The topics discussed exceeded expectations and delved into a level of knowledge beyond that of basic seo offerings available to car dealers today.  While many website providers do offer basic services the discussions delved much deeper.

Some of the topics covered were:

• Changes in search that are becoming a reality such as universal search and the Google search wiki.
• Why tag and keyword stuffing are a waste of bandwidth and the negative implications to be expected from these practices.
• Website analytics and why independent third party site performance measurement trumps vendor provided tracking.
• Building search engine trust and the importance of outbound links and linking partners.
• Techniques for ranking for competitors names.
• Inbound linking strategies and internal linking strategies.
• The importance of updated content and the challenges dealers face.
• Pros and cons of website provider platforms.
• Blogging for car dealers and effective use to help build search engine relevance.
• Search engine saturation and how to eliminate third party lead providers from dealers “money term” searches.

Those in attendance were top level website providers, automotive marketing consultants, inventory distribution partners, micro site providers, analytic providers and search marketing providers and consultants.

This years conference was by invitation only and the next one is scheduled for September 18th-21st of this year in Las Vegas.  Make sure you subscribe to ISMinTraining.com to receive details on the next automotive seo conference and for tips and opinion of online automotive marketing.

Technorati Tags: auto industry events, automotive digital marketing, automotive seo

Dealers are being forced to compete not only with each other online but also lead generation sites, affiliate sites, Tier II Regional Marketing and Tier I OEM marketing.  This creates a virtual battle field for them to navigate especially when they are forced to make decisions about things they do not understand such as search engine optimization.  While in principal it is easy to understand even for the non tech savvy person, in about 30 minutes I could have someone that cannot check their email have a decent grasp of what it is.  It is the methods touted as gospel that makes the mine field tougher to navigate.

I have sat back and watched and laughed at things published by people in automotive marketing for the last two years and have rarely stepped up to the plate to cut through the BS unless I was personally involved but now that my livelihood is determined how my skill set is perceived it is time to help other consultants and dealers cut through the smoke.

Automotive Video Search Engine Optimization -

Is being touted as a marketing channel with used car photos bouncing around with a computerized voice over is garbage and spam and may even go as far as alienating a potential customer.  One industry guru even suggest optimizing video tags for competitive dealers names and calls this VSEO.  Video SEO is a waste of time and marketing dollars unless you are going to take the time to do professional videos and captivate your audience not bore the tears out of them.  A TV commercial uploaded to youtube.com is not what people going to that site want to see unless maybe it was really outstanding such as the Badger or Super Bowl Commercials.  A commercial about your midnight madness sale if it is even seen by a customer prior to the sale is a waste of time and effort in these environments unless you can find a way to drive some serious traffic to it.

What makes it attractive is it is almost instant and that makes it easy for snake oil salesmen to peddle.  Matt at Vinsolutions did a great post about why it is instant and it has nothing to do with the medium as much as it has to do with where it is published.  Any content on a high traffic, highly trusted site is going to have almost instant search engine optimization.  However we need to remember that sites like Youtube are social networks in of themselves so be prepared to be scolded if die hards see bouncing  .jpeg’s of your used car inventory as the only content you provide.

Google Base is an Automotive SEO Tool (HUH?)

Google base has ZERO Search Engine Optimization Benefit.  It is not a link from Google to your inventory item.  The only way to have google base listing show in the search engine results pages is for your site to be completely ecommerce enabled, meaning there is a way for people to buy it completely online with a shopping cart application and arrange shipping.  One consultant claims:

Google Base is an ideal SEO tool for selling cars, trucks and other vehicles. Cutting edge car dealers have started to use Google Base as part of their  Automotive SEO strategy.  Because of how Google Base can be setup,  an SEO consultant can use this system to create greater visibility for their car inventory on the Internet.

Any consultant who claims this really needs to be watched all the way around.  Google does not even index it’s own “base”.  (Googlebase Robot.txt file)  All results in their search parameters and index are an <iframe> of a Java Script and the links are google redirects which means none of it is picked up by the search engines.  A real SEO consultant knows this, ones selling smoke and mirrors know this too.

Having access to dealers web traffic statistics on a daily basis I have yet to see any referral traffic from Google Base.  Seeing how is is primarily a “doorway” page, thus not really meeting googles own guidelines, because listing are not displayed there it is just link to listings it really provides very little value unless you are completely ecommerce enabled, that does not mean lead submission and a credit app.

