4-page Case Study - Posted 11/14/2008
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Toyota Web Site More Discoverable by Search Engines with Silverlight and iCrossing
ToyotaFishing.com is a microsite targeting fishing enthusiasts that helps Toyota promote the Toyota Tundra pickup brand. Originally developed in Flash, ToyotaFishing.com performed poorly in search engines, making it difficult for customers to find the site. Furthermore, updating content on the site was difficult and time-consuming for Toyota under the original architecture. To improve search engine optimization (SEO), iCrossing re-architected the site using Microsoft Silverlight, which significantly enhanced the discoverability of the Web site by search engines, and dramatically streamlined overall site update operations.
Situation
In April of 2008, iCrossing partnered with Microsoft to provide Toyota Motor Sales with a technology rebuild of their Toyota Fishing Team microsite. This microsite highlighted Toyota’s relationship with professional bass fishing.
The main objective was to show that the site, which already existed as an Adobe Flash site, could be rebuilt in Microsoft Silverlight using search engine optimization (SEO) practices for rich media development, and show marked increases in natural visibility without sacrificing quality in presentation.
Solution
The Toyotafishing.com microsite was built as a Flash site in 2007. A baseline Position Analysis Report (PAR) was completed and showed dismal results for a set of Toyota-branded, Toyota-sponsored anglers, and bass fishing terms. The total number of keywords ranked by Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and Ask.com in March of 2008 was two.
iCrossing examined the current obstacles to search engine indexing efforts on the existing site and to integrating natural search strategy. One of the greatest obstacles to natural search was that there was very little content on the pages that could be consumed by search engines, which made the site appear devoid of meaningful content.
To improve SEO, iCrossing decided to use Silverlight. Because Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines, iCrossing felt that using the technology would help improve the microsite's performance in search engine queries.
Second, by breaking up the content on the microsite into pieces, determining which were best suited for display in rich media containers and placing the rest of the content outside in standard HTML, iCrossing was able to provide the search engine spiders with consumable "mirrored" content to evaluate and index appropriately.
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Our goal in redesigning ToyotaFishing.com was to build the site using Silverlight that provides a rich media experience with excellent search engine visibility. |
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Jeffrey Pruitt Executive Vice President, Corporate Partnerships, iCrossing |
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Construction of the site involved more than utilizing Silverlight technology and integrating natural search best practices into the design. For this project iCrossing also kept the client’s desire to maintain the site using their existing Interwoven content management system in mind. The previous microsite was maintained by a third party vendor and at times required several days to update. By switching to Silverlight, Toyota is now able to update the site without vendor interaction in a matter of hours – a dramatic improvement to team productivity.
Within eight weeks the microsite was rebuilt and launched. With the exception of a few design changes to promote greater usability, the site maintained the same look and feel as the previous site.
Benefits
In late May 2008, the updated site was well received by the client as a faithful rebuild of the previous site and a significant improvement to the content management workflow. Furthermore, the site dramatically increased the natural visibility of the content to search engines, with the new Silverlight-based site garnering 78 ranked keywords, up from 2 ranked keywords with the old site. As of September 2008, the new Silverlight-based site captured 53 1st page rankings, 18 2nd page rankings, and 7 3rd page rankings. Thus, by switching to Silverlight, not only was Toyota able to improve its creative workflow, but it was able to reach a much larger audience with its marketing efforts.
Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight powers rich application experiences and delivers high quality, interactive video across the Web and mobile devices through the most comprehensive runtime available on the Web.
Built to integrate with Microsoft Servers, Developer and Designer Tools and supported by a thriving partner ecosystem, the Silverlight solution accelerates the results of compelling experiences through powerful technology.
For more information about Microsoft Silverlight, go to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the
United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Toyota Motor Sales, please visit http://www.toyota.com, http://www.lexus.com and http://www.scion.com.
For more information about iCrossing’s products and services, please visit the Web site at http://www.icrossing.com.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published November 2008
