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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If you think that you know the rules of search engine optimization (SEO), those rules might actually be outdated.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 Elizabeth Thomas on May 13, 2010 at 4:17am: I am passionate about SEO (and train non-techies because I love it so much.) Here is what I'd add:

Google rank by itself doesn't mean much of ANYTHING! I had a Google rank 5 website and crap traffic. It just meant we had highly regarded websites linking to us. When we revamped everything, we gained tremendous traffic. AND, because we also really focused on our branding, our traffic had a much better conversion (the action from seeing the website to picking up the phone.)

Meta tags *ARE* still important for the bride! As I tell people, step one is showing up at all on page one of a result, but step two is having an interesting, engaging reason for brides to click on you. The PAGE title is one piece (and that's a meta tag.) If you know SEO, then your page names reflect the file name and that all reflects a pressure they're feeling and the query they're asking. Always name it exactly what you're talking about, not just "Article 3." The Meta description is taken from the content of your website but not always...and that's a great place to "sell" why someone should read the page. I always have my sales hat, trying to make it intriguing or explain what the page is going to address. And the final piece that isn't a meta tag, but is still important is your domain name because it's also taken into consideration when you "show up on page 1 of google." That gives some bit of information on whether you'll be clicked on. If you are just another "wed" domain name, you may not stick out with the 9 other websites that also have a generic "wed" website name.

Hope this helps.

Comment by Christine Dyer on May 13, 2010 at 5:59am: Just to clarify - Yes, meta titles and meta descriptions for each page are still very important. That is what people will see when your listing appears on Google. However, people used to use another set of meta keywords (basically a laundry list of keywords for each page) and that is no longer relevant. I hope that helps too. Thank you to everyone for all of your comments! Your contributions here are helpful to everyone!

Comment by Wendy@RhapsodyinBloom on May 13, 2010 at 8:04am: Thank you Christine, It was a very helpful discussion! Thank you Elizabeth, for your input too. All good stuff!

Comment by Jerry Bruno Productions on May 13, 2010 at 9:38am: True, meta keywords are usually ignored, but the Title tag and Meta description tag are still very important as you state in point #1. Key words are extracted from them, and the description is often pulled for the search engine result.

As far as No-Follow, as a commenter mentioned, links placed on no-follow sites do still count, but no pagerank credit is rolled over from the site. Many sites also turn off or don't use no-follow. There are many no-follow blog and site directories out there. I turned off no-follow on my own WordPress blog using a plugin, but I strictly moderate all comments. I also use a Firefox add-on that instantly shows me which links are nofollow.

4% keyword usage is usually what I hear. And a sitemap is very important for the search engines to be able to see you.

Comment by Crystal Couture on May 20, 2010 at 9:08am: Thanks for the info. Any help with SEO is always useful. If anyone in the wedding industry wants to swap recipricol links please let me know.

Comment by Flourish Bomboniere on November 14, 2010 at 6:48pm: Thank you for this information, it has been really helpful.
Liz Young
Owner
Flourish Bomboniere
www.flourishbomboniere.com.au

Comment by Ivor Tetteh-Lartey on February 8, 2011 at 6:26am: Try to include locations and venues in well written content, review other suppliers and increase local directory listings but try to word each profile so that each are unique, that way you will gain more indexed profiles. The local profiles should help visibility of your places listing.