Over the last couple of weeks I have been getting up to speed with a few web development frameworks that I’ve been wanting to work on: NodeJS and bootstrap. I had experimented with both of them a little over the last few years, but I never had the chance to actually work on a project, until now.
I had the idea to put together a little website to search for car key replacement batteries when my Mazda 3’s car key was starting to get a little weak. Doing a google search returned some results but nothing definitive, other than a few youtube videos on how to replace the battery. Nothing outright stated that a 2014 Mazda 3 uses a CR2025 type coin battery, so it didn’t give me the confidence that I was actually getting the right battery without confirming it with the car manual. And further more, those youtube videos didn’t give me an option to buy an actual replacement battery.
So I set out to build a new site that would both definitively tell you what kind of battery your car key needs, and give you some cheap options to purchase a replacement battery and I called it CarKeyBatteryDepot.com. The website lets you specify your car’s year, make and model and key fob type (if there is more than one for your car) and it displays the type of replacement battery you need and provides you a list of vendors to purchase the battery from for cheap. The battery database was built by going through hundreds of car manuals (so far only Mazda and Toyota from 1999-2019 is supported) using a Python program I wrote to read the PDFs and extract the battery data. The purchasing options are pulled from Amazon’s Product Advertising API.
The site was built using NodeJS and NGINX with a LokiJS backend for fast searching and Bootstrap to provide a responsive UI. I followed Mozilla’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO to get the basics of SEO to give the site the best chance of being the top Google search result. Specifically, I’m using the following techniques:
- ‘Meta Description’ tag in header, and all keywords in both the ‘title’ tag and at the top of the page
- URLs for every possible battery response with the car’s year, make and model in the path. Ex: carkeybattery.com/2014/Mazda/3
- sitemap.xml with a list of every possible URL so Google knows what to index
- support SSL, with a free certificate obtained from LetsEncrypt.org
I’ve been waiting to see how well this works, but Google hasn’t indexed the site as of yet. This blog post is meant to both give me a way to introduce the site to anyone who is following my website, and to give Google another link to the site in the hopes that they consider this as me vouching for the site which should help its site rank. I’m hoping this little experiment works and that I can generate a few bucks off of Amazon referrals, as well as use it as an example when attempting SEO for other people. I’ll post a follow up once I have some definitive results.
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