Archive for the 'Search Engine Optimization' tag

This month I’m going to dive into a topic that I believe will be one of the most important factors contributing to the long-term viability of the business model that drives our industry. That topic is the retail supply chain in our industry. Specifically the issue of suppliers that sell direct to your customers.

Long before I got into the e-commerce and internet marketing racket or got professionally involved in the powersports industry I received my college degree in what’s now called (but wasn’t yet widely known as) supply chain management. Combining that education with a lifetime of being a computer geek, and being smack dab in the middle of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley in the middle and late 90′s has provided me with a rather unique perspective with regards to how the internet and related technologies relate to doing business on the web.

Some of my first thoughts when e-commerce burst on the scene back in the dark ages of the web was that the internet was obviously going to have a tremendous disintermediation effect on pretty much every facet of the traditional supply chain. In a nutshell, disintermediation is the process of removing “links” in the supply chain.

Low and behold through a series of twists and turns in my schizophrenic career path I end up with the amazing opportunity to watch, comment on, and participate in the very phenomenon! Not only do I have this opportunity, I have it in an industry that has been so benighted, backwards, and generally late to the party when it comes to modern technology, modern business practices, and attitudes that it’s getting hit harder and faster than a lot of other industries ever were.

For background I direct you to an October 2009 post on  Dealernews’ blog by editor Arlo Redwine  entitled “Vendors That Compete Against Their Own Dealers“.

That post generated (relative to the majority of posts on the DN blog site) a large number of comments. I strongly suggest you go and read that post and the comments. While you’re there, take some time an offer your point of view on the subject. Our industry needs more dialog on these issues.

Arlo again touched on this issue in June with his excellent job of moving this along by offering an  introduction to Shopatron, a company that allows OEM’s to sell direct, but have the actual fulfillment handled by dealers that participate in the Shopatron program.
All of this has done an excellent job of laying out who some of the players are and the techniques they are using to transform the retail supply chain for (currently only) PG&A.
I want to spend a little time looking at why the OEM’s are doing what they are doing, what you need to be thinking about and more importantly how you can prepare for how all of this is going to shape our industry in the future.
First, one has to ask: “why the manufacturers are doing this in the first place?” Why would a manufacturer that has had a retail supply chain in place decide to radically alter that by selling direct to the consumer? Based on conversations I’ve had, things that I’ve read, and my own analysis, I think it comes down to the OEM’s not believing in either the long-term vitality or maybe even the long-term survival of the powersports industry’s retail supply chain.

Put simply OEM’s don’t feel that the traditional dealers are adequately meeting the market demand for their products. That can be in terms of gross numbers, product mix, whatever. The bottom line is that for OEM’s to make this move it’s a signal that they don’t trust the established retail channel to move enough product. An OEM that’s selling direct is saying to you, “you’re not getting the job done, so we’re going to work on cutting you out.”
Quite a few of the OEM’s that want to sell direct are currently willing to use services like Shopatron (or 50 Below’s “Referral E-Commerce” affiliate program for distributors), but I think they are only doing it for two reasons: self-serving interests and political cover.

The self-serving interests has to do with Shopatron’s stated policy that fulfilling dealers must have the product in stock in order to “bid.” This has the effect of forcing inventory deeper into the supply chain, pushing it down to the retailers that want to participate. This helps the OEM’s books by allowing them to recognize the revenue and get that inventory off their books freeing cash and increasing profits. Of course this also pushes the excess and obsolete risk to the dealer/retailer, eats up their cash, and violates pretty much every tenet of progressive, modern supply chain management principals. The deeper in the supply chain a product is carried the lower its utility and the higher its cost.

Paradoxically, the more “successful” Shopatron and the OEM are in getting dealers signed up, the more competition there is for each of these orders. As the deciding factor for who gets the order from the Shopatron system is based on the combination of having the item in stock and the physical proximity of the dealer to the customer we end up with more dealers/retailers carrying more and more inventory hoping to collect more and more of the crumbs that fall from the OEM’s table.

This is great news for the OEM’s (except for those that have generous inventory rotation or send-back policies. If there’s an OEM that has a no-questions asked, unlimited return policy that is also participating in Shopatron, I would argue that they need to fire whomever is running their channel strategy). The OEM’s now have an enticing carrot to get retailers to carry more of their inventory which is something that they have always seemingly wanted more than anything, even if in this time of relatively cheap expedited logistics it’s a stupid thing to do.

Of course if the retailers/dealers balk at taking a bite at the carrot and don’t sign up for Shopatron or don’t increase their stocking levels, the OEM will make the sale anyway (most of the time at full retail!).
The OEM’s can always defend their decision to sell direct by saying, “hey, we offered the olive branch of giving you the opportunity to participate in Shopatron and make this sale. Don’t be mad at us!”