For the non tech savvy please trust me when I tell you that google base provides ZERO SEO benefit unless you have a full featured shopping cart and I do not think that I have heard of a dealer selling a car ever from googlebase since they stopped populating search results with the whole index.  You can contact me and I can explain it better if need be.  A saving grace is your cars will show up on Google Base not the shopping search if consumers go there and look, but why would they when there are a lot better sites to shop for cars on and they are not directed to them on search queries.

Links or Content for Automotive SEO? -  How about Both

I constantly debate with a good friend of mine, JD Rucker from TK Carsites, about the value of links and content.  It is no doubt that both are important.  Without links the search engines cannot find your content, unless you have a sitemap that pings and updates with new content, however with poor content you need more links.  With static content you need a ton of links.  With an .xml sitemap pinging the search engines with content updates you don’t need many links at all you just need a source of content.  Sounds like a double edged sword to me.

This is something we go ’round and ’round over.  Content is King, Traffic is Supreme and unless the links are from a trusted source they need to bring traffic.  However enough links will cause a brick to rise in the search engines.  Hiding content div tags that do not enhance the user experience is search engine manipulation not optimization.  I am of the opinion that sites would be deindexed if they were given a manual review.

Where is the Automotive SEO Trust Factor?

Establishing search engine trust is something I never hear or see discussed in automotive SEO forums or on blogs.  Sure some SEO consultants will pick up on what I am about to say and publish a case study and claim to be an authority on it.

You build search engine trust buy linking out to to other sites that are not your own.  This is the world wide web not the all roads lead to me to throw pop ups and auto played audio in your customers face.  I see in the very near future sites being penalized for not linking out to other sites, with the changes comming down the pipe.  If you have 500 links pointing to your site and have zero outbound links you are going to start looking pretty selfish in the eyes of the search engines and be penalized accordingly.

Directory Submissions have Little Value in Car Dealer SEO

Say what huh?  On of the most trusted sites on the web is the hand edited directory at www.dmoz.org another is www.dir.yahoo.com they both started from zero entries too.  Directory submissions can build hundreds of links in a short time and will help your site get out of the sandbox and start ranking instantly for some of your key terms money terms like the dealership name and brand and location.  The other more elusive terms are tougher to rank for such as model names and competitive market areas take a little more finesse than directory submissions.

Indexed inventory is good for dealer SEO

I did a post here a while back about indexed inventory and it looks like one of the bigger players changed how they handle phantom inventory.  Good thing they paid attention before all of their sites were thrown into the supplemental index.  Indexing inventory is a good thing if all of the items have accurate descriptions and the sold entries are handled properly.  If either one of those elements are missing you are better off to frame it in and build more site content.

Ok I have covered a lot of ground here and have other elements to cover in a later post.  Things like spamming social media, redundant content, social media optimization, linking strategies and blog search engine optimization I suggest you subscribe to my feed below or email updates up top.

I have also added two new features here.  One will help you with your own search engine optimization and the other will keep the troll comments off.

1. All comment links are now rel=”do_follow” which means if you comment you get a link to your site with SEO value.
2. Comments must use a real name and use the website field back to your business or a profile page.

If you value my content here please help support it give me a call and ask me about my craigslist service for car dealers or buy something from the sponsers.  912-266-1629

Paul Rushing
912-266-1629
www.ismintraining.com
SEGA Systems, LLC
“Without Traffic Everything Fails”

Chat: Google Talk: parushing Skype: parushing

Contact Me: LinkedinFacebookTwitter

Technorati Tags: automotive search engine optimization, automotive seo, car dealer linking strategies, car dealer seo

While many claim that indexed inventory brings in traffic on long tail searches and it does and will if the site is optimized properly.  Just having individual inventory items showing in the index really means nothing if search engine user cannot find it.  What matters more than anything is its actual position in the search engine results pages.  Having it indexed is one thing, where it shows on an actual consumer search query is another.

How can the long tail benefit in Automotive SEO?

I pulled traffic stats for one of my lead gen sites that has had traffic delivered on 31,222 keywords for 137,194 visitors via the search engines last month.

The top 10 keywords combined only delivered 1257 visitors around .9 of 1% of the traffic so it would be safe to say if I completely lost rankings for my top ten search terms the site would still perform well as far as search engine traffic goes.  The long tail is the biggest winner.

