What is white hat and black hat SEO?

The Internet presents the ability to make money or get 15 minutes of fame to anyone with a computer. With the Search Engines being the main source to these ends. Optimizing websites and taking measures to get to the top of the Search Engines is a big deal. There are several ways to accomplish this goal some less ethical than others, or Black Hat. Black hat refers to techniques that are used to help fool the algorithms of the Search Engines. White hat is to design a website with good navigation for users with valuable content (which is also good for Search Engines).

So here is the SEO acid test

If you are going to use a technique that is intended to get more visitors to your site, ask yourself one simple question: Will this add value to the visitor? If the answer isn’t a strong yes then rethink what you are doing.

Automotive Keywords using Rank Checker

Just like any marketing campaign, there are several aspects to creating good SEO. For me it has always started with finding something that could be measured. Since the automotive industry is a very specific niche I created a specific list of keywords several years ago to target. After monitoring the effectiveness of these words with analytics it became pretty apparent that the longtail keywords had the highest conversion. Especially when they landed a person on a list of vehicles relevant to their original search. So in other words if a person types in “Toyota Camry Denton” and lands on a page that displays a list of Toyota Camry’s there is a greater chance of that person spending time looking through the site and picking up the phone or filling in a form. I have always likened this to “walking the lot” with a customer.

So over the years I have spent a lot of time fine tuning our inventory platform to do just that and as an added bonus found that a website that ranks well on several pages for a variety of searches has great strength for head of the tail searches also.

From 4 years ago when we first deployed this technology to now a DealerTrend site usually ranks number one and two for every new model the dealer carries with zero backlinking effort. Now that there is more and more competition, especially in dense markets it is time that dealers start understanding how to backlink to there sites.

This video and the spreadsheet below is the first step to learning how and why to backlink to your site.  It will give you a good picture of what your site is doing well for and where it needs help.

I have also included the video from Aaron Wall from SEObook.com that explains the Rank Checker tool in more detail.  There is also a link to the page where you can download the SEObook.com toolbar that includes Rank Checker and a few other plugins that we will be using over time.