Shopatron is win-win for the manufacturer. There is no downside for them, but there’s plenty of potential downside for the dealers. I’ve already brought up the issue of inventory liability. But what about direct competition?
Take for example a prominent vehicle OEM (we’ll call them BRANDX) which sells direct from its own Shopatron powered site shop.BRANDX.com.

Let’s say that I’m a dealer that has spent considerable time and energy building an e-commerce operation selling their stuff. That includes significant investment in things like SEO to make sure my site shows up high in the search results.

I’ve managed to get ranked in the top 5 for several BRANDX related keywords. Keep in mind that several studies have shown that as you move down the search engine results pages (SERPS) the chance of getting someone to click on you drop dramatically.

Now BRANDX comes along with a naturally highly ranked domain name (BRANDX.com) that is running its store at a subdomain (store.BRANDX.com). All of a sudden  my previous #5 rank in Google is #6 because BRANDX’s own site is ranked #5. Using some of my SEO tools that check search engine position, that has indeed happened. This is not a hypothetical. There are retailers/dealers that are indeed losing real online sales to their own OEM and by extension to a competing dealer that is participating in Shopatron or to the OEM themselves if it’s for a product that no one bids on in Shopatron.

Of course the situation is even more heinous if the manufacturer that’s selling direct is not using Shopatron or any other method to pass the sale on to its dealer/retail channel. If you are competing directly with a manufacturer for retail sales, you need to really question why you are doing business with them and selling their products. There may be some legitimate reasons to do so, but in our industry the way it is today, those reasons are few and far between.

Why have we gotten to this point? I believe that it comes down to the systematic failure of our industry to adequately develop a supply chain that meets the needs of the modern marketplace. That, combined with the fact that OEM’s, distributors’, and retailers’ motivations and incentives are often at best incompatible, if not downright counter-purpose. Mix in thousands and thousands of retailers/dealers that are all selling virtually undifferentiated products that are relatively low margin, high cost, and high-cube and you’ve got the situation we’re in now.

So what do we do about it? Well, the first thing you need to do is get signed up for Shopatron. That’s a 100% complete no-brainer. As long as it’s there, you need to sign up for it and monitor it for any orders that you can fulfill. Keep in mind that these are already lost sales. Only by being in Shopatron can you attempt to recapture them. Unless you have a strategic interest to really jump into Shopatron, I would not recommend increasing your inventory stocking levels until you get a feel for what the market is like for the brands and products. Just use Shopatron like a line in the water initially.

To conclude, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything overtly nefarious about Shopatron, or OEM’s trying to fulfill what they see as un-served or under-served demand in the market. OEM’s that I’ve talked to say that they have basically been pushed into this position as they have customers contacting them directly wanting to buy because they can’t find what they want in the retail channel. I just think that the current solution is at best a band-aid that still tips the playing field too far in the OEM’s and large retailer’s favor at the detriment of the rest of the dealers.

Ultimatly one of two things will happen: Better information systems and processes will be developed that allow real-time sharing of supply and demand information up and down and across the powersports supply chains to insure more efficent operations… Or… There will be less and less opportunity for the smaller dealerships and retailers that make up the current landscape.

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, Merchandising, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, supply-chain

While I know that most of you see me as the ultimate guru of all things web (right?), the truth is, there’s a wealth of places out there other than me where you can (and really should) find out a lot more about things like e-commerce, internet advertising, and integrating social media into your overall internet marketing strategy and so on.

The truth is, this area of technology (especially social media) is forming and re-forming so fast that if you blink you’re likely to miss a development or a breakthrough that becomes the next “big thing.” You don’t want to be the one that misses out on the next hot trend do you?

If you answered “No!” then read on. If you answered “Yes!” then I’m not sure we have anything else to talk about frankly.

So, without further ado, this month I’m going to save you some time in filtering out the wheat from the chaff (ooohhh… an 18th century reference in a 21st century column!) and point out some of the resources that I find pretty valuable in keeping up with what’s hot, happening, and now.

E-Commerce

First and foremost is a resources that I’ve mentioned in the past when it comes to e-commerce, and that’s Internet Retailer (www.internetretailer.com). Internet Retailer has a print magazine that you can get for free, as well as several really well done e-mail newsletters that you can subscribe to. Internet Retailer is also responsible for the Top 500 Guide, which every year ranks the top largest e-commerce players in terms of revenue and provides a wealth of information such as traffic figures, sales performance data (conversion rates, average order value, etc.) that you can use to benchmark your own performance.