Here are the traffic stats for December 2008 for www.ismintraining.com with out the keywords obscured:

While search engine traffic accounts for less than 46% of the traffic here, which is more typical of a car dealers website, it still shows that the top search terms have less value than the combination of the aggregate of the long tail.  The reason the site here receives traffic on so many different terms is the type of targeted content specific to automotive SEO and other topics.

For a dealers site to pull in these long tail type searches it would require that the site have regularly updated content and not just be an online catalog of inventory.  Other types of content could be added beyond marketing pitches that others would link to freely with out sending out link request which would increase your sites overall value in the eyes of the search engines.  While at the same time your inventory can rise to the top in the search engines if the sites architecture is set up properly so every incoming link permeates throughout the site without bleeding page rank internally and redirecting traffic properly if the car is sold.

The days of having a static website maintain relevance in the search engines are fading fast unless you are targeting non competitive search engine terms, which most localized automotive search terms and limited time promotions are.  With properly optimized content dealers can pull in traffic from competitive markets and brands, however with the changes in the works for Google.com you better make sure you are delivering content that is highly relevant to to what the search engine users are looking for or you may never show up for that consumers search again.

The site here will be going through a redesign shortly to provide more value to the online automotive community with me providing more online marketing content and a new contributors providing content as it relates to people on the ground in the trenches.  If you would like to be a contributor or advertiser please contact me some big things are in store here.  Make sure you subscribe so you can stay upto date on Automotive SEO and other online automotive marketing tips.

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, long tail seo, search engine optimization

I recently opened a an account with Bank of America for my business banking and signed up for all of the free trials and discovered that I had payroll through them activated, it is not needed yet, and used the chat button to find out what I needed to do to cancel it.

Click on the images to see what outsourced customer chat can do for you.  If anything it will give your customers a good laugh.

Technorati Tags: online chat, outsourcing

The automotive digital marketing space is now the wild west of the auto industry and represents the best opportunity for dealers, who have the ability to make informed decisions, to promote their dealerships and inventory online. Unfortunately for most dealers they rely on recommendations from individuals or companies that have a back end motive in recommending products and services to them. Like the scouting reports that General Custer had before “the Battle of Little Big Horn” and are being lead to the slaughter.

Carnival like atmospheres and gee whiz presentations with recommendations from people who have not changed their game plan in relation to digital marketing in several years is a recipe for disaster. In this space with enhanced consumer awareness and online trends changing at an alarming rate cookie cutter products with declarations of how well they did in 2005 should tell the dealer to be weary.

This problem is not only presented by consultants and agencies who are trying to carve out a space in a niche that they do not understand it is compounded by the fact vendors that operate in the digital space make recommendations that only serve them and not the dealer.

Today there are so many different flavors of cool aid that is being served up to decision makers it is easy for the dealer to become paralyzed and choose to do nothing. Another big mistake.

The list of terms, tools and disciplines in itself can be confusing to a lay person. Automotive digital marketing, online best practices, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, micro sites, landing pages, CRM, ILM, SEO, PPC, websites, process, conversion ratios, email templates, social media, social networking, dealer ratings, click to call, online chat, online classifieds, twitter, linkedin, plaxo, leads, online merchandising, pop ups, pop unders, text advertising, banner advertising, online directories, blogging, squidoo, consumer generated content, have you got lost yet?

Now you have vendors pitching these individual products or combinations of them in packages as the answer to the dealers online marketing effort. Not to mention the training that must be performed for the use and implementation and process development.

Here is the typical situation. A dealer attends a conference and hears buzz words such as social networking, web 2.0, blogging, seo and sem. Currently they have a website and are sending their inventory to classified sites such as cars.com and autotrader.com and realize that they are not getting the best return on their time and investment.

So they contact a SEO vendor and a SEM vendor to help deliver more traffic to their website and realize that their process is broke after examining their lead handling. In comes the process consultant that gets them signed up with a state of the art ILM and CRM system and buying every lead in a 200 mile radius of their store. However the dealer has set a budget for expanding her Internet presence and soon realizes that all the based are not covered so she starts exploring more options. The SEM vendor tells them how they are going to deliver traffic to the stores website through an intelligent PPC campaign and the traffic will be almost instant and the leads will pour in through the site and they don’t need to buy leads and give them more money to drive traffic that closes at a higher ratio.

