Hi guys, How do you feel about optimizing "Cookie Cutter" websites. Are these websites already at an extreme disadvantage considering their un-unique site structures? One website company a lot of our clients use is dealeron.com - Every site they make is essentially the same. How would you go about optimizing these type of sites. Any hints, suggestions, questions, comments? Thanks guys, this forum is the best!
Understood, and thank you for the quick response; however is it possible to make these type of pages rank high?
I would use the site as a start if it has some good guts to it. Then make the site your own. I have done it a couple of times and the site ends up completely different. Its sometimes easier to be creative when you have something to start with. Start by removing the stuff you don't like.
Yes, but it's more difficult since you're starting with essentially the same content that thousands of other people already have online. If you're looking to develop a real winner it's best to start with 100% original content. "Cookie cutter" sites can serve a purpose but I wouldn't count on making one of them, without a lot of work and effort, your primary long term $ maker.
Interesting approach, definetly something I was considering. The sites really lack text and I think thats a major problem with them. They have great back end management of leads aned such which is why a lot of clients enjoy using this company. I just think that their actual websites lack in the SEO department. The navigation is all flash other then minor text navigation at the bottom. There are no keywords in header tags and the only real keywords are at the bottom of the page for the obvious use of robots only. If there were a way to add more textual content to the sites I think they would rank higher.
I have an additional question: Do you think that since most of these sites are made with iframes google will have a hard time finding the text/keywords? Will search engines downgrade the sites because of the iframes and could they cause potential problems with people finding only parts of pages?
I was just speaking in general terms, not about the company you mentioned. Using a cookie cutter depends on your strenghts. When I started I was strong in SEO but a beginner in web design. I was able to learn html and PHP by modifying an existing site.
Well, I work for dealeron and i head up our SE marketing for our client sites. I can tell you that there is a slight disadvantage to using templated sites. We are fully aware of this and make great efforts to provide unique content and other SEO techniques to boost rankings. If you want a full list of the things we do to promote our SEO i would be happy to discuss it in private over phone or email. Because of our efforts, our "cookie cutter" sites do very well in the search engines. Just off teh top of my head, do a google search for "new york acura" (without the quotes) you will see that 2 of our clients rank in the top ten. www.acuraofwestchester.com ranks #1 and www.acuraofbrooklyn.com ranks #5. Yes, some of our sites look very similar but they dont have to. Our template/cookie-cutter is very flexible. Here's an example: www.riveroakshonda.com and www.windycityhonda.com are both from the same system but look very different. That being said, it would be much more costly to provide custom websites with all the services and tools our websites offer - increasing the cost to our clients. I can also tell you honestly that our competitors dont come near us in SEO. Some offer template site that dont rank well and other offer custom flash sites that dont rank. A good indicator of this is our company site. Pick a few good key phrases and see if dealeron.com comes out above our competitors most of teh time. Here is a few to get you started... auto dealer website automotive dealer website automotive dealership website car dealer websites auto dealer websites automotive dealer websites automotive search engine marketing automotive search engine optimization car dealer website auto dealer website design auto dealership website automotive dealership marketing automotive SEO automotive dealership web design automotive web site design Also, in addition to the normal things we do to promote SEO for our clients, we offer "SEO packages" whereby we do more extensive SEO work for our client's site that is too cost-prohibitive to do for all of our clients. We charge an additional fee for this but it includes things like link buidling campaigns and copywriting that just take too much time to do for every client of ours without charging extra. And, if you are extremely concerned about having a fully custom site, we can do that too - but we do charge a premium.
Sure thing. I enjoy the work we do and im always happy to talk about it. Oh, and i forgot to mention that we dont really use iframes. There might be one or two on the sites, but only use it if we have to.
This is in response to the thread starter's comments. I work for a dealership in Vegas and we were shopping websites not too long ago. Dealeron was the one we almost went with. (unfortunatly, almost) From what I know about these topics, their sites don't look / feel "cookie cutter" at all. Reynolds, Cobalt, well that's a different story. The amount of work Dealeron claims to put into SEO is not even comparable to the 5 mins Reynolds must take to launch a site. Just from some things I've learned from Dealeron reps, and researching on my own, the rankings on Google are by far the highest. Based soley on the amount of pages being indexed by Dealeron compared to ANY other host. Dealeron kills the competition. P.S. I may be wrong, but I don't think they (dealeron) start with a plain, useless site and go back to optimize it. That Doesn't work. I know. I believe they build it that way. So, your statment/question is somewhat of an oxymoron. Thanks.
I'm in this exact situation now. For my new site, for many of the pages (which read like a Physician's Desk Reference (PDR) insert), I wouldn't write to touch with a 10' pole, except for meta tags - not interested in mucking about in a legal swamp due to messing with carefully proscribed medical content. But, knowing that SE's look at pages, and not sites, I am doing other things to the site - adding relevant newsfeeds, I plan on opening up an articles section similar to my first site (with all original content), interlinked blogs, etc. It is an interesting question - how well can you do by adding fresh content to a site with pages which are essentially duplicated all over the web, by adding fresh pages. While the product pages may not bring people in from natural searches - I don't really care. The home page is completely editable, and can be optimized; and the other, informational, article and news pages can bring people whose concerns might find redress on the site can also be optimized. If you add the original content and do the normal SEO things, I can't think why the site, in terms of how many pages rank well, will do well. And beyond that, getting repeat customers is the second prong of "doing well." If 1 person comes back 5 times, that is as good as 5 people who come once. This is my strategy.