Next up in the e-commerce space is Shop.org (guess what the address of their website is). Shop.org is the e-commerce focus for the larger National Retail Federation (www.nrf.com). Shop.org puts out a great series of e-mail newsletters that do an excellent job of keeping the reader up on what’s going on in the e-commerce space. I find the coverage they provide to have a slightly different twist than Internet Retailer and between the two you can get a great picture of what’s working, what’s coming down the road, what you need to be doing to get ahead and once you’re there, to stay there.

Internet Marketing

As all internet marketing pretty much begins by looking through the lens of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, etc. the best place to get your daily fix of search engine related wisdom is probably Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com). They have a series of e-mail updates, as well as a worthwhile RSS feed and Twitter profile (@sewatch) that you should be reading. They cover pretty much all the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) that you will ever need to know (or at least could ever remember or implement).

The next excellent resource for internet (and even general) marketing is Marketing Sherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com). Marketing Sherpa has developed the reputation as the source for marketing best practices. These are real-world best practices, not high-level theory like you’d get from some place like the American Marketing Association. While they do offer some free reports and resources (their write-ups are free for the first week), to get the most out of what Marketing Sherpa has to offer you will need to pay for the annual subscription. You can sign up for a free trial subscription to check it out. I recommend that you do.

Social Media, etc.

Finally we have the increasingly important and dynamically changing world of social media and all of the hybrid offshoots of sites like Facebook and Twitter.

First up is a site called Mashable (www.mashable.com) who bills itself as The Social Media Guide. They do an excellent job of covering how to use the exisiting social sites both from the perspective of a user, as well as from the perspective of a business looking to use social media for marketing and promotional purposes. In addition they keep on top of the bubbling, churning, and chaotic world of emerging social media players as well as clever and useful ways to leverage the social media ecosystem of feeds, API, applications, and widgets.

Finally I’m offering up a great site, TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com), that will keep you abreast of both the social media scene as well as the business world of the internet from a technical perspective. TechCrunch is actually billed as a blog, but it’s a blog (and extended media empire known as the Crunch Network) that headed by probably the best “new business” gadfly around, Michael Arrington. Michael and his team are plugged into who’s doing what, what it’s good for, who’s getting funded and who’s the newest member of the internet industry deadpool. It’s a great resource that you don’t want to miss.

So there you have it. A great list of summer reading when you need to know what’s going on in the world of the web. I’ve only scratched the surface by offering up the ones that I read on a regular basis. If you have some great resources you want to share, let me know!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, Resources, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking

This month I’m going to be tweeting about Twitter. What it is, why you should care, and most importantly how you can use it in your business

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have most likely been bombarded with mentions of Twitter in the media

Even members of congress were “busted” tweeting during President Obama’s recent national address http://tinyurl.com/dc394j

Briefly, Twitter is a “microblogging” tool (and now a technical infrastructure) that lets people post short 140 character tweets to the web

Twitter is a weird FrankenTech that exists somewhere in the spaces between RSS, chat, e-mail (albeit public email), blogs, and forums

Once you post your “tweet” to the Twittersphere, users that are “following” you will be updated with the pearl of wisdom you just posted

I admit, at first I didn’t “get” Twitter. It seemed like a pointless social-media distraction. I’m rapidly and drastically changing my mind

The best way to really understand Twitter is to sign up for it and start playing with it. Go to twitter.com and create a twitter account

Make sure you take the time to create a customized and branded profile. Include a link to your e-commerce or dealership website

Be warned going in, Twitter goes down a lot. Just Google “Twitter is down”. It happens so much, it’s *almost* become an endearing quality

Check out Twitter’s help site help.twitter.com to really understand all that you can do with it. As always, if you’re stuck, RTFM!

Posting to, and managing followers is an excellent task for your Community Relationship Manager!

Publicize your dealership’s twitter ID and encourage people that visit your shop or your site to sign up for twitter and to follow you

Put your twitter ID on your printed receipts, on your business cards, add a “Follow Us” link to your website and in your e-mail marketing

You need to understand some of the tools and technique of the twitter “language.” First, a tweet is the name for a twitter post

Next, you will see the @ symbol in tweets. This is a way for directly referencing or replying to another twitter user. Mine is @radicalpower

Another symbol you will see is #. It’s an unofficial trick that has evolved among twitter users to tag or categorize post content #ecommerce

Another convention you will see is RT for Re-Tweet. When you read something really interesting that deserves wider distribution you RT it

Here’s how it looks together: RT @radicalpower- I’m writing a great article for #Dealernews on how to use #twitter for motorcycle dealers

Twitter has really become more of a technical infrastructure. To get the most out of it you’ll want to use some of the twitter clients

Two of the most widely used and recommended twitter clients are www.twhirl.org and www.tweetdeck.com. Try them out for yourself and use one

There are some cool applications that tap into twitter so people can analyze the real-time twit-stream to see what the world is thinking

Check out Twist twist.flaptor.com to track trends or keywords and Twitscoop www.twitscoop.com to see what terms are waxing or waning

There’s even an easy to use tool, twitpic twitpic.com that lets you post pictures through twitter.

