TheTruthAboutCars.com starting licensing TrueDelta’s car pricing and specifications pages a few months ago. When these didn’t get as much traffic as was hoped, an SEO (search engine optimization) expert was called in. One of his primary recommendations: static price comparison pages.

Google (and other search engines) don’t fill in forms and click submit buttons. So they’ve had no way to index the wealth of information contained in TrueDelta’s highly detailed car price comparisons. And so searches for car price comparisons don’t find our sites as often as they ought to.

The static comparison pages will change this. They display the results of a comparison on a permanent page. These pages are the new target of the “most popular price comparison” links on the site, including those on the model information pages.

To create them, I wrote a program to match up bodystyles, powertrains, tire sizes, and audio systems between two cars. The program then runs a “maximum” price comparison, selecting all features available on both models.

If you want to customize the comparison, just click one of the links to the earlier stages at the top or the bottom of the static results. This will take you to the dynamic pages.

While these pages were initially created for search engines, they also make the site more useful for humans. First, they provide a one-click price comparison more thorough than you’ll find anywhere else. Also, with the dynamic pages, comparisons tend to be like snowflakes. Any two people are likely to end up with differnt results, as there are so many variables to select. In contrast, the static pages put some numbers out there that will be the same for everyone, which could be better for discussions of price differences between models.