ECar List Saves Izmo Cars

I love technology, and because of that I’ve never been a big fan of Izmo Cars. They do create really nice looking websites, but the way Izmo handled their inventory has always been poor. I knew there was no way to optimize their inventory pages, so I never even bothered to try.

One of my car dealer clients is in Orlando Florida, and a few months back I started helping them juice up their main website. At this time, I had no choice but to select their corporate dealer.com website.

I blogged before about how great dealer.com was, but since working with their corporate site for Napleton I was unimpressed. It wasn’t their fault, but the options available for such a basic website isn’t enough. No matter what you do to it, it looks tacky (like a Cobalt Website). I’m sure there are upgrades available, but Napleton already has a monster of a websites created by Izmo Cars.

A while ago they mentioned they were doing something with E-Carlist, and they were going to incorporate this into their Izmo site.

Today I was poking around, and I like what I see, and here is why:

ECar List Is Using Subdomains Instead Of SubFolders

In case you don’t know the difference, a subdomain is usedcars.napletoncjd.com. A subfolder would be napletoncjd.com/usedcars. If you don’t know the difference you can read the wiki article on subdomains here.

Most companies would use a subfolder because it’s easier to rank and pass along juice. I’m assuming ECarlist is forced to do this because if they did use subfolders, it could conflict with what the main Izmo website is doing.

We use subfolders creatively with our miscrosites, and it works out great with Yahoo & Bing. We can actually get 3 or 4 different pages of the same principal website to show up on page one searches. It’s a bit tougher with Google, but it is possible.

One of the biggest problems with subdomains is simple. A subdomain is treated as an entirely separate website, so it takes some extra work building links to it to obtain rankings.

Inventory RSS Feeds

Finally, somebody else is using inventory RSS Feeds. There are many cool things you do do with an RSS Feed, and here are just a few:

1. You can update your Facebook Automatically(get directions).
2. You Can Update Twitter. We have a licensed Twitter app that’s more flexible, but you can take your RSS Feed and update your Twitter with Feedburner. If you don’t use FeedBurner, try it out. Burn your feed then click the “socialize tab”.
3. Mash Your Blog & Inventory Together. If you already have a dealer blog, I would hope it has an RSS Feed. You can take that RSS Feed AND your inventory feed and mash them together using Yahoo Pipes. This will take 2 or more RSS Feeds and convert them into one. then, take you new RSS feed that Yahoo made you and burn that into Feedburner. You can used the mashed RSS to update your twitter and Facebook Via Feedburner as well.
4. Make your own little Smart Phone Application: All you need is an RSS Feed, and you can easily make your own Smart Phone Application here.
5. Update LinkedIn: I’m not a big fan of LinkedIn, but you can update LinkedIn just like Facebook and Twitter.
6. Deep Link your Inventory using Your Car Dealer Blog: Add an RSS Widget to your blog (for your inventory). This will help in getting your inventory crawled faster by the search engines. I added the RSS feed of Ecarlist to one of the Blogs Napleton has. Look on the right here (scroll down a little). You can also make that cool looking widget on that blog with an RSS Feed. That makes a great call to action. Note, the widget won’t pass authority. It does make a great call to action for humans, but be sure to have the regular feed as well for the bots. I added the widget to the top tight of this blog so you can check it out.
7. RSS Direrctories: There are tons of free and paid RSS Directories out there. Spend the time adding your RSS feed to these, it can create much needed backlinks.

Internet Saturation:

Now Napleton has an Izmo Site with 2 subdomains, so that counts as three websites. Plus, they have a corporate Dealer.com website and a Showroom Logic Microsite with a WordPress Blog. So all together they have well over 2,000 web pages indexed on Google alone. The more pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing; the more traffic you will get. It’s simple math really.

I am not sure if Izmo and Ecarlist have a working relationship or not, but in either case I hope Izmo appreciates what they did. You don’t see many companies work together like that. For me, it’s a perfect marriage. Let Izmo work on the design of the website, and let Ecarlist manage the technology.

Izmo should at least send the crew at E-Carlist some pizzas or something.