Because you only have 140 characters, it’s hard to enter long urls when you want to direct people to a certain site or page

The solution to this is to use a URL-shortening service. Tinyurl.com is the most popular but there are hundreds more See: tinyurl.com/yp8cba

A user-generated directory has popped at wefollow.com. You simply tweet to @wefollow with 3 #category to get listed

So the big question you have to be asking is, OK this is all very interesting, but how can I use this to make more money in my shop?

On the e-commerce side, you can tweet to all your followers when you add new, cool products to your website. That will drive traffic & sales

You can also run RT-based contests. Tell people that if they re-tweet a product detail page, or blog post they have a chance to win a prize

Follow this link http://tinyurl.com/cg8euq for a Google search on “retweet contests” to see some ideas of what others are doing

You can publicize web discounts or in-store specials that are good with a code that you tweet. This gives people motivation to follow you.

Build a social media ecosystem with twitter that points people to your blog posts, and a blog link that points people to your twitter ID

When people follow you, or RT you, make sure you thank them via a Direct Message or publicly via an @reply. Don’t forget to follow them back

You will want to make sure that you do frequent searches on twitter for you company name to keep track of what people are saying about you

I hope you found this series of tweets on Twitter informative and I invite you to follow me on twitter @radicalpower

And yes, each of the points above were under 140 characters!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, pr, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking, Twitter

As promised here’s my presentation from this year’s (2009) Dealernews Live session. Obviously just looking at the presentation you will be deprived of the immense wit and intelligent insight that my commentary provides in the live session, but hey!

As usual, if you have any questions or issues let me know in the comments section below.

Tags:DealerExpo, Powersports Industry, Presentation, Search Engine Optimization

Every once and a while I’ll get someone saying to me, “Todd, you’re nuts to be giving away some of these ideas for free!”

Well, this month is another great example. As this is my last column of the year, consider it my early Festivus present to you. I guarantee that if you follow my advice in this column your dealership will absolutely, positively  make significantly more money next year even if you don’t have anything to do with e-commerce.

I’m going to tell you about one of the hottest areas of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) right now: Local Results!

At the Search Engine Strategies show that I just attended in San Jose I heard several experts mention that as much as 40% of all web searches that have to do with commerce (i.e. person does a search for widget with the intent of buying widget) have an intent to transact locally if at all possible. Obviously for things like services, that number is more like 100%. Oil changes and brake jobs are not going to get killed off by e-commerce any time soon!

The secret is based on the fact that pretty much the only people that use things like a phone book to find a business are typically sitting in a cave and/or not all that interested in internal combustion engines anyhow (much to the chagrin of your pushy Yellow Pages sales rep of course).

What do people use instead? Why the interwebs of course! They open up their browser and type in things like “motorcycle oil change Las Vegas”, or “atv tires”, or just about any combination of powersports related keywords and a location. Even if they don’t type in an explicit location, most of the major search engines use a technology called IP address geolocation to figure out where they are to add it to what you’re looking for to offer up more relevant search results.

So when someone in your locale types “motorcycle oil change ZIPCODE” into Google (or Yahoo!, or Microsoft’s Bing) does your shop show up in the Local business results for motorcycle oil change near Your Town? Does your competition? How much more business would you be getting if you did?

How do you get in those results? Well, it’s a combination of having a website that is properly optimized for the kind of content you’re hoping to attract people for (for organic search engine results) as well as making sure that you have a business profile created on all of the major search engines out there (and any and all local resource sites that cover your neck of the woods).

If that sounds like a lot of work, you’re right, it can be. And there are tons of sites, firms and consultants that can help you out. Just Google terms like “local search engine marketing” to see how many. Sure, you can hire an internet advertising firm to help you out, but I’ll do you one better. Instead of paying some marketing firm to manage and place your ads and to do the required SEO activity, hire someone internally to not only manage all of these locally focused activities, but to also become your local community relationship manager.

