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4 Things You Don't Know About Your Google Ranking

Wedding Professionals:

Since Google opened for business, they have been changing their rules. They are constantly changing the way that they rank and index websites. This makes our lives difficult as we think about the importance of getting our websites in front of the countless brides who are searching for wedding businesses online.

If you think that you know the rules of search engine optimization (SEO), those rules might actually be outdated.

Here are four SEO rules that have drastically changed over the last few years:

Keyword Stuffing. Years ago, it was easy to manipulate web page rankings by mentioning a particular keyword over and over again. These days, Google penalizes sites for doing that. Instead, create useful and relevant content for people - not for search engines. I've heard that an important keyword should only take up about 7% of a web page's entire content. In addition, make sure keywords are present in a web page's header, subhead, title tags and meta description.
Blog Comment Spamming. Many people drop links to their websites on other sites within blog comments. In many cases, Google now ignores these links. Instead, create well-written, engaging content on your site and other websites will be more inclined to link to it.
Meta Tag Optimization. There was a time when meta tags (invisible coding on your web pages) played a large role in a website’s search ranking. You no longer have to waste your time with this because Google has publicly stated that they now ignore these tags.
Search Engine Submission. You used to have to submit your website to the search engines. Some companies even charge you to do this for you. Don’t pay them for this. Google is sophisticated enough now that the search engine will find your website on its own. Yes, it may take a few weeks but it will likely happen. To speed up this process, create profiles on social media sites and have those profiles link to your website. Google will see that activity and will index your website faster than if you hadn’t done that.

Do you have any SEO tips that you would like to share with our wedding forum? If so, please share them below.

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About This Blog: Christine Dyer is the Creator and Founder of BridalTweet. Christine 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 Kirsten Juntunen on May 8, 2010 at 1:48pm: Thanks for the up to date info about Google rankings. I know that there is a lot of mystery surrounding google's web crawling techniques, but this points people in the right direction.

Comment by Beyond Events (FL) on May 8, 2010 at 4:42pm: Thank you for the Google update, I am happy to hear that meta tags no longer are important for search engine rankings, because I thought we still had to do that. I will certainly do the SEO consultation as I am always looking for ways to improve my ranking, thanks for sharing.

Comment by Heartfelt Ministries on May 10, 2010 at 5:12am: Google may not be using meta tags anymore, but other smaller search engines still do.While most of our traffic might come from Google, keeping up for the smaller search engines is still important since you never know where a client is coming from.

If you want to direct more traffic to your site in a meaningful way, you are better off having your own blog with its own content and sending people to your site for more information.

Comment by Michael Shilling on May 10, 2010 at 5:35am: Great points.
“No-follow” was invented by Google in 2005 and almost every blog has no-follow for comments links. Wordpress has it as an installation default. This means that, even though you can put a link in your comment on a blog, the link is given no weight by the search engines.
It amazes me that five years on people still suggest that links in blogs can improve SEO!
The only actual value a link in comments has is if someone clicks on it..... as you said!

Comment by Maria G on May 10, 2010 at 3:51pm: thank you so much for the update!

Comment by Cathy Gabriel on May 11, 2010 at 3:33am: As always, great information Christine. Thanks

Comment by The Fab Bride - Philly on May 11, 2010 at 4:37am: Great topic!!

Comment by Robert Webster on May 11, 2010 at 4:49am: Great information. SEO tools are the key to marketking in the 21st century. If you aren't networking, you aren't marketing. I created an informational section to my website, which boosted my links IMMEDIATELY.

www.TampaLights.com

Comment by Bartina J. Houk on May 11, 2010 at 4:58am: Thanks for the info. Our Google ranking keeps going up as we add videos to YouTube.

Comment by Brandy Blackford on May 11, 2010 at 5:02am: Conflicting information prevails for non-techie people like me who try to do everything everyone says regarding SEO. It's nice to see some plain english information that dispels some of the mystery surrounding SEO. Thank you!