Remember how great the 80s were... how you could build a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield and people alive, and DEAD would just start walking out of the cornstalks to patronize it??? Oh If only life were that simple still. In the wondrous year of 2010 just building it is not enough to make them come. Getting patrons to your virtual store front is a much more complicated task, you have to worry about stuff like link building, page relevancy, keywords, metatags, landing pages, mobile re-direction. Oh and wait um don’t forget about url re-writing, social networking, browser consistency, bloging.  Have no idea what the heck I’m talking about?

Great! That means I have solid job security for the next few years.

     The general concept behind getting Google rankings is fairly simple; in a word it is all based on relevancy. The trick is to know what your customers are searching for and optimize your site’s content to be relevant to those terms.

Selecting the right search terms isn’t easy in our industry. When customers need a car and have bad credit what do they type in their search box? Do they look for the type of car they want first and then worry about the credit later? Or do they type in bad credit auto loans? Do they localize it, as in bad credit auto loans in Philadelphia? I still don’t have a solid answer to what the best search terms are. I think mainly because it takes quite a few words to describe our industry so there are tons of potential variations. Buy here pay here, bad credit car loans, auto loans for bad credit, used cars for people with poor credit, Nissan bad credit, etc. Luckily there are tools like Google’s search based keyword tool http://www.google.com/sktool/ to help you narrow down the most searched terms in your area. Avoid broad general terms that have lots of competition like “used cars” or “auto loans”. Go for those niche phrases with a decent amount of searches but not a ton of competition.

Once you have your search terms figured out make sure those words are included in your website content. There are a few different ways you can list a keyword on your website that will really add to your Google relevancy score. Your keywords should be included at least once on your site in the following ways:
- In the page titles
- In Meta tags and descriptions
- In a url string, i.e. http://www.mywebsite.com/buy_here_pay_here.html
- As a text link in your content
- Under an html header tag “<h1>”.
Be careful not to over do it as too many mentions can cause you to be penalized for keyword spamming. Just A few mentions of your keywords throughout your site are enough to build solid relevancy. If you’re not sure what I mean here ask your webmaster to employ these tactics for you.

Google places a lot of weight in page ranking on the number of external sites that have links back to your website. They figure if a lot of people are linking to you then you must have good information on your site. Link building is the most daunting task of SEO, how do you get people to link to your site? There are lots of companies out there who will charge you a ton of money and claim to get you ranked #1 on Google in 24 hours. My professional advice is stay away from them, most employ scrupulous tactics that can and WILL get you banned from Google’s search results. Once you are banned from Google there is no coming back, you might as well throw your website in the trash at that point because it will be useless. There are solid ways to build links and traffic if you have some spare time look for local directories that let you list your business for free. Use places like Merchantcircle.com, hotfrog.com, domz.org, EzineArticles, Squidoo.com, local.com, Yahoo directory, Yahoo answers. Also make it easy for customers to share your site with a widget like the one at addtoany.com. Or if this all seem like too much to take in you could always just hire us!