I go into this idea of a Community Relationship Manager from an events standpoint in some detail on my site (http://tinyurl.com/perpetual-events), but it really becomes valuable when you have this same local expert manage all of your local-centric SEO/SEM activity as well. And unlike general SEO/SEM activity that really is a hard-to-master specialty when you are trying to rank for highly competitive keywords across the entire internet, local SEO/SEM is much easier to get your arms around internally (especially if you are not in a technologically savvy/astute area of the country and your competition has not caught on to the potential yet).

I can almost guarantee that the price you pay for the right person to manage your local presence will provide an ROI at least 3X what you would get if you spent the same money you are going to spend on salary on traditional advertising (YP, radio, TV, print, etc.). AND you have the additional benefit of being able to closely track how well the work/money spent on this person is converting to new sales. Try that with a TV ad or an increasingly expensive newspaper buy.

You of course need to hire the “right” someone to make this work out to its full potential. If you need help figuring out who the right someone should be, drop me an email and I’ll help you out with the job description as well as where to look.

There’s almost no limit to what your community relationship manager/local internet marketing person can be doing. Promote your business events using tools like Zvents (www.zvents.com) or MeetUp (www.meetup.com). Zvents is way cool because when you enter in a new event on their site in your profile, Zvents sends that event out to all the partners that are buying their event feeds that are pushed out. So just by posting your event on Zvents, local print and online (newspapers, yellowpages.com,etc.) and local search engines (i.e. MSN’s Live) will also have your company and event information thus dramatically magnifying the reach you have to get more customers into your shop (to see that reach, go here: corporate.zvents.com/company/media.html).

Finally, while there are currently very real benefits to getting your dealership’s local-centric online presence spruced up, in the future it’s going to become even more important. Pretty much all current and planned cell phones have some kind of GPS capability as well as internet access. Stand alone GPS units are going to begin adding real-time data that goes way beyond just traffic.

When a couple is out on their cross-country trip and need service immediately, they are going to whip out their Google Android-based phone (why do you think Google wants to play in the cell phone market? ADS!!!)  type in “motorcycle service” or something similar. If your shop doesn’t show up and your competition (that read my column and did something about it) does, well my friend, you just lost money.

Happy Festivus!

Here’s a brief list of the major search engines and other local information providers to help get your dealership’s local presence up to speed (a side benefit is that search engines like Google will actually look at your listings in other places and use that information to help you rank in Google’s results).

www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en-US&gl=US
listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php
ssl.search.live.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
dbupdate.infousa.com/dbupdate/startupdate
www.yellowpages.com/advertising/update_listing_form
advertising.superpages.com/spportal/
register.local.com/
www.truelocal.com/listabusiness.aspx
www.zoominfo.com/Registration/Register.aspx?type=6
www.infospace.com/info/kmaint/kdbadd.html
signup.yp.com/
www.yelp.com/signup

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, Motorcycle Advertising, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO

Well I’m pretty stoked… I just did a quick check of Google’s results for the search motorcycle dealer e-commerce and lo and behold I’ve got two sites in the top 6 results of the SERP! The higher one is the site that I run day-to-day operations for, A&S BMW Motorcycles, and the second one is of course this site.

Now obviously Google is a fickle lover and a day, a week, or a month from now the same search could result in drastically different results. But for now I’m pretty happy that I’m at the top of the industry that I specialize in.

And now, for posterity’s sake, here’s a screen-grab of the SERP in question:

I’m so easy to make happy! 

Tags:E-Commerce, google, motorcycle, powersports, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERP

Here was the LinkedIn:Answers question:

Who is the BEST SEO Consultant out there?

I am looking for the best SEO consultant out there, to work with me on a content driven lead gen property we are working on.

This can be paid in Cash / Cash + Equity

This was my response:

There are some good recommendations here obviously, but I think it’s very important that you understand the scope of your question. I’m not trying to be pedantic, and if you already know this stuff then that’s great.

Fundamentally good SEO (and to a large extent SEM) is based around having a good site to begin with. That all comes down to having good content.

From there all the rest of the “stuff” comes into play:
-On page factors
-Intrasite link structures
-quality links to your site from outside with good anchor text
-Properly managed server infrastructure with all the appropriate redirects (if necessary)
-Good site hygiene (lack of duplicate content, etc. etc.)

In addition to that basic fact, SEO is VERY market dependent. If you are trying to compete in an area with highly sought after keywords, it’s a much harder row to hoe. If you are in a niche or long-tail market, it can be much easier. Obviously the nature of the market and the inherent difficulty of the SEO effort in each will determine how “best” you need.

Keep that in mind when you get recommendations as well. Someone with a niche site could have used Person X and gotten great results, but that same person in a more competitive market could have failed miserably.

