As I mentioned in my last post, I now work with Dealer Solution, Inc. which its main products is a dealer software for used and independent auto dealers. They brought me on as a partner to help them offer SEO services to their customers which are are mainly independent and used auto dealers. This has prompted me to learn more about the auto dealer fields.

Auto dealers in particular small independent and used auto dealers often don’t invest in SEO mainly because they either don’t understand the value of search engines or they think it is way too competitive of a field for them to get any good traffic. That is why they invest in listing their websites in third party sites such as Shop for Auto and other similar sites with traffic uploading their inventory in hope of getting some good traffic.

But what they miss out on is local SEO. Yes it maybe hard to rank organically for “used Honda Civic” nationally but if you invest in local SEO, if someone in your area looking for a used Honda Civic, Google’s local search and customized search will have a great chance to return your website in the top list if you optimize your website effectively for local SEO.

Local and customized search are now bringing the most traffic.Near 30% of traffic for this blog is based on local search terms and customized traffic (including logged in search). This means that this also could be a huge traffic opportunity for any websites and auto dealer websites aren’t exempt.

There is a ton of opportunity in local SEO and that is what we will be focusing on when it comes to our auto dealership clients when optimizing their websites. If you are a small business owner of an auto dealer and looking to optimize your website, feel free to contact the should you need any help, consulting, or even a simple question.

Although my business is registered in San Diego, Encinitas to be exact, and I have clients from both Los Angeles and San Diego, I have moved to Orange County to work with a couple of local firms helping them boost their internet marketing division. It is a new stage of my career that I am very excited about.

But I am not limiting myself to these two businesses and I have some free time doing SEO consulting and I really want to tap into orange county area so if you are a small business or medium business looking for an SEO consultant in Orange County, I am now local and can help your business. I offer a variety of SEO and internet marketing consulting services I recommend you check out.

- Local SEO is becoming more targeted by spammer – Google’s heavy focus on “citations” is the main reason because as getting links from other websites can be difficult, getting citations isn’t as difficult. For example, spammers can spam forums and blogs with “citations” and since there is no link involved, there is no nofollow tag or no spam detection hence it is easily absued.

-  Google Search Quality Declines because of Google+ – Competing with Facebook and Twitter, Google is favoring its own social media network, Google+, and showing it in the search results. Many search engine experts and usability experts believe this will decline Google’s search results. Although this will probably not effect Google’s search market share as its biggest competitor is way behind in the industry.

- SEO Business on The Rise – Just like how late 90s there was a .com boom, there seems to be a “.seo” boom now that many companies have websites, they want to get soem search engine traffic as it is the most targeted type of traffic. As the result SEO firms and SEO consultants are highly in demand these day.

I am taking some time off working for others full time to focus on myself and my consulting business. I will be working with a few local companies here in OC such as Bold Array and Dealer Solutions(AutoXplorer) as well as my own clients in San Diego, OC, and LA. This is a much needed time for me to reach out truly to the entrepreneurial side of me and applying my internet marketing skills to my own business.

I will be working with those companies mainly offering my SEO, SEM, and web development businesses.

I am not ruling out working for someone else however, if there is an exceptional opportunity I will pursue it but at this point it is much needed for me to do this for myself and my services.

Just thought I drop a quick note indicating that Search Marketing Posts accepts guest posts on search marketing and internet marketing topic. If you are a blogger writing about such topics make sure you visit that link.

Of course I am the owner of that site as well trying to get it going to hopefully become one of the top visited search marketing blogs in 2012.

As an SEO consultant, I often advise my clients to heavily invest in content because of search engines love content and want to show the most relevant content to their uses. The particularity like two type of content;

a) Search engines like quality content
b) Search engines like fresh content

Now the question come is that where to invest this content. And my answer is that “it depends!”. I personally invest most of my content on my websites. Mainly because I think in long term it helps my site more by generating traffic to your website as opposed to guest posts and articles where they usually get a little bit offsite traffic and ranking boost to your website but eventually they disappear deep inside pages as more posts come and the links to your website disappear.

But if you put content on your own website, then you get some good traffic off line tail and if you continue improving internal linking.

How to improve internal linking
Always reference your old and archive posts when relevant. For example my press release post I wrote a few days ago has a few references to older posts linking to them hitting the bots to revisit this pages even though they are old because they have valuable content hence the ranking of these pages will increase in the search engines and they will become more valuable again.

Offsite Content
Offsite content as mentioned earlier refers to article submission, press release submission, and guest posting when you are trying to get some exposure and self promote.

Some of my previous employers and clients have asked me to provide an ROI on SEO initiatives so that way they know how much to invest and while that is a very reasonable thing to ask, I often tend to tell them that don’t count on the ROI results heavily and invest in SEO for long term results.

SEO is a guideline not a marketing campaign
Sure you can break down your initiatives into so called “campaigns” but they not true campaigns. And the reason I say they are not campaigns because by definitions, campaigns have an end. Marketing campaigns in particular have a certain end where you measure your campaigns success. A good example is an email marketing campaign where you run to see your open rate, click through rate, and conversion. Same deal with social media campaign, and even your PPC  campaigns.

But your SEO initiatives should not have an end they should be ongoing. SEO is an ongoing refinement of your website and its content. Your web masters or web developers should always be on the look out to implement the latest web development techniques that are search engine friendly, your content writers should always have both users and search engines in mind, and your marketers should always be marketing your content, product, and services out there in order to earn popularity.

Link building should be an ongoing process, as many older links drop and new ones appear, and that is how search engines rank websites based on active links. And since nowadays sites change, update, and content gets pushed down, your links fall off the chart so you need to continue building new links.

Of course throughout the process you need to be analyzing and measuring all your efforts, see where you need to put more of focus. For example, if you think your site is SEO friendly enough, then you can shift some of your resources toward quality content creation and or outsourcing. But so as long as you want to rank well in search engines and get search engine traffic, you want to continue your SEO efforts and that is why it is very hard to call it a marketing campaign. SEO is an one king effort which is why I like to call SEO a technical and marketing guideline.