Build a Niche Store Review of www.the-hybrid-car-store.com

June 24, 2008

June 2008 Build a Niche Store Review for The Hybrid Car Store

Site: http://www.the-hybrid-car-store.com/
Target Niche Market: Sales and Information about Hybrid Cars
Date Reviewed: June 24, 2008
By: Mark Hansen

Overall Niche Store Score: 4.6 out of 10 (10 being the best)

• Domain Name: 8  (Has target words in domain name)
• Domain Age: 1  (Active for only 1 month)
• Niche Specific Site: 5
• Site Indexing: 8 (36 indexed pages in less than 1 month)
• Use of Unique Meta-Titles: 1
• Use of Unique Meta-Keyword Tags: 1
• Use of Unique Meta-Description Meta tags: 8
• Public and xml Sitemaps:  10
• Use of Targeted Articles and Information: 2
• BANS Default Menu Optimization: 2

Overall, on initial load, the site theme is pleasing to the eye and loads very quickly! The green color tends to fit the theme of what I would expect to see at a hybrid type of site and the menu and content alignment work out perfectly in several browsers!

As I started researching the depth of information found in search indexes, I immediately noticed that many of the pages share the same title information. If there is one specific area to pay attention to more than any other, the meta-title likely carries the most weight. Visit this resultpage of the serp’s and you will find that more than 50% of the indexed pages all have the same page title. I will talk more about that below…

Lets get into the review and reasons for the scoring of the Hybrid Car Store

Domain Name: 8
This section may be a bit confusing to some and it is easy to understand why! The domain has ALL the words you would want in a site about Hybrid Cars for Sale, however it uses 3 hyphens. While hyphens are perfectly fine in domains, it is commonly believed that more than 2 hyphens will result in some type of filter from search engines. I do not know if this is fact or just belief, but Matt Cutts addressed it in a blog post from 2005, where he says there is NO algorithm for it. I do not know if that has changed or not since his post was published.

Domain Age: 1
This factor is based purely on the age of the site… which was just registered 1 month ago. As the domain ages and you continue to add unique content, you will find it gains authority based on age. If you plan to keep this site for several years, you may want to look into extending your registration time to more than just one year as well. Time to expire is viewed as a factor by at least Google, and is covered in one of their patents of their algorithm. (I do not have the link to the patent handy, but will find and post as a followup)

Niche Specific Website: 5
This section is where I first began to struggle with the content on the site. For instance, the site is about Hybrid Cars, but when I clicked on the link for Chevrolet” in the left BANS menu, I was presented with old trucks, corvettes, and many other vehicles that are not hybrid in nature.

Once you complete some of the recommendations below, this will immediately change the scoring of this section! By simply adding a sitewide search term under your store setup, you could instantly reduce the listings to hybrids only, which is what visitors will expect to find when they land on the site.

Site Indexing: 8
Google currently shows more than 35 pages for the site in the index! Some of the pages are not listed in your menu tree, which I assume you have them either turned off, or deleted them since they were initially indexed.

Now that we know the spiders are coming and your niche will deliver the targeted visitors you want, lets take a look at the most important factors of the site.

Use of Unique Meta-Titles, Meta-Keywords and Meta-Descriptions
When I begin looking into the uniqueness of a BANS site, the first stop is always the main page. In order to have a successful site, you first have to make it unique and different from the hundreds of other BANS sites, then you need to make it better than the others on the web!

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, my attention was caught very early by the serp page showing your site indexing. More than half of the pages share the same title! I would set myself a goal of walking through each and every MAIN category of the site and writing unique meta titles for every single page.

Current: Hybrid cars for sale : used hybrid cars : cheap hybrid cars

By walking through each page and making the title, keywords and description VERY SPECIFIC to that particular page, you will instantly increase the relevance of the individual pages and how they relate to the products being listed on them.

The main page is one of the most important because it is where most of your inbound links will end up coming to. Its just the nature of the web… someone finds the site and links to you, most of the time, to the home page. With that in mind, you should use your main page meta information to provide info on the entire site.

Current Main Page Meta information
Meta-Title - Hybrid Cars for Sale
Meta-Description- Hybrid Cars For Sale. Toyota Prius, Honda Hybrids, GM Hybrids, Ford Hybrids 
Meta-Keywords- hybrid cars,toyota, prius,ford,gm,honda,civic,accord,hybrid
 

Recommended Main Page Meta information
Meta-Title - Hybrid Cars for Sale and Information about Hybrid Car Technology
Meta-Description- The Hybrid cars for sale website contains listings of all type of hybrid cars and hybrid trucks for sale on ebay. In addition to our hybrid auto store, we have quite a bit of information on hybrid technology used in cars and trucks.
Meta-Keywords- hybrid cars for sale,hybrid,cars,trucks,sale,sell,buy,autos,vehicle,toyota,chevy,chevrolet,nissan,lexus,green,hybrid

From the changes above, you can see that I have included more information about the overall offering on the site for visitors.

Use of Public and XML Sitemaps
Both public (for visitors) and xml sitemaps (for search engines) are in place on the site and both seem to work correctly. There has been a recent issue with the xml sitemap using the same priority on ALL site pages, which I am looking into now.

Use of Targeted Articles and Information
I really like your currently selection of articles on the site! Even though there are only a couple, they seem to be different from those found on most affiliate sites. The only concern in this area was when I ran the pages through copyscape and found that you are using the same text of one article, on 5 of your sites… resulting in duplicate content of more than 90% on the content.

Instead of article pages, I would focus on writing one or two unique paragraphs on top and bottom of your actual store pages. It will take a bit of time for sure, but if you do a little research and write 150-200 words of unique content on each page of your store, it will help distinguish those sites from others much better.

Default Build a Niche Store Menu Optimization

Overall, the default menu is the same as eBay. You should spend time on keyword research at a place like WordTracker, to get the longer tail phrases for your menu items. For example:

You have: “Malibu” (which could be either hybrids or not)
May try: Chevy Malibu Hybrid (Which is very specific)

I would run through the term “Hybrid Cars” from a place like WordTracker or any keyword research tool of your choice and see what visitors are actively looking for.  When I did this myself, I found that terms like  ”Hybrid cars with legroom”, while not having a high volume of search, have very little competition in the market. You could easily convert a phrase like this into a category on the store… writing a small paragraph on top, explaining the legroom comparison on different models, then listing those models in the product area.

In addition, I would add a link in the top content page section, that brings visitors right over to the wikipedia page on Hybrid Vehicles. This will not only help your visitors learn more but also tell the search engines the type of site you have by linking to one of the highest authority sites on the web. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vehicle)

Overall Recommendations for the Success of this Build a Niche Store site

• First, Narrow your site results to only hybrid vehicles. By removing all the other vehicles from showing on your product pages, you will not only increase keyword saturation, but provide your visitors very relevant results.
• Walk through each page of your store in your site administration. Rewrite your titles based on what you want your visitors to expect to see on those pages. If the PAGE is about Toyota Prius, then write a unique titles based on that information. Do this for every page of your site…
• Add text based content on top and bottom of all your store pages. Spending 15 minutes writing a unique paragraph or two about the listings on that specific page will reduce duplicate content and increase page relevance.
• While you are adding unique titles and content on your pages, it would be a good time to recreate your link text (anchor text) into more descriptive phrases. In the example above, simply changing from “Malibu” to “Chevy Malibu Hybrid” lets the visitors know exactly what they will find on the resulting page.

Overall, the site is in a very competitive market, which means you may have to spend a bit of extra time making it one of a kind. Offer your visitors a compelling reason to visit with unique content… and you will be rewarded with click through sales!

Mark

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