Getting customers to my site

[mjacobs]

What are the best ways to direct customers to my site? Someone had mentioned "Meta-Tags" to me. What am I supposed to do with them? And how do I get them to where they need to be?

[sallen1]

META tags are little bits of information that is part of any web 'page' that you find thru the internet. The info in META tags are used by search engines to quickly determine what might be contained in any page but the tags themselves are hidden from what people see. META tags tell your browser program things like who the page's author is, what type of program built the page, keywords, and other descriptions.

Page building programs (Netscape, etc.) will let you specify different types of META tags or you can manually insert them anywhere in a page. The ones you're thinking about go something like this:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="My Dealerships Home Page">
<META NAME="KeyWords" CONTENT="cadillac, crestview, Catera, DeVille, Eldorado, Fleetwood, Used">
<META NAME="Classification" CONTENT="new car dealer,used car dealer,automotive">

Here the META tags tells the browser a description, list of keywords (searchable index) and classification. If I use a search engine like Lycos and put in "cadillac" then I should be able to find my website. As you see, these can be useful to getting traffic to your site. You can put anything into these tags or you can completely omit them.

Have fun!

scott

[dodge1]

Great information on meta tags! There is also another way to direct trafic to your site without having to battle other dealer sites on the meta level. I went from 75-80 hits per month to over 700 home page hits, and 12,000 overall page requests. I accomplished this by researching the most popular websites in my own area. I found a local ISP that sold banner advertising on their default home page, and I advertise on the local newspapers website. I spend about 1,000 a month to do this, but the cost of advertising to customers gained outweighs what I spend. Banner advertising may not solve everything, but it certainly helps.
I have added (if I did the UBB code right) a copy of our banner below.




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[This message has been edited by dodge1 (edited 09-13-99).]

[bassador]

META tags are just one method of getting a search engine's attention. Alta Vista search results rely heavily on META tag content.

However some engines, like Excite, ignore META tags all together and search through the the text on the first couple of paragraphs on the home page. As for YAHOO, it doesn't search anything, it's a static database file!

The best way use the search engines is to create what are called "gateway pages" for each one. In short, you create a separate home page for each search engine (I'd suggest doing this for just the top twelve or so), that is optimized specifically for that search engine. For example, a page designed to show up in an Alta Vista search should contain detailed and extensive keywords in the META tags, and Excite gateway page should include those keywords in the first two paragraphs of text, etc etc. This will help you get better placement in search engines, thus, more hits.

Lastly, the number one method of generating leads and hits is to advertise your URL prominently in all your print, radio and tv ads. This is a proven method for driving hits, leads and sales to your web site. It's amazing how many dealerships don't do this one little thing

[mjacobs]

That's lot of grear information guys. Thanks a lot. Looks like I still have a lot of work here.