Now the SEO vendor explains to her that SEM is not permanent traffic and gets is more expensive over the long haul and tells her that she can buy leads for half the price that most lead vendors charge by buying direct from the lead aggregators while they establish a permanent search engine presence.

Now the autotrader rep and cars.com rep are waiting in the showroom to discuss the cancellation letter that was sent in because the process consultant told her not to waste money there to free up more budget so she can access discount credit leads that have been sold to six dealers already in the last 90 days.

Finally after three weeks of this circle jerk she has decided that she has tried the Internet and it is not worth it because it is not working in her store. She can’t find the ball no matter how hard she searches for it.

All the time her inventory data feed has been down because the modem for her DMS is infected with cockroaches where the parts manager dropped a burrito behind it in the parts warehouse where he hides to take breaks during the day and every email from the store is going into a spam filter because they have a local mail server and the F&I manager and title clerk are sending porn and the email around that says microsoft is going to give them $286 for every time it is forwarded to their 800 person contact list putting all the email address in the to field and the person who did online sales two years ago has an autoresponder set up to send every person who has ever submitted a lead through the website a daily email to call him on his disconnected cell phone to get the best damned service and because they need a car today and it is time for them to step up.

And people wonder why dealers have such a hard time getting it.  It is not their process that is broke it all the processes going on around them inflicted by the vendors who ply their trade in the niche or people who are trying to figure out a way to stay in the car business in a consultave role when they do not even know how to set up an email client.

The good thing is for people who are serving the dealers with integrity and for the dealers that operate with integrity and own a franchise other that one of the big three there is hope.  Current market conditions are going to rid the industry of posers and carnies at all levels.  OEMs, Dealers, vendors, consultants and dealership employees who have been faking it for years.

Now is the time for the dealers to act to own their competitive markets and make rational choices.  This can be done through education or finding consultants that can guide them who do not have an interest in pushing a certain vendors products.

Transparency is a buzz word that vendors and consultants use in their pitches to dealers telling them they need to be transparent with their ionteractions with consumers now dealers need to hold them transparent as well.  If a consultant or vendor that is recomending other widgets for the dealer to use in their online marketing efforts will not provide full disclosure as to ther relationship with these other parties the best thing the dealer can do is tell them to play their shell game at down the road motors and seek education and non biased recomendations.

Now that you are ready to leave and go back about your day take a minute and leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Technorati Tags: automotive internet sales, automotive vendors, online marketing

The top 10 reasons to avoid wordpress.com for a dealership blog

1. Lack of flexibility – You cannot use plugins that help your blog become truly SEO friendly.  No custom title tags or Google sitemaps.
2. Siphoning traffic is against their TOS – If your blog at wordpress.com is only designed to send traffic to your website and not to provide real information to the visitor it will get DELETED.
3. Unprofessional – A blog hosted on a free hosting site says to your visitors that you are not serious enough about what you are doing to be a person they should trust to spend money with.
4. No real customizations – You can add a few custom headers to blogs at wordpress.com but you cannot use a completely customized wordpress theme there.
5. No custom html or .js – You can only use their stats and cannot add form tables or other useful html.
6. “Hey go see my blog at www.imanidiotdealer.wordpress.com” – Get your own domain.
7. Advertising – WordPress.com displays ads on your blog to certian types of visitors.  You may never see them, they code it that way, but your vistors may.
8. Space – The limits at wordpress.com are generous on their free blogs but if you need more space you gotta pay for it.  Which you should be doing anyway.
9. You are placing your content in someone other peoples hands.  You are already doing it with your dealership website, you should own something that belongs to you in your virtual space.
10. By the time you pay to remove adds, add a domain and the extra space you are still subject to their TOS and you can do it yourself and have complete control of your content.

Bonus – WordPress.com does not index your individual post just your home page all keyword indexing is via tag clouds which can be shared by your competiton.

Domain at godaddy – $7.55 a year for .com

Your own hosting account $4.95 a month

Owning your content and not having to appease others: Priceless

If you need help setting up a blog using the software from wordpress.org subscribe to my feed or email subscribe as I am preparing some tutorials to help you learn to set up Car Dealer Blogs.

Technorati Tags: automotive blogging, car dealer blogs, cheap car dealer blogs, wordpress.com dealer blogs

The obvious answer to both is a resounding yes.  But first you need to define your goals before starting on either one.  They both have their place but they two very distinct purposes.

To often though is SEM used as a crutch to make up for deficiencies in SEO.

