I'm still reeling from the amazing feedback I got on my series of articles about advertising for wedding businesses (and the demise of old fashioned wedding directories). I think I helped people, and I also learned a lot myself from all of your comments.

This guest post by Jon from Wedding Service Providers takes things a step further. Jon made some great comments about my articles and really contributed to the debate. If you're looking to improve your presence on Google further, Jon's advice will really help. Pen and paper at the ready, and I'll hand over to Jon!

Opti­mis­ing a wed­ding busi­ness online

For the pur­poses of this arti­cle I have cre­ated an entirely fic­ti­tious wed­ding busi­ness called Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes, Based in Brighton, East Sus­sex. In this arti­cle I will explain how I would go about opti­mis­ing the Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes web­site to get more traf­fic from the search engines.

Research your key words

Firstly, I need to decide on a few search terms I want to rank well for in the search engines. In order to do this, I need to find out a lit­tle bit about what peo­ple are search­ing for, so I will use Googles Search-based key­word tool at http://www.google.com/sktool/. Into the key­word tool I enter a num­ber of phrases I am think­ing about tar­get­ing, to see which ones are being searched for the most.

From this I have decided that I want to opti­mise the home page of my web­site for the phrase — Wed­ding Cakes Sus­sex — and — Wed­ding Cakes Brighton — but I also want to put some empha­sis on my range of cake top­pers and cake stands, because Google key­word tool has just shown me that thou­sands of peo­ple are search­ing for those.

Titles, meta tags and content

I now need to make some changes to the home page of my web­site, to effec­tively opti­mise it for those search terms. I am going con­struct a page title, meta tags, and some page con­tent first of all.

Page title

In the HTML of your web page, in the head sec­tion, you will see two tags like this <title> </title>, prob­a­bly with some text in between. This is your page title, and quite an impor­tant fac­tor of on-page SEO. It is also the title of your search results snip­pet on Google. Here you def­i­nitely want to include your main key­words, but at the same time you don’t want to make your title too long.

Many busi­nesses put their busi­ness name in their home­page title, which is a waste of space. Peo­ple who are search­ing for what you offer don’t really care what your busi­ness is called at the point they click on the search result.

For Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes my title is going to look like this…

<title>Wedding Cakes Sus­sex. Bespoke Cakes And Cake Top­pers in Brighton, East Sussex.</title>

Here I have used most of my tar­geted key­words, and I have even repeated some with­out being spammy. The title makes sense to the searcher, and makes sure the search engines know exactly what my page is about.

Notice how I have cap­i­talised the first let­ter of every word in my title. Sta­tis­tics show that doing this can increase click through rate sig­nif­i­cantly. Cap­i­tal­is­ing every sin­gle let­ter, reduces click through rate massively.

Use a dif­fer­ent title for every page on your site, tar­get­ing dif­fer­ent key­words, but mak­ing sure the key­owords you tar­get relate to the con­tent of the page.

Descrip­tion Meta Tags

Now I have my title, I need to cre­ate a descrip­tion Meta Tag. The only rea­son I am doing this is because Google and other search engines some­times show the descrip­tion Meta Tag as part of the search results snip­pet. The descrip­tion Meta Tag no longer holds much, if any, SEO value. Here is the descrip­tion Meta Tag I have cre­ated for Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes…

<META name=“description” content=“Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes make bespoke fruit, sponge and choco­late choco­late cakes for wed­dings in Sus­sex, Sur­rey and Lon­don. We also stock a large range of wed­ding cake top­pers, stands and dec­o­ra­tions avail­able nation­ally in our online store.” />

All I have done here is make sure the descrip­tion Meta Tag explains to the searcher what my busi­ness is about. I have used my main key­words for what lit­tle SEO ben­e­fit there may be, but I have tried not to use any sin­gle word more than three times to ensure my Meta Tag is not ‘spammy’.

It is impor­tant to note that Google does not always use the Descrip­tion meta tag for the search result snippet.

Use a dif­fer­ent descrip­tion Meta Tag for every page on your site, tar­get­ing dif­fer­ent key­words, but mak­ing sure the key­words you tar­get relate to the con­tent of the page.

Key­word Meta Tag

The key­word Meta Tag is now obso­lete in terms of SEO, and although still used by many web­sites, it now holds no ben­e­fit whatsoever.

Page Text

I now need to write about the ser­vices Clara’s wed­