As you’re evaluating an SEO consultant just be VERY careful of anyone that promises a certain result or rank. They can do all the “correct” work and it can still take a long time to see the results on your site.

That said, if you have the bank account to support it, the two heavy-hitters I’d look at are:

Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com)
Stephen Spencer (www.netconcepts.com)

Both of these guys/companies have a much more comprehensive outlook and toolset than a lone SEO consultant can provide not to mention the years and years of man-hours of experience that they can bring to bare on your problem.

I don’t work for them, and I’m not paid to shill for them. I’ve just seen them talk numerous times at shows like Search Engine Strategies, Internet Retailer, eTail, etc. and I’m always blown away by their presentations, and I’ve yet to meet a client of theirs that was not amazed with their results.

I write for and consult to the motorcycle and powersports market (www.radicalpowersports.com) which is a pretty niche space, so perhaps my outlook is different than say a large consumer goods space.

But I’d suggest starting with these top guys and if they don’t work for you, I’m sure they can point you a good, trusted company that would fit better for you.

Good luck, and my the Google gods smile on your efforts!

Links:

• http://www.bruceclay.com
• http://www.netconcepts.com
• http://www.radicalpowersports.com

Tags:consulting, LinkedIn-Answers, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO

OK class, this column marks the end of the series on SEO (search engine optimization), as well as the end of my columns for 2007. First I talked about the what’s, last month the how’s, this month I’m going to finish up the SEO stuff with a short list of some of the biggest how not to’s. And because even in three months I’ve only begun to be able to scratch the surface on SEO, I’m going to provide some really good SEO resource sites for you to dig into in the future.

First, as you will recall, when it comes to SEO, content is king. That means that the content on your site needs to be readable by the search engine spiders. What this primarily points to is that you want to make sure that your text is actually text! That seems amazingly obvious right? Well, when I look around at a lot of motorcycle dealer sites, I see quite a few sites where the text on a page is actually an image. Sure, by placing the text in an image it might look a little nicer, and you have infinite control over the formatting, but Google and the other search engines don’t see text, they just see a picture! You really, really don’t want to have any text as an image. And if you do have text in an image (for instance as a button, etc.) you want to make sure that you take advantage of the accessibility parameters I talked about last month like ALT and TITLE so that they mirror the graphical text in the image.

The other place where a lot of sites fail in terms of SEO is using Flash. Flash is an interactive, rich-media technology developed by Macromedia that was recently acquired by Adobe. While Flash can have a great place in your Web toolbox (for instance the one place where most people are interacting with Flash is via YouTube’s video player which is distributed as a Flash asset) you should be very leery of developing an entire site in Flash. Currently most of the search engines don’t have any way to crawl into and index a Flash site so your SEO results are going to be total crap.

If there are some real propeller-head types out there (especially if you are a Flash fanatic) you will no doubt be yelling into the magazine that it’s all libelist, anti-Flash propaganda and it’s entirely possible to develop a Flash site that is SEO-worthy. I concede that you can develop a SEO-friendly site in Flash by jumping though a lot of extra hoops, doing a lot of extra development work, and so on (for more on this topic, you can check out http://www.jehochman.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml). But why would you want to? Considering that most of the dealers I’ve interacted with over the past year or two barely have the resources to do e-commerce at all, I just don’t see the point in making it even more work by using Flash extensively on your site. Besides, most of the cool Flash-like stuff can now be done with standard-compliant technologies like DHTML and CSS. I know that this is going to generate some nasty emails from “web developers” that seem to prey on the naivete of some in the dealer community by locking them into complete Flash-based sites. Oh well…

The final thing I’ll tell you to avoid, and I know I’ve stressed this before, is what’s called black-hat SEO techniques. Don’t buy into webspam providers, or SEO/Marketing firms that talk about setting up hundreds or thousands of dummy sites full of keyword-rich links that link to your site. You may see an amazing impact in your SERP results or Page Rank in the short term, but you risk getting totally de-listed or even black-listed from the search engines for your troubles.

Stick with the tried and true real-world SEO techniques that I’ve written about over the past few months and you should be on your way up the SERPs!