You should not have to buy your money terms with pay per click advertising.  Money terms meaning your stores name, and your brand and location combination’s.  Ranking for these keywords is child’s play in the grand scheme of things, if your site is properly optimized and you obtain a few relevant back links.

Only 25% of your of your websites search engine presence is determined by your on site efforts.  The other 75% is determined by the number of votes it gets from other sites, back links.  However the 25% factor may make a huge difference on how effective the other 75% is and how long it takes to see results.

Key elements to be concerned with on site.

Meta Data

Meta tags tell the search engines what users will find when they arrive at your site.  Think of it as how your site is cataloged in their index.

1. Page title: This is the most important element.  The title is what describes what your page is all about very much like a book title.  It is also what people see in the search engines in the results pages and in the browser bar.  It gets more weight than anything from the search engines when they index your site
2. Page description: It is a summary of your page and is what shows for a description of your site under your title in some of the search engines.  It is very important to include your main “money terms” in your page description.
3. Keywords: It was once the most weighted of all meta data but as people discovered this it was the most abused.  People would stuff as many keywords as they could imagine to describe their site to the search engines many time even if they were not relevant.  Now they do not give them as much weight however most SEO experts will agree because the search engine spiders still scan them and if your content matches they do provide some weighting.  Having more than 8 keywords is a waste of energy and more than six is probably over kill and may even sandbox your site.

Website vendors should give you access to manipulate these items to help you build the relevance of your site.  No one can describe your business better than you so it should not be left up to them.  I laugh when I see websites by vendors that basically have broiler plate meta descriptions with just minor changes for dealer name and location.  It is like they just fill in the blanks.

Each page on your site should have unique meta data.  Each page delivers a different message let the search engines know what you are showing your visitors.

Heading Summaries:

Heading summaries are sub headings on your site.  These tags help people read your web page but also help the spiders understand more about your page is targeted too and what its the most important parts.  For example you will see different sections of this post show different headlines through out the post.  This is through the use of head tags.  <h2> is a second level title and <h3> a third level title.  Heading summaries above is an <h3> element.

Image summary:

The search engine spiders cannot see images like your website visitors can.  So you have to tell them what the image is or says especially if it is an image mostly comprised of text.

Off site links:

If you onsite house is in order then you need to start building back links.  Enough back links can actually over come lack of onsite optimization if executed for long enough period of time.   A good example is when you Google “click here”.  The number one listing is the download site for Adobe Reader, which has millions of links telling people to “click here” to get a copy.

The more relevant and trusted places that link to your site the more weight they carry.  A link from your local Chamber of Commerce will be relevant to your location.  A link from your manufactures website will show relevance for your brand.  A link from a .edu domain will show trust.  Think of links as as votes for your website.  The site with the most relevnt content and trusted links wins.

If you want to see how your site stands up and compares to your competition visit a this tutorial on Automotive Website Grading.  You will be surprised what you discover.

Stay connected and see the next post on Search Engine Marketing at Internet Sales Manager in Training, subscribe to my RSS feed or email subscribe above.

Technorati Tags: car dealer onsite optimization, car dealer seo, seo vs sem

For those that do not know what the term Long Tail refers to I suggest you go visit Cris Anderson’s page with his description. One of the best ways to describe it here is in the universe of available keywords for your site long tail keywords will bring in more traffic than ranking exclusively for the tighter keyword combinations.

As an example:

If you rank on the front page of Google for the term “Chevy Dealer” the amount of traffic that it will generate for you would be less than the the sum of the traffic for such terms as Chevy Dealer Kansas, Chevy Dealer Kansas City, Chevy Dealer near Springfield, et al. Those list and combinations of words will provide more traffic than the “hot” keywords.

Unfortunately most vendor driven sites do not give us the ability to do the internal onsite optimization needed to rank for these long tail searches. Some people in the services side of the industry will claim this is the reason Dealer Micro Sites are needed as part of your portfolio, others will say having multiple layers of content for your dealership in many locations will confuse the purpose of your online marketing campaigns and the customers searching for your product.

I tend to believe both statements! It all boils down to the message you are trying to deliver!!

While many in the industry taut huge successes using microsites in driving leads through the door and into their CRM and others are some what disappointed in the ROI that they experience. I personally use various platforms for personal branding and to push surfers to our main site to search inventory.

I use various platforms such as blogs, hubpages and squidoo. Without a doubt squidoo performs the best in the amount of traffic it generates. Here are some stats from my squidoo dash board.

