Is my front page seo'd?

[Mwebb]

Ok you seo experts. I don't want to spend any money on seo at present so have had a go myself.
The keywords I am targeting are "cars" and used cars for sale".

If anyone could take 10 mins and have a look at www.justcarsonline.co.uk (http://www.justcarsonline.co.uk) and let me know a few basic tips on what i can do easily to help seo that would be great.

cheers
Michael

[Invicta]

Michael, you are asking a very big question about which people write whole books. Nevertheless, I'll offer the following points.

Search engines use two main criteria to rank pages:
Their relevance to the page topic, which is measured by on-page factors such as does the page have a subject title (that appears in the top bar of the browser) that is the same as the subject headline on the page and is the page clearly about that subject.
How many other sites (with the same subject as your site) vote for your site by linking to it using link text containing the subject.On your site the title includes the words "used cars for sale" but they only appear once on the index page except in graphics, which the search engines can't read.

Google lists 4.2 million sites that contain the phrase "used cars for sale" and in first place is Autotrader with 1,190 back links compared to 15 external links to your home page.

Clearly, it's going to take a lot of work to compete on the keyword phrase "used cars for sale". So here are some strategies you might consider:
As "used Renault Clio" only has 9,980 competitive sites, consider creating internal pages for this and other niche phrases.
Write articles about buying used cars and post them on the article sites. (Google "submit articles" for a list). Over time other web sites will publish them, all with links back to your site.Hope this gets you started.

[DuaneJackson]

I'm by no means an expert but....

lose the other irrelevent words in your title tag, change to just "used cars" or whatever you determine people are searching on

Make your content crawlable - at the moment it can only be got to by submitting a form or runnign a javascript pop-up script, neither of which a well behaved spider will do.

Your description tag "Buy A Used Car- Advice From JustcarsOnline.co.uk" is what will show below your URL in most search engines. It's not very enticing. I woudl assume most people aren't after for advice. How about something like "Thousands of used cars for sale all over the UK. Search our database of used cars."

Turn off the VIEWSTATE function in .net if you can get away with it. IT just adds a load of code to your page that reduces your code to text ration which is already pretty low becuase you are using tables.

Add a site map.

Have a link to your homepage from eery page, perhaps using the anchor text "used cars".

IT's not just about the home page. You need a mass of content too - you have it, you're just not exposing it to the spiders.

I hope that's of some use!

[coultog]

One of the keywords is: "Sell you car" - surely this should be "Sell your car"?

That's the only thing I noticed, but agree with Invicta's comments.. I don't know anything about SEO..

[Yorganic]

You also need to look at the very basics: there are only two occurences of the phrase "used cars" in the body of the home page and neither of those is a H tag

[Mwebb]

thanks, anymore advice?

[darren atkinson]

Hi Michael,

I hope your site is going well.

Here are a few pointers to look at.

1. You need to increase links into your site, this has a big effect on ranking, when getting links to your site try and ensure the link text includes your keywords, i.e. the link to click on is 'Used Cars' this is quite important for Google at the moment. Play around with different combinations of your keywords - phrases in the link text.

2. Someone mentioned above about the amount of code in your web page. Your actual code to text ration is just 12% that means that of all the html to create your page, only 12% is actual text for users to read. This is quite low and you should be aiming for a much higher ratio. Unfortunately your web designers would have to address this as you will not be able to change this without a good knowledge of html / asp.net.

3. Your menus contain a lot of javascript to create the dropdown effect. This isn't really too good. It's hard to say 100% if the search engine crawlers have a problem following the links but I would guess more simplified text links would be much more effective. Using css you could get the same drop down effect but with no hinderance to se crawlers.

4. Again as mentioned above, your keywords are hardly found on your page, Increase the keyword count, maybe get your web designers to display the titles as 'proper' text rather than images, this will help.

Good luck with it mate.

Remember one of the biggest things you can do to help your ranking is increasing the number of inbound links, however make sure there are not too many reciprocal links as this is being looked at by Google at the moment.

Darren

[Mwebb]

my affiliate program has several epople linking into my site that don't show up as links to our pages.

The aff link is a s follows. http://www.justcarsonline.co.uk/affpro/tracker.asp?affid=048586 they link to this page predominantly. www.justcarsonline.co.uk/CustomerSell/CustomerReg.aspx (http://www.justcarsonline.co.uk/CustomerSell/CustomerReg.aspx)

Should i be working on getting one way links to the home page? What are good practices for this, as most people would want a reciprocal link?

[directmarketingadvice]

The keywords I am targeting are "cars" and used cars for sale".

My 2 pence:

Forget about "cars". Google UK has over 900,000,000 results for that word.

To get on the first 3 pages (i.e positions 1-30), you'll have to be in the top
1/30,000,000 of the results.

I'd be amazed if you manage that with DIY SEO.

Used cars for sale has just over 44m results (4.3m if you put quotes around it) and is far better targetted to what you do.

However, 44m is still not going to be easy if you're not an SEO whizz.

If i was in your shoes, I'd be thinking about 2 paths:

(1) Do keyword analysis to see what types of cars are being searched for and create a dedicated page for each one.

e.g. a page for a Renault Megane - 9.7m results on google uk, 5,697 searches for that phrase on overture UK in the last month.

(2) Bring in a pro. If excellent SE positions are important to you and will make you a lot of money, it will pay for itself over and over.

Talk to Tin on this forum. He's an SEO genius.

Steve