Finally, here’s a good list of SEO related sites that will show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes:

• www.searchenginewatch.com – I think this is the best place there is if you’re only going to pick one site
• www.searchenginestrategies.com – Want to attend a conference where people that make SEO their life (I honestly can’t imagine why you would when you could go to Indy instead and have a heck of a lot more fun)? This is the conference arm of SearchEngineWatch. It actually is a very useful thing to see if you have the time and resources.
• www.mattcutts.com – Matt (an employee of Google) is sort of the man on the mountain for SEO types. He sort of cryptically hints at some of the deep, dark, inner workings of Google. Totally worth reading, as well as the comments of others in his blog.
• www.seomoz.com – A great site for SEO. You need to pay to be a member to some of the more advanced stuff, but it’s a place where all kinds of SEO folks hang out.
• www.seobook.com – The site for a pretty good SEO book (obviously) as well as some pretty decent blog posts
• www.seoroundtable.com – Great place to go for advice and a good launching point to other good SEO forums

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO

Last month I introduced some of the technical groundwork on the why’s and the what’s of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This month I’m going to talk about some of the how’s.

As I have hopefully (and pedantically) beaten into your heads by now, when it comes to SEO, content is king. The merchandising copy and product descriptions should not only sell the product to your customers, but it should be both keyword rich and relevant for your entire business. If you sell authentic Ducati apparel, when you mention a jacket make sure you call it a Ducati Motorcycle Riding Jacket. All of those keywords are very important. And make sure you use keywords that your customers would look for and use. While the OEM may use the term brake friction block, people are going to be looking for brake pads.

If you hope to achieve outstanding organic search results, it’s not just the words that humans are going to see that are important. Search engine robots also read and index every available bit of information on your site. Even though there is considerable debate about the relative importance of a lot of these various “non-human” bits of information, it is understood that they do have a positive impact if you use them right. So here are some tips that can help your SEO above and beyond obvious textual information:

Name the images on your site with SEO in mind:
If you have an image of an oil filter for a Ducati GT1000, don’t just keep the name off your camera (like DSC-2054.jpg) or call it something like oilfilter.jpg, give it a nice descriptive name like 444.4.003.2A_Ducati_GT1000_oil_filter.jpg. If someone does a web search for the part number, the brand, the bike model, etc. they all are supported by a search result that will highlight those keywords in the search engine results page (SERP).

Use all of the “extra” HTML attributes that are available:
Modern HTML code is designed for what’s called “accessibility.” There is extra data that can be inserted into a page to help things like screen readers (programs that actually read everything on a site out loud using speech synthesis) for the blind. You can use these extra bits of data to incrementally help your search results (again, it’s debatable how much it helps, but it’s easy to do and it does seem to make a difference in real world use). Use the ALT (this is short for alternate, typically used to describe what the image is) attribute for image tags. In the above example of the oil filter, the image’s tag should have the ALT attribute set to something like Ducati Oil Filter For Ducati GT1000 – Part Number: 444.4.003.2A.

There is another attribute that most tags also posses, and that’s the TITLE attribute. An example would be using this in a link’s anchor tag to provide extra information about the link. So in your site’s navigation, or within editorial copy, you could have a link to Ducati Riding Apparel with a TITLE attribute set to Ducati Motorcycle Riding Apparel. This will not only provide a tool tip pop up when you mouse over it, but it may help with SEO as well. Of the two (ALT and TITLE), TITLE attributes impact on SERP placement is the most dubious, but it can’t hurt, and every little bit helps.

URL’s:
URL’s are another area of hot debate in the SEO world. Most e-commerce packages will create URL’s for your categories and products that look something like this: http://vroomvroommoto.com/product_detail.aspx?8675309 where 8675309 is the internal ID number of the product. This is totally sub-optimal for SEO purposes. What you want is a URL that looks like this: http://vroomvroommoto.com/ducati_motorcycle_oil_filter.aspx. If your e-commerce package does not support what’s known as re-writing URL’s there are several methods and tools that you can use to do it at the server level or by installing and using various add-ons.

Page Titles:
Page titles absolutely make a huge difference in page ranking. The first and most important thing is that the most important things needs to go first! The most important keywords need to be in the first 5 to 7 words in the title. Most companies will put their company name first, then the other stuff. That’s backwards, unless your company name also has the keywords you’re hoping to promote. Lets say that your company is Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works and you sell Ducati and Moto Guzzi. It would be pointless to have your page titles read Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works: Ducati and Moto Guzzi Motorcycles. Instead it should read Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel from Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works. Now you’re covering all the bases and getting all the important keywords at the front of the title.

Page titles on your product detail pages absolutely should display a comprehensive product description before anything else if you want the search engines to rank the stuff people are searching for at the product level on the search engines. In the oil filter example, the product detail page should read something like Ducati GT1000 Oil Filter: Part 444.4.003.2A – Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel, not Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel from Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works : Ducati GT1000 Oil Filter: Part 444.4.003.2A. On the product page, the most important keywords are the ones that have to do with that product.

Some of this may have seemed kind of propeller-headish, and hopefully the web developer you are using is up on this SEO stuff, but it’s still a good idea that you have at least some exposure to it so you can manage and verify.

