Auto Dealer Links – “DoFollow” Tuesday
Filed Under: Do Follow Tuesdays, Local
Welcome to the first edition of “Do Follow” Tuesdays. To read what this is all about, you can check our announcement post.
In summary, every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week it is the Automotive Dealer market. We invite all of you out there to post a specific link building recommendation for the Auto Dealer market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.) in the comments section below. If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “do follow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed.
This week’s suggestion from our staff for the auto dealer market is all about local. Since most dealers still obtain most of their car sales from their local markets, we think it is critical for them to appear in local search results.
For example, when conducting a Google search for ‘phoenix toyota dealers’, you get this result. Notice the local search results dominate the top of the page. If we were consulting with Earnhardt Toyota, we would recommend they work on their Google local listing as they are completely missing from there, and since they rank 5th in the natural results, they are now pushed below the fold on the screen.
Other places to be listed for local search results include Yahoo, and MSN/Live. Many local listings are free, so there is no excuse not to create them for all of your physical locations. Once you do, get some customers to add reviews and maybe even point some links to your local page. It all helps!
These tend to be fee based, but you should also check into being listed in the more traditional sites like the Yellow Pages (remember those?): YellowBook.com, YellowPages.com, DexKnows, and Superpages.
OK, now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your advice on link building for the auto dealer market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "do follow" link from us.
Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new vertical market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger a thought for your market.
Be sure to vote for your market today! VOTE HERE
Technorati Tags: vertical markets, auto dealers, car dealers, local search, Google local, Yahoo local, MSN local
Popularity: 32% [?]
12 Comment(s)
2 Trackback(s)
- From Useful SEO Practices that Every Dealer Should Follow - Car Dealer Forums | Apr 30, 2008
- From Link Building this Week (18.2008) | Wiep.net | May 2, 2008
Robert | Apr 29, 2008 | Reply
Following Steps will certainly help
1. Submit to local directories. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=phoenix+Directory&btnG=Search
Finding Local Directories Is easy and are super targetted. Best Content Matching Happens Here.
2. Post On Auto Dealers Forums! Add your link to signature.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Auto+Dealer+Forum&btnG=Search
3. Find Related Guestbooks.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Auto+Dealer+Guestbooks&btnG=Search
4. Write some related articles on Buying CArs from Toyota Dealers in Phoenix and sumbit to article directories.
5. Submit in Yahoo answers
like : http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Arpyk0Wl_zaw31SSsRq739UjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20080418193015AAx93ST
6. Make a page on squidoo and hugpages related to same.
7. Submit in social book marking websites.
8. Submit to Craiglist.
9. Submit to other directories.
Selwyn Figueras | Apr 29, 2008 | Reply
This is relevant for car dealers in Spain looking to target expat british clientele. In the first instance, lobby the manufacturer to include email addresses as part of the contact details for each dealer. You’d be surprised how many manufacturer’s websites for Spain and other markets don’t use email address details. It gives customers an opportunity to set out all the details of what they’re looking for before making a call or making the trip to see the dealer.
Final tip: as soon as you’re aware of new models being talked about in the press, write articles about the model optimised for the model name and jurisdiction with a deep link to your site and see how it works! Little competition when there’s little to no information about the vehicle means you’ve got a better chance of ranking well by the time everyone gets on the wagon. Just google “bmw-x6 spain” and check out PCS and bmw-x6.co.uk.
Top tip, use a blog to publish targeted and optimised blog entries which will be indexed in a matter of minutes.
Keep writing, information marketing is key.
Cheers
Selwyn
Chris Lang | Apr 29, 2008 | Reply
You should definitely start using the social bookmarking networks to create incoming links to your various auto model lines and add comments on your blogs. The best part is that it can be highly targeted to a single model or line.
There is a lot of interest in personal products on Digg and especially highly visible items like one’s automobile preference.
Green friendly posts do well so a Digg item on a dual mode electric vehicle would be well received.
Vanity items like sports cars do well there too.
A sports car review or new model release is deemed a newsy article and would pull allot in Diggs as well.
So now you are wondering how this helps your search results.
Digg is one of the few social sites that do not use NoFollow in their outgoing links.
The nofollow attribute is something developed by Google and tells search spiders that no relevance is to be passed on to the outgoing link.
The more Diggs (user votes) a Digg item has the better your parent site page will do in a search in Google. Just a few Diggs and you will get nothing and it also depends on the term you are trying to rank under.
Since local search removes most of your nationwide competition this strategy could very well give you a huge boost for your PageRank in Google local and Yahoo local search too.
You have to be careful in how you handle promoting your site or blog in Digg though.