You will notice the number of hits versus the number of pages equates to an average of only 25 page views per week per page but in total that is an additional 227 additional hits a day to these multiple landing pages. Which on the whole rank for more keywords than I would even attempt to list here, around 500.

None of them rank well for an extremely targeted keyword but they do capture searches for competitors names, competing market areas and specific model location searches and they all push back to or feature specific inventory items.

Is it a lot of work? You betcha. Is it worth it? Absolutely!!

Not only does it send traffic to our main sight it also generates many phone calls and emails directly from those individual pages. Unfortunately I am not using a tracking number to measure those individual results but I can see one being added to them mix soon.

Are you doing anything out of the ordinary to increase the number of ways shoppers can find your offers?

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, dealer micro sites, landing pages

What is nice about using squidoo.com for this is it easy to target chosen keywords with precision and I have started creating a farm of lenses tied to automotive keywords around the brands I have in inventory. I have one lens that I built that gets a fair amount of traffic for a competing brand in our market area and has resulted in several sales with minimal upkeep. Usually around 5 minutes a week.

Today the competing dealer did visit my store to complain to my General Manager because this lens is directly under their main site in the SERPS for searches for Golden Isles Nissan. I had to take the time to explain that I was not “messing with” their site. I was just getting our inventory in front of searchers looking for a Nissan in the Golden Isles. It was a truly priceless “Master Card Moment”.

If you want to know more about using Squidoo.com to build your own fleet of landing pages visit http://www.squidoo.com/automotive-microsites

Technorati Tags: Automotive SEO, squidoo, user generated content

In a recent conversation with an expert automotive SEO we discussed this fact and I was met with agreement to an extent. When I pointed out that all automotive seo is search engine manipulation and if you are going to manipulate search engine results in any unnatural way you might as well automate as much of it as possible and that is where the difference of opinion occurred.

I have several sites that bring in a nice income from affiliate marketing and dominate search results for long tail searches (Sorry No Examples) and the optimization was generated from pure brute force google bombing on these very non competitive keyword, with the additional benefit of causing the individual landing pages to rank well for very competitive search terms. Some would call this black hat SEO and a company that markets SEO services would not want their clients to know this is how they push their sites up for their keywords or would use this knowledge to sell against a competitor that uses this tactic and they did not.

Title Tags, Meta Keywords, Site Maps and Site Descriptions are used by the search engines as notification tools to let them know what content should be found at the site when the spiders arrive and give searchers some indication of what they should find when they arrive and are not given the same weight as the content found on site or the quality and number of back links.

Enter the SEO specialist. While most content on automotive websites is static or rarely updated the only option for SEO companies is to increase the number of back links to a site either to the home page or to other areas of your online offerings. Anchor links, with used car terms, to your used car inventory should cause cause that directory to rank better than your home page for the same terms while passing back some authority of those links back to your home page to help it rank better for the more generic search terms and the inclusive used car term to help pick up one more position in the serps and effectively knock your competitor out of a spot on the page one results. It’s how these anchor links are acquired is where the difference of opinion in white hat and black hat SEO come in.

While true black hat SEO is more about automatic redirection, cloaked content and search engine spam. Many, SEO Vendors, would equate auto generated content, manipulated scraped content, database generated sites, automated submissions and automated bookmarking as black hat as well, because it is manipulating the number and relevance of the links pushing back to the content being optimized and it is creating multiple layers of content with little or no value other than optimizing something else.

Any form of “link building” is unnatural, unless it is from sites that voluntarily link to your content, and creates no more value to the search engine results than those acquired by using the techniques listed above. Any link created to your site for SEO purposes violates Google’s Paid Link Guidelines no matter who or where the link comes from. So any SEO firm that claims to participate in only “White Hat” SEO is actually using a deceptive pitch. Paying someone to build links to your site other than submitting it to directories, which has lost a ton of value, is search engine manipulation even if it is via evergreen blogs, squidoo lenses, article submissions and press releases with the sole purpose to SEO other sites. This is Google Bombing, which still works, it is just done in a way to appear more legitimate even though it is not.

It is not really a matter of which is right or wrong. They both work and are search engine manipulation not optimization.

Don’t beleive Google Bombing still works? Try Googling “click here” with or with out the quotes and tell me what you find….

Technorati Tags: Automotive SEO, black hat, search engine optimization