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Weekly Advice: How to Climb High in Google's Rankings?

This always seems to be the BIG question for wedding professionals who have a website. This topic is called search engine optimization (SEO), which is the process of improving the volume of natural traffic to a website from search engines. A wedding professional who can master this will get free web traffic. Not only that, the traffic will be of high quality because it will be comprised of users who are looking for that wedding professional's particular service.
It is an absolute must to think through SEO before creating a website. Be sure to ask your web designer to address these rules as they create and/or update your site. As you read through these rules, also know that search engines are always changing their algorithms AND it takes time for search engines to recognize changes that you make to your site. Nonetheless, here are twelve helpful tips that I've learned along the way, which can help your website climb to the top of Google's rankings.

Rule #1: Remember that the search engines' main goal is to present the most relevant and useful information to its users. If someone types 'wedding advice' into Google, then the websites with the most useful information about wedding advice will appear. Therefore, do your best to have a website that presents the most relevant, useful, and fresh content about your specialty.

Rule #2: Choose two to three keywords that you want people to associate your site with. Ask yourself - what are the keywords that you want someone to type in Google in order to find your site? It is helpful to use the Google Keyword Tool to find out what keywords are popular. Be sure not to pick the most popular keywords because other more mature sites will beat you at those rankings. Instead, choose keywords that are less popular or less competitive, so that you will have a better chance of rising to the top of the rankings.

Rule #3: If possible, incorporate these keywords in your url or website address.

Rule #4: Include these keywords in each page's title. The title is written within the page's code and is what you see way up at the top of your screen when you are viewing a web page.

Rule #5: Include these keywords in each page's description. This is written within the page's code and is what appears when your site comes up in a Google listing.

Rule #6: Include these keywords in each page's meta-tags (also within the page's code).

Rule #7: Include these keywords in the body of each page but it is important to remember that you should not over use keywords. A general rule of thumb is that these keywords should only make up about 7% of the page's content.

Rule #8: Do not use a lot of photos or flash (animated pictures) because search engines can not read this. This is usually a challenge for wedding photographers who absolutely need to show off their work. As a solution, make sure that you name each photo file with one to four very descriptive keywords. And if your website has a lot of flash, add a page that is strictly html in order to include important keywords and to let Google know what your site is about.

Rule #9: Partner with other relevant wedding sites to have them point links toward your site. You can go to BridalTweet's Vendor Link Exchange Group to find sites to partner with. You should also add relevant website links to your site, which point outward.

Rule #10: Refresh your site's content on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this is to add a wedding blog to your site.

Rule #11: Add a 'bookmark this site' link to your site. Search engines like sites that are bookmarked.

Rule #12: Have a sitemap. This helps the search engine to understand how your website is organized.

Do you know of any other tips or rules? If so, please comment below and share them with us.

About This Blog: Christine Dyer has an MBA in marketing and shares over ten years of marketing expertise with the wedding community. In this weekly blog called Supercharge Your Wedding Business, you'll find advice on an array of wedding business topics such as how to market to brides, social networking, wedding PR, wedding sales, vendor networking, branding, pricing and much more. .Please pass this news along to your own professional wedding network. To receive this advice in your email inbox each week, Sign Up for a Free BridalTweet Membership.

Comment by Little Miss Wedding on October 5, 2009 at 1:25pm: hi I would say that generally that is a pretty succint and good overview of SEO (I am no expert but I have spent a couple of years working with people that do it full time and I run a number of websites, forums and blogs). You need to be careful of not overdoing the keywords and focusing content, title, metadata etc entirely on that. I would say that the most important things for the search enginesare
sites that have relevant, unique content (not rehashed and rewritten content from other sites), regularly updated content and written for the reader not the search engines. Also be careful with buying links (this gets your penalised) or link exchanges - link exchanging has very little use from the research done. The best thing to do is to write good quality content and other sites will link to you because they link your content is worth linking to - this in turn improves rankings - like the guide above says adding a blog is a good way to achieve many of these things, and having a site that is not build in flash with a good site architecture is a must

Comment by Christine Dyer on October 5, 2009 at 1:47pm: Little Miss Wedding - I agree! Thank you for contributing and for adding more advice.

Comment by The Wedding Planning Audiocast on October 7, 2009 at 6:49pm: Very good article Christine! Thanks for sharing.

Comment by Trista Thompson Photographer on October 12, 2009 at 11:40am: Great tips Christine. I was a little confused about SEO. I'm going to apply these to my photoblog today! Unfortunately, my blog is mostly pictures because that's what I do. I'll try to add more words to increase my SEO results.

Comment by Ines Nanic on October 13, 2009 at 11:37am: Thanks Christine, excelelnt tips on SEO- I've been struggling with it for a while now - at first i had a Flash only site but it was a nightmare with seasr engines, now i made a landing page with an option whether to go to HTML or FLASH page. it works out so much better! i will most def incorporate your tips into my site! thanks again and keep up the good work :)
all the best from Croatia

Comment by La Design Boutique on October 15, 2009 at 9:36am: Christine, this is awesome!!! I actually built my site myself to save on costs and realized that I have a lot to do to make it up to par to the standards you have listed above.. Thank you for mapping it out so simply and helping me realize what is the next step for me. I love your website!

Comment by Erica Clements on October 19, 2009 at 11:52am: Love this article!!

Comment by Favors by Lisa on October 20, 2009 at 11:40am: Thanks for the great advice!

Comment by Radiance Boutique on October 20, 2009 at 3:26pm: Great article Christine! I would highly recommend SEO for dummies to anyone starting out -it really helped me to know what I wanted when I spoke to my web designer. Just wanted to add also that links from blogs, especially ones that use your keywords can also be a real boost. My own blog has a google rank of 2 (this just means google assesses it to be important) so any other suppliers or bloggers I allow to post on there benefit a great deal from the link to their site. I'm afraid I only post relevant articles for UK brides before you ask -sorry International folks! But hopefully this shows it can be worth building your own blog or writing articles and finding others happy to post them for you.