Here is what I believe to be true.
You should not submit your own items to Digg.
You should not Digg your own items.
You should definitely not be shouting your own items to your Digg friends.
Here is the full rundown and the Digg privacy breach that will hurt your SEO rankings.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=79
I welcome any feedback on this article and great idea with DoFollow Tuesday Arnie!
Collin LaHay | Apr 29, 2008 | Reply
I would start off by building rapid anchor text links on a lot of social media sites, and then move onto articles and directories once the base has been established.
A useful tool would be socialmarker:
http://mixedmarketarts.com/2007/12/31/socialmarker-promotes-rapid-link-building/
Tony Gee | Apr 30, 2008 | Reply
Ensure that relevant keywords and phrases are not only used in the page title, meta description, page headings and page copy but also in a user-friendly URL. Use rewriting techniques to make your URLs both useful to users and search engines.
This tutorial explains things very clearly:
http://www.tonetek.co.uk/seo_keywords.php
Musa Aykac | Apr 30, 2008 | Reply
I definatly feel that article marketing is way to underestimated. Ok distributing to one outlet wont help your positions that much.
Distributing to hundreds of outlets may do, this form of link building is the only genuine way to build links naturally as all you can do is submit your article, there is no guarantee of inclusion that is upto the site owner whether he or she publishes it or not.
The big G will not water down your links from the article because that is the whole point of the internet, people like what you are writing so they publish it themselves or link to it. For example just say there was a huge earthquake and I was the first one to get this news, id put this up on my blog or news site and people would be taking my post or linking back to it therfore giving me natural links.
Article marketing is absolutley the same but your just giving it a little push submit your article with a link in it to a few outlets this will give you solid backlinks and it is totally natural as people are publishing a quality article there spreading great information all over the web which google love. And you wont suffer and dup content issues if the article is only for distribution, but you should avoid distributing an article and then placing it on your blog or news site, if you want to place it on your blog do so before distribution and wait untill G indexes you, because google will not penalize the first site as they know that is where the original source is from.
Dan | Apr 30, 2008 | Reply
Like all businesses, dealers should be tapping their strengths, in this case their knowledge of cars and the auto industry in general. One way to use this to their benefit is to contact automotive bloggers and offer to write a guest post for them.
The post can be a “how to” relating to repairs or maintenance, be timely by discussing fuel costs and improving MPG, or exciting by referencing some hot new models.
If a dealer has an especially knowledgeable service, sales or parts person that individual should be utilized. Get great content from them and approach bloggers (or even magazines and local newspapers) with it.
Link Building Bible | Apr 30, 2008 | Reply
I launched a brand new DoFollow Blog Search Engine….
http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollow/
You can search for any topics, including “auto dealers” and find car related websites/posts to post a dofollow blog comment on. Also, you may find a few blogs with CommentLuv and TopCommenter plugins, that give you even more backlinks!
It makes finding blogs to comment on much easier.
Vertical Measures | Apr 30, 2008 | Reply
Hey I actually tried the link building bible dofollow for auto dealers and it worked just fine. Great suggestion.
Thanks to all of you for making this a successful first go with Do Follow Tuesdays. Based on the voting it looks like Real Estate is up next.
Gary Young Jr. | Jun 10, 2008 | Reply
do directories even get indexed or help your rankings in the search engines? what about PR?
Go Public | Jun 12, 2008 | Reply
First, to answer the question of Gary Young (above), you should know that directories aren’t as useful as they once were. Some will get indexed, and may slightly help your rankings if you are a new site because it gets incoming links pointing to your site. So for any brand new site, I would recommend doing some directory submissions, just don’t overdo it. There are some good paid directories that have decent PR pages, and they are good trusted places to get links. Check the list on http://www.strongestlinks.com under directories, and you will find some gems if you go through the list.
For the auto dealer market, I would recommend a few things. I’ve done link building for some auto loan and dealer sites, and there are tons of good sites to trade links with in the auto market. Yes, I know, reciprocal linking isn’t the greatest… but it does help, especially with related sites that have good PR on the links pages.
Also, I would definitely do a lot of article marketing and distribution, press releases, and social bookmarking.
Car Insurance Quotes Online | Jun 14, 2008 | Reply
Well, It does help you rank better in search engines and give you a higher PR when you submit your site to good quality directories.
However, it can actually hurt your site if your site got submitted to bad directories.
we speak about auto related sites, so try to find some auto related directories and blogs, such as this ones, to help your site get linked from relevant websites.
when it’s the same niche, it actually might help the directory/blog as well.
Good luck guys!