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Really debating running my own managed dealer website. Who's running their own dealer website or con

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#41
Quite the domain you have there Jason (chevycorvette.com) :D

I do have a full time web designer on staff who is a tremendous asset. It has allowed us to design and maintain a bunch of websites....So the downside is that you have to have the time and someone to do the work.
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I'd hope other groups would follow through with this as well. When your monthly website bill becomes larger than hiring a full-timer, it's time to bring some of that in-house and get some more bang for your buck.
 
#43
Tom Seven said:
kcar & yagoparamo,

I want to offer a suggestion for the inventory issue. I don't know what vendors this would work with, but if you can get your vendor to offer an API, then you can use their inventory software and pull in the data server-side with a Wordpress plugin or whatever fits your site architecture.

Also, instead of using an iFrame, you could insert the inventory dynamically with JavaScript.

Actually, now that I'm writing this, I don't understand why you'd use an iFrame at all. Even if there is no API available, just scrape the inventory data from your vendor once an hour or so and mirror it in your own database. I guess this is similar to the approach yagoparamo is using now.

Even if it took eight hours to build the scraper/database, its way easier than building your own inventory software. Of course, having the vendor make an API available would be optimal.
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How would you add pictures? Where would you add comments? How about options and equipment?

It's certainly NOT about getting a "list" from your DMS to your site.

MERCHANDISING
 
#44
If you are satisfied with just managing your inventory you could try a third party user (e.g. autoeasydms.com or something) for getting a website done. It isn't that great though in case you want more control..but at least it get's some work of your head...
 
#45
johnnyp said:
If you are satisfied with just managing your inventory you could try a third party user (e.g. autoeasydms.com or something) for getting a website done. It isn't that great though in case you want more control..but at least it get's some work of your head...
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This would defeat the purpose.

I mentioned earlier in this thread the importance of 3 factors. There are many factors that are important but those 3 are the most critical and they actually work together.

The main motive for a dealer needing to completely manage his/her own website is total control. This control allows a dealer to be able to constantly update content on that site. As you update content, google periodically crawls the site, taking note of the new/updated content. This tells the spider that it should check more often because there was different content than the last time. Here's a scenario

1 month deep crawl - Google crawls website finding new and/or updated content from last monthly deep crawl. Triggers spider to fresh crawl again in 2 weeks. Two weeks later, spider once again find new and/or updated content and triggers next crawl in 1 week, the 3 days, then 1 day, then 12 hours then 6 hours, etc....

The fresh crawls could come every few minutes depending on the changing content.

Each time your site is crawled, google checks backlinks. i.e. - who is linking to your site. The content relevance google found on your site plus the content relevance on a site linking to you and that site's pagerank help determine your own pagerank for various keywords. That's where keyword density in your content (among other things) becomes important.

The main thing here though is getting google to crawl your website as often as possible. The only way of assuring that is constantly changing content. While there are some methods of enhancing the pagerank with the backlinks, it really doesn't matter that much if google is only crawling your site once a month.

No 3rd party is going to do that for you.

Something to remember is that when you lay off a bit and don't update content a while, google eventually lessens the crawl rate and you have to do it over again. Also, iframes don't help you alot here. While it will be crawled, it only helps the page that's within the iframe, not the page framing it.
 
#46
Billy P,

Wow, you are right and wrong all at once.

Right: Frequently changing content is a trigger to have google to revisit your site more often.
Wrong: Frequently changing content OR frequent google bot visits are not required for top SERPs

I get crawled daily and rarely add content.

Your SEO suggestions are rooted in 2009. Panda has blown up many traditional signals INCLUDING backlinks.

Watch this video and be prepared for a giant shift in SEO tactics.
How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever - Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz

SEO is now far more "holistic" than ever. You can't key on any hot techncal topics and rank well. SEO is now pulls in user experience metrics, the Google Quality Score is alive and well in SEO. More FYI: Wake Up SEOs, the New Google is Here | SEOmoz


It's a new Day Out here.

p.s. in no way am I saying that my site is ahead of the curve. I'm still 2008ish. >:-/
 
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#48
Joe, sorry to disagree with ya but have to. You're mistaken on this one.

I'm approaching 20 years of SEO (was doing it before there was an acronym) and again, its everchanging. But the Google Panda update isn't really as big a change as you might think for those of us out here doing it right. Basically, the update means you'll be penalized for low quality content, grammar and misspelling included. The length of articles is affected a bit. By that I mean it can't be too long or short. Many of us have always used the rule of 1000 to 1500 word window. You'll also get hammered for a lot of pictures. This will be a major blow to automotive dealers as they love pictures. Me, I've always been much more of a content kinda guy so not affected there.

Your site gets crawled daily because you have a large number of backlinks. At least one of those is popular enough to get crawled daily and, because your link is on that site, they crawl you as well. That's one way around the changing content but, someone somewhere is doing it enough to get you crawled often.

My personal political blog is where I put all of my practices to work. I'm now getting 130k to 150k unique visitors per month. It's enough that two of the presidential candidates and some others have seen fit to pay me well to display their ads. I have several now that write on the blog with anywhere from 7-15 articles per day. I also use some other "tricks" to have thousands of indexed pages crawled many times per day.

Basically, the whole backlink scare with the Google Panda update is nothing but a scare. We've been hearing google scare tactics for years and, just as many times before, the backlink deal here amounted to much ado about nothing. Definitely not the first time or the 20th they've used that tactic and won't be the last. There has always been an effort on Google's part to penalize for using link farms or directories but even that still works to some extent though I don't use them. Judging from all the backlinks to your site I'm assuming this has made you more than a bit uncomfortable? ;)
 
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#49
I think one of the take-aways from this thread is that building a site in-house is not only going to take a technical expertise, but an ever-changing marketing expertise as well.

In fact, since change is the new status quo, I think you also need ask yourself are you going to be able to innovate at a more efficient cost than outsourcing?

Remember when just having an online form to capture online requests was all that and more? And now that form can be automatically appended with all sorts of info like what the customer was searching for, how they got to you, etc.

How long before you'll need a field for the thermal dna scan provided by the interactive mouse that will tell you your customer is female, 45, and although she's looking at both a 2-seater convertible and a van, based on the cell stress caused by the ambient noise created by the under 4' crowd in her environment, she's more likely to buy the van?
 
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