” And in the SEO Basic plan is a bullet “HTML Optimization” that leads me to believe that website pages are Search Engine Optimized when the “SEO powered by” line is on the dealers website. And this also leads me to believe that the dealer is paying for this (SEO). “HTML Optimization” is not exactly a term used by the SEO community. Either HTML is done according to W3C standards or its not. We’ll assume they meant something like “On-page SEO”.

But after this quick-check, maybe its me, who does not understand what SEO Basic > HTML Optimization means. Maybe the HTML is not Optimized for Search Engines. Ya think?

No matter how you slice this onion, there is no Search Engine Optimization happening on this website! Sorry VinSolutions, you just left me with nothing here. I can’t put lipstick on this pig. Pretty websites are a dime-a-dozen. Optimized websites are not.

The reader might think that I’ve uncovered one instance of proclaimed “SEO powered by…” where no SEO exists, but this is actually more commonplace than it is an aberration.

You need an SEO audit like this – if you are a dealer wondering if you are getting the SEO that you are paying for – or if you are a vendor wondering how to do SEO. Call me. I’m happy to take 15 minutes and look under the hood of your website. I’ll even make a free video of it if you like.

“Under-the-hood of Cobalt websites things got real scary“.  None of the content on Cobalt sites is getting properly indexed, and that spells disaster for search rank performance.

There are 2 component of an HMTL document (a web page), the Head and the Body.   The end of the body ( </body> ) signals search engines (spiders) to stop reading the web page.  Cobalt’s underlying CMS system inserts Body Tags in all the user editable fields.   “This will disrupt any spidering” which will cause most content on the page to be rendered useless and result in “a whole bucket of woe”.  Webmaster World

Because car dealer websites tend to have very little content on them anyway, there isn’t much to index. That means SEOs must add the content to the page. But because the spider is likely to stop at the first Body Tag, that’s real bad news for you SEOs that are editing your Cobalt dealer website expecting to get some improvement in search results. You are wasting your time.

I contacted Cobalt about this Body Tag problem, not wanting to write such a harsh report about a bug that seemed could be fixed momentarily.  A conversation with James Fabin, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, and Jeff Lu Sr. Product Manager SEO at The Cobalt Group assured me that they are acutely aware of the issue and hope to have the problem resolved shortly.  I will write another post when it is.

Read the full SEO Analysis Report of Cobalt

This search engine optimization question came across my desk twice, and I thought I would check to make sure I was not missing something and to make sure this was not an SEO myth in the making.

There are obvious reasons why <table> should not be used in place of good CSS for page format and layout. But…

Q: are tables impediments to good SERP position?

A: it is not accurate to say tables are bad for SEO (search engine optimization and internet marketing).  Obsessing about tables is something for those working to gain the last 2% advantage from on-page SEO.  But not for the ISM and their car dealer website.  Here is why.

Tables have been in use for a very long time and search bots have been able to read within tables for many years.  (yes, they presented a problem for crawlers when tables first came into use, but that problem was quickly overcome long before Google was born) And Google Webmaster does not mention tables anywhere today.

The best arguments concerning use of <table> in website design are; a) code-to-content ratio, b) content position in the page, c) contemporary HTML and CSS convention and d) page load speed.

The most tangible detriment of table use is code-to-content ratio of a page(s).  A high ratio of content should be an obvious benefit; more keywords indexed and that is something search engines measure.  But as we all know, car dealer websites tend to have very little content and the use of javascript and Flash to create visually attractive and lively websites increases the ratio of code to content.  So car dealer websites are already very handicapped without tables.

Adding to this poor code-to-content handicap is that 98%* of the car dealer websites I look at place what little content is on the page, at the bottom of the page.  Now if all your content is contained in the last 100kb of a 400kb page,  you have to use a table-trick to place that content at the top of the HTML (page).  Googlebot is known to look at 100kb, up to 300kb of a page before moving on.  If this is you, your page design s%$*s (needs help).

Contemporary webpage design convention dictates that since the introduction of CSS, the layout of a page should be done using CSS and not with tables.  Using good CSS design will reduce your page size significantly and therefore reduce the code-to-content ratio.  (CSS resides in a separate file that search engines won’t index)  If your website design relies on tables for format and layout, you are falling behind the times.

Speed is good.  We all prefer pages that load quickly.  Tables must be rendered before a page is displayed, while no such rendering occurs with CSS.  One table will not likely cause a noticeable difference in page load time, but several tables, and especially nested tables, will increase page load times.  Rumors surrounding Google’s new Caffeine release (coming soon) suggest that page load times will increasingly effect page rank and your SERP position.   Whether that will prove to be true or not remains to be seen.  Using contemporary design conventions will make this point moot.

Now if we were building a very sophisticated search engine, we might include in our algorithm an attribute to interpret the use of tables to denote old pages, which could further mean the website does not contain fresh content.  And as we know, fresh content gets better search results.  But Matt Cutts (Google) has made comments that would lead us to believe that this is not how Google judges your PR.  And tables have a legitimate place in web design anyway, so why would we do this?

One thing for sure, search engines understand that anything encapsulated inside a table is data.  The risk here is that the over-use of tables in your website design can confuse search engines.  Since certain bots do not necessarily penetrate deeply into pages without a good reason, good content inside a set of nested tables could be passed-over.  The bot may gather what is outside the tables and ignore the data inside (assuming that the user can visit the page to find out if the data contained in your tables is relevant to thier search).  So its probably safe to say that if all your content, or you place important keywords inside a table, you are not practicing good SEO.

How about latent semantics?  NO!  Both CSS and tables can cause related keywords to become separated by code, removing any argument that one method keeps related keywords in closer proximity.

According to a prior article about what priority search engines place on SEO attributes, the code of a page is not on the list of priorities.  In fact I keep a check list of more than 120 SEO attributes that I have assembled over time (from other SEOs).  The use of tables is not on the list.  Obsessing about the use of tables is something you might do after you have addressed the other 98% of more important SEO best practices.

* 98% is just a guesstimate, but probably accurate within 2%

The economy is producing a growing number of SEO consultants and companies.   Naturally there is more and more noise about automotive Internet marketing – SEO in particular.  It should be intuitive that the louder the marketing message, the less effective the product.

Why?  I could not explain it better than Chris Dixon.  “the most pernicious aspect to the phrase (SEO) is that the word “optimization” suggests that SEO is a finishing touch, something you bolt on, instead of central to the design and development of your site.” – an excellent post.

So check out the search optimization services being offered before you buy.  Internet marketing is not exactly new.  And its not difficult to become just a little educated about SEO yourself. A little homework will save thousands!

An experienced SEO specialist will perform tests, so should you.  Here is the inside scoop:

1) Ask for (their) top car dealer websites. Do not use the first one that is offered. There is always likely a perfect example website. Use my guide How to pick a good car dealer website SEO specialist.

You can run some tests on your own – and those tests will teach you OTJ.

2) Run those through: http://www.websitegrader.com

There are more tools like this, but that’s a good first step.  If they can’t optimize their dealer websites, how do you think it will turn out for your sites? Once educated, you’ll have a better chance of finding the right Automotive SEO – not the loudest automotive Internet marketing guru.