Net opportunities abound

I want to thank Tire Business and reporters Jeff Yip and Kathy McCarron for the great in-depth coverage about the Internet (“Caught up in the Web,” Feb. 12 issue), how it works, why it works and its usefulness in obtaining customers and maintaining them.

The emphasis about a company having a Web presence cannot be understated. We at Used Tires Inc. were fortunate enough to buy the generic keywords that pertain to our particular segment of the tire industry. We operate the Web sites www.usedtires.com, www.usedtire.com and www.usedtrucktire.com, among other generic URLs we own. Then through domain forwarding, we point to our other operational domains.

Tire dealers need to understand several things about how people search the Internet and how they wind up at your Web site. Those include the importance of links, keywords, search engine optimization and search engine marketing and why and how people get driven to or click on your Web site from the landing page on the search engine they used.

Direct navigation, for example, means the user bypasses a search engine and types the name of whatever thing he or she is searching for directly into the browser. Those account for 10 to 20 percent of all searches, giving domain owners with generic terms—usually the dotcom version—an extra advantage and usually a piece of intellectual property worth tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

In our industry the following are the 15 most searched words or phrases—singular and plural versions—according to www.overture.com: tire; discounttire; canadiantire; wheelsandtire; tirerack; tiredealer; goodyeartire; trucktire; coopertire; usedtire; motorcycletire; michelintire; cartire; bigotire; and atvtire.

Other areas of importance include unique visitors and pageviews, as well as determining from what area a Web surfer's IP (Internet Protocol) is for identifying geographically who is visiting your Web site—and how to convert these metrics into sales.

Also of interest is how pay-per-click advertising—search engine marketing such as Google Adsense—has turned ordinary Web site owners into an advertising billboard on the Net.

I hope in the future Tire Business will continue to report on this theme, possibly with a series of articles that bring all tire dealers into the Internet Age and help all of us maximize the Net for our businesses. I can tell you that it's generating revenue for us in addition to our tire sales.

Howard Levy

President

Used Tires Inc.

Boca Raton, Fla.

* * *

I was reading the “Caught up in the Web” section in the Feb. 12 issue and couldn't help but notice that ASA Tire Systems was not mentioned once.

We develop Web sites for tire dealers and have done so since 1999. We do not, however, create template-based Web sites, which was the topic of one of your stories. ASA Tire develops custom Web sites that accurately represent each independent tire dealership with its own branding and identity. Some of the sites we have designed can be seen in our portfolio section of our Web site: http://www.asatire.com/webdesign.htm.

You will notice that when you do a search on the Internet for “tire dealer web design” we come up No. 1 in Google and in Yahoo!

Erik Croswell

Creative marketing coordinator

ASA Tire Systems

Nashua, N.H.

Editor's note: A story on ASA Tire's launching a redesigned TireMaster Web site appeared in the Feb. 12 special section.