Keep in mind that none of these techniques are a silver bullet, and these suggestions are by no means even close to exhaustive, but when combined with good site design and merchandising copy they can help you get higher up in the SERP’s.

Next month I’ll finish the SEO series on a list of the big no-no’s to avoid at all costs if you want anyone to ever find your site via a search engine!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO

Last month I wrote about the online advertising practice of paid search. As I alluded to in that column, and that you may have found out if you have looked into it on your own, it can be a really expensive endeavor, and accurately measuring the success or the ROI of all that advertising spending can be a headache.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to get people to your site without having to spend all that money? The good news is that there is a way. It’s known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

You should have noticed that frequently during past columns (such as the design, development, and merchandising columns) I’ve already made mention of SEO. The reason for doing that is because to do SEO right, you need to design your site from the ground up with optimization in mind. The next series of columns will now go into the nuts and bolts of actually bringing all that SEO stuff together.

Just like some of my other columns that deal with stuff that has a strong technical underpinning, it’s going to take more than one issue to get through it all because it’s important to understand the why’s of SEO as well as the what’s because it’s the why’s that will most likely drive the how’s.

Just to get my bona fides out of the way; feel free to Google “BMW Motorcycle Parts” or “BMW Motorcycle Accessories” or even model specific stuff like “BMW R1150RT Parts.” That’s the site I run (A&S BMW Motorcycles) at the top. It’s been in the #1 position for 3 years running for just about every permutation of BMW Motorcycling related keywords you can throw at it, and if we’re not at the #1 position, we’re in the top 5. We’ve even been above the BMW corporate site for the search of “BMW Motorcycles” (BMW makes special effort now to see that doesn’t happen anymore!).

All of this is all so vitally important because when most people are looking for something online, they typically start at one of the major search engines like Google (the 800 pound gorilla), Yahoo, Ask, and so on. Each search engine has it’s own methods of “discovering” websites (typically known as spidering where an automated web surfing program called a robot just goes from page to page, indexes what it finds on that page and follows all the links that it finds to the next set of pages, over and over, and over again) and of sending back a series of pages ranking the return results (known as the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs) when you enter a search term.

When companies talk about how well their business does with regards to SEO, they use a term called organic results. That term is used to separate how visible they are based on the pure search results vs. any type of paid search campaign that they may be running at the time, not if they use pesticides or keep their chickens in tiny cages. Everyone wants to have good organic results for the primary search terms that describe their business. Or more correctly, they want to rank at the top of the SERPs for the keywords that their customers are searching for. That can be a huge distinction when it comes down to the difference between just driving traffic to your site, and driving shoppers to your site.

One thing that you need to keep in mind as you launch your site is that even if you do a perfect job with your SEO efforts, it is going to take a while for your stuff to show up at all, let alone near the top. New sites are hard to find. It’s going to take a while for the search engines to find you (all major search engines have a registration process where you can request yo have your site indexed), and even after you are indexed, you may end up spending several months in a type of limbo while you are deemed a worthy site and not just some fly-by-night scam site (this limbo in Google’s case is called the Sandbox. This sandbox, unlike the one’s from your ill-spent youth, is not fun to be in).

Propeller-head alert!
From an informational standpoint the Holy Grail for the web would be something called the Semantic Web. This mythical beast would function in such a way that when an author creates a site, they could tag the site, a page on the site, or even a term on the page, in such a way that it removes all ambiguity related to what the content is about, and the search engines would not have to essentially guess how to index the site. It would add a layer of intelligence to all of the pure data out there and theoretically allow much better search engine results.

Unfortunately there’s a huge number of complete scammers out there that are more interested in pushing adult toys, Mexican Viagra, and naked pictures of Paris Hilton that would stop at nothing to cram as much semantic information that has nothing to do with the crap they are selling but would yield high search results just to get people to their site.

It’s primarily because of scammers that semantic information (you’ll hear terms like META data, keywords, descriptions, etc.) is virtually ignored today by all major search engines and they instead have to rely on keyword pattern matching, relevance ranking, as well as other more complicated algorithms that analyze intrasite as well as intersite link structures to determine at best worth, and at worst (and most typically) popularity. Yes that stuff sounds complex ( What do you think all those multiple PhD’s do all day at Google?), but if you want to get your site on top and make bags of money you’re going to need to understand it.

Now that I’ve laid out the landscape a little bit so that you have some context, in the end, it all boils down to content! Content is king. And like your mother used to say, it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that makes it really important. The next column I’ll teach you how to speak in a language and syntax that the robots can understand. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO