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Home » Auto And Trucks Articles » Sell Your Car Online Step 5 Making Search Engines Love Your Classified Ad

Sell Your Car Online: Step 5, Making Search Engines Love Your Classified Ad

Car classifieds websites can help you sell your car or truck very quickly. In step 4 of this series, titled "Sell Your Car Online: Step 4, Writing a Compelling Description of Your Automobile", you learned how to write a powerful description of your car that transforms the viewer of your classified ad from a browser to a buyer.

The fifth step in placing an ad is making your listing search engine friendly. A crash course in search engine optimization is in order. Being "search engine friendly" means the web page in question has all the correct hidden and visible parts that search engines are looking for. A web page must have the following to be considered search engine friendly:

- TITLE tag, which is shown in the title bar of the window (mine shows "Google - Microsoft Internet Explorer" when visiting Google.com).
- META DESCRIPTION tag, which is only visible if you view the source code.
- HEADER tag, which displays text in a larger font than the rest of the page (just like the headline in a printed newspaper)
- Hyperlinks, which are simple text links that allow navigation on the internet.
- Emphasized text, which is text that is bolded, italicized, or underlined.
- Copywriting of at least 200 -250 words on the page (with a minimum number of images).
- An ALT tag for the first 3 images on your page, which displays when the image is not available.
- The ability for the search engine spiders to index the page.
- A URL that is static, not dynamic.

The key to search engine rankings is which keywords you use and where on the page you use them. For proper search engine optimization, your keyword should show up in the TITLE, the META DESCRIPTION, a HEADER, an ALT tag, a hyperlink, and an emphasized portion of text. Also your keyword should show up 2-3 times per 100 words on your page (once per paragraph should do).

Your page must be indexed by a search engine. Search engines have a piece of code called a spider or robot that actively seeks out web pages to "crawl" or index. They follow links from one web page to another trying to find as many web sites and pages as they can. Once they crawl the site, they add the page to the search engine's database so it will show up in the search results. But there is a problem. Some of the auto classified web sites do not allow their classified listings to be indexed by the search engines.

The URL needs to be static and not dynamic. Pages that are driven by a database usually have dynamic URLs which include "?", "=", or "&" as part of the full address of the page (example: someclassifiedsite.com/index.php?a=5&b=222). Search engine spiders have problems indexing pages that have dynamic URLs, though they are ever improving. To ensure your page does not have a problem being indexed, it must be a static URL (example: someclassifiedsite.com/category5-222.htm).

So, what does all this mean for you? First you should know that when you place an ad in an auto classified site, you only have control over 2-4 of the 9 criteria listed above. That makes it hard for you to give your listing an advantage over other similar listings in regards to search engine rankings. So let's take a look at the things you do have control over.

The description you write should have the correct keywords in it. For example, if you have a 1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula for sale, you should ad the term "1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula" once every paragraph. Place the term near the beginning of each paragraph. Also, the term should be emphasized (bolded, italicized, or underlined) in the first paragraph, if the web site allows you to add HTML tags to your description. To bold a word, put before it and after it. To italicize a word, put before it and after it. To underline a word, put before it and after it.

Let's take another look at the sample description from step 4 in this series. Notice the HTML tags used around the keyword "1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula" in the first and last paragraphs. It is important not to emphasize every keyword. Only emphasize the first and last instance of the keyword in your description.

"This 1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula is in great condition. It has alloy wheels, AC, power everything, and a 6-disc changer. The T-tops are a nice addition, especially in hot weather. Even though this Firebird is 10 years old, it looks like it belongs on the showroom floor. It has flawless red paint on the exterior and a super clean black interior. A brand new automatic transmission was installed only 12 months ago, which is still under warranty.

The best feature about this 1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula is the engine. It has a 5.7 Liter HO V8 that has been well maintained. It does 0-60 in a respectable 5.2 seconds and has a top speed just under 160 MPH. Accelerate and you can hear every one of the 305 horses coming through the exhaust. Any sports car enthusiast would enjoy getting behind the wheel of this one.

Don't miss this 1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula . It's a good deal on a great car. Call today."

It is important to choose the right title for your listing, if the classifieds site you are advertising on allows you to write the listing title. The title should be rather short and include only the most important information about your vehicle. A great title should have the keywords in it that people would use to search for your car or truck. A great title should have the year, make, and model in it, for example, "1996 Pontiac Firebird Formula." If your car is convertible, you should ad the word "Convertible" to your title.

