Articles: Marketing & Sales

Winning at the Polls

Dave LaLonde is Senior Vice President and Search Engine Optimizer for Auto Credit Express. The ACE Group is a special finance total solutions firm offering their dealership partners entry level and advanced sub prime training, an easy to use online software, and an expert auto sales lead system.

One of the major ingredients in the search engine recipe that I have not yet discussed in detail is building external links that lead to your web site. A few months ago I discussed how to write anchor text for these links but I did not discuss how to accumulate these links. Simply put, most major search engines view links leading to your site from other sites as a vote of confidence for your site. Links coming from prominent, well established, and trusted sites have more votes. It's similar to the presidential Electoral College; California casts 55 votes and Montana only 3. Obviously, California has a larger electoral impact.

Similarly on the web, a link to your site from Yahoo.com would cast more votes than a link to your site from Suzy Smith's personal home page. Most prominent sites will charge an annual fee to list your site, but it is well worth the expense. Every dealer should budget at least a thousand dollars annually to have their site listed on various directories. Not all directories are created equal, so here are some guidelines to follow when starting a link campaign.

Get a Clean Link.

Many directories use dynamic database driven applications to operate their site. For example on SuperPages.com, the non-sponsored link to Bob Maxey Ford has the anchor text for "http://www.bobmaxey.com". The underlying URL however is

http://clicks.superpages.com/ct/clickThrough?SRC=&target=SP &PN=1&FP=listings&T=Detroit&S=MI&C=auto+dealers&CID=494822 &PGID=123.8084.1155044844231&ACTION=log,red&LID=0108067171&TR=6 &relativePosition=10&FL=url&TL=off&LOC=http://www.bobmaxey.com

The URL can be viewed by mousing over the link while viewing the status bar in the lower left hand corner of your browser.

If you conduct a reverse link check on MSN, Yahoo, or Google by typing in link:http://www.bobmaxey.com, you will see that neither of these search engines recognizes the link to the dealer's site from superpages.com. Therefore, it casts no votes for the dealer's site. I am not saying that a listing on superpages.com is not valuable as many dealers receive good quality traffic from this portal. The listing, however, will not help build external links to your site.

Add Links Slowly

When starting your external link campaign, it is very important to add the incoming links to your site over a period of time. If you currently have only a handful of links leading to your site and next month the search spider discovers hundreds of links leading to your site, it could have an effect opposite of what you were striving for. The search engine may view the sudden rise in votes for your site as voter fraud and remove your site from its search results. I recommend adding between four and ten links to your site per month. This rate will appear natural and will avoid having the search engine conduct a recount.

Directories to Avoid

Avoid directories that have identical structures, similar IP address, or interlinked directories. Directories have arisen for the sole purpose of search engine optimization. Many of these directories us the web site in a box approach to launch scores of identical directories across different domains. These groups participate heavily in voter fraud; to gain votes, the directory networks cross link with each other. Many engines view these sites as Web Spammers or Bad Neighbors. In addition to the cross linking, it is well established that the major search engines frown on duplicate content.

Recommended Directories

There are hundreds of quality directories. Listed below are a handful of directories that I would start with:

Dmoz.org, also know as the Open Directory Project. This is the largest human edited directory on the web. A listing on the open directory project is worth a lot of votes, when it comes election time it is the "California" of directories. Not only is it is a very trusted source but a listing is free. Be patient, to have your site reviewed and listed could take up to a year.

Yahoo.com. Even though the URL is not clean you will get plenty of votes for the link. Listing takes around a week and costs $299 annually.

Botw.org, also know as Best of the Web. Listing takes around a week and costs $50 annually.

Buzzle.com. Listing takes around a week and costs $59 annually.

If you work at a dealership and would like a comprehensive list of recommended directories send me an email.

Establishing and maintaining the right external links will provide your site the voting power to win at the search engine polls. Remember to run a clean and consistent link building campaign and your site will avoid a recount or recall election.

Published in World of Special Finance Magazine
September Issue 2006