SEO Code

The more technical aspects of search marketing can be intimidating, but when you take just a few minutes to understand it you’ll see it’s not very complicated. Here’s a rundown of some elements of code that can help your car dealership’s rankings in the search engines.

HTML

Heading Tags - these are HTML tags which highlight a bit of text that’s important to the page it is on, you can think of them like chapter titles in a book. There are six possible heading tags on a page, H1 being the most important, and H6 being the least. While these can be repeated (using H1 more than once) the ideal is to utilize them once. You don’t have to use all six on a page, using just H1 is fine, but make sure you are at least using H1.

To use these tags, simply place the code <h1> before the text you want have as your main heading tag, and </h1> at the end to tell your browser (and the search robots) that where the tag has ended.

Strong & Italic Tags - you can stress that a word or phrase is important by making it strong (bold) or italic. Strong tags begin with <strong> and end with </strong>. Use <em> and </em> for italics.

HTACCESS

The htaccess file on the server can give information too all the visitors to your website, including the search engine crawlers, about how to access your site, and what it’s allowed to “see”. This is where we get into 301 redirects.

There’s a couple of ways to get to your website, someone could go to http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com (without the “www.”). Search engines can actually “see” each of this as a different website, even if the content is exactly the same. To indicate to the search robots that they are actually the same we 301 redirect one of these to the other. A 301 redirect tells crawlers that the content has permanently moved.

To redirect the non-www version of a domain to the www version (which is most common) please the below code into the htaccess file on your server (replacing “domain” with your domain, and change the extension if you don’t have a .com):

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course your code is lost if your site can’t be crawled. Make sure your website provider offers true html sites.

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