For a list of keywords that people actually search for on the internet, go to inventory.overture.com. Simply enter the make of the vehicle and it returns the most popular keyword combinations that include that keyword as well as how many times they were searched for in the Yahoo! Network. This will give you a good indication of what people are searching for.

So how do you find an auto classified site that allows the search engines to index their classified listings, displays static URLs, allows you to control your TITLE tag, and allows you to emphasize the text in the Description field? Simple, just go to your favorite search engine and search for a popular make and model car for sale. There should be several classified listings near the top of the search results. Those classified sites are the ones that are the most search engine friendly and would be a great place to post your ad.

By properly inserting these nine page elements that are essential for high search engine placement, your listings have the opportunity to be found by potential buyers when searching the internet. This concludes the series "Sell Your Car Online." I hope you learned some new techniques in online advertising. Try them out today and see how quickly your automobile will sell.

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Commentary By Douglas R. Andrew on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Study

The Tradeoff between Mortgage Prepayments and Tax-Deferred Retirement Savings

From the Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

By Gene Amromin, Jennifer Huang, and Clemens Sialm,

One of our own federal banksâ€"Chicago's Federal Reserve Bankâ€"has determined that by accelerating mortgage payments instead of stashing money in tax-deferred accounts, more than one in three Americans are making the "wrong choice ," and are giving up potentially important arbitrage gains.

The mortgage overpayments, the Fed's recent report says, is a "mis-allocation" of funds that costs people $1.5-billion a year. If consumers changed their allocation by not sending excess payments to their mortgage company, and instead put that money in some form of tax-advantaged savings, they would reap a median gain of between 11 and 17 cents per dollar.

This is the very first time the Fed has compared these two kinds of "savings," write the authors. They conclude that "many households have significant amount of money" in both tax-favored and taxable accounts, but that a "large proportion" of American taxpayers apparently are not taking the smarter route to asset allocation, which would put substantially more money in their retirement savings.

I am delighted to see that the Fed's own experts now believe deductible mortgage interest can be an excellent choice for many taxpayers to use in structuring their retirement funding strategy, even though I do not agree with the report's narrow focus on only qualified plans such as IRAs and 401(k)s.

What's more, the paper says arbitrage is a "rather conservative" way of optimizing retirement wealth. Taxpayers gain when interest rates go up, since the newly invested amount earns higher rates than the mortgage debt costs. Should interest rates go down, taxpayers still come out ahead, because they are "likely to exercise their option to refinance," thus "reducing the downside risk of the arbitrage strategy."

The Fed report ends by saying that despite the risks (and rememberâ€"there are risks associated with all investment strategies), saving retirement money in a tax-deferred plan "has the additional benefit of providing a good hedge against the combination of housing price risk and liquidity risk."

Finally, the Fed says that taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 a year who use mortgage-deductible interest as part of an arbitrage strategy in retirement accounts would appear to have the most to gain, and the authors find it "puzzling" that more people who are in "better financial shape" than the average taxpayer don't take advantage of this kind of strategy.

I have no idea if the authors of this Federal Reserve paper have read my Missed Fortune books or have heard of me. But it is gratifying to see government experts themselves validate and support a key element of my wealth optimization program. If you would like to read the entire study, it is available at http://www.MissedFortune.com/ChicagoFedStudy as found in the "working papers" section of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Web site.

The study also points out that:

* "46.1 percent of households are prepaying their mortgage by an average of $3,140 per year"

* "only 49 percent of households relied on advice from professionals"

* "having access to better financial information (financial advisor or personal education) substantially increases the likelihood of making the right choice"

The key reasons Americans make these mistakes are:

* "not having resources to make decisions"

* "greater emphasis on savings habits they 'perceive' as more liquid"

* "limited information on the cost-benefit analysis"

* "rational response to 'institutional' factors"

The actual quote from the abstract at the beginning of the report reads as follows:

"We show that a significant number of households can perform a tax arbitrage by cutting back on their additional mortgage payments and increasing their contributions to tax-deferred accounts. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that about 38% of U.S. households that are accelerating their mortgage payments instead of saving in tax-deferred accounts are making the wrong choice. For these households, reallocating their savings can yield a mean benefit of 11 to 17 cents per dollar, depending on the choice of investment assets in the tax deferred accounts. In the aggregate, these misallocated savings are costing U.S. households as much as 1.5 billion dollars per year..."

http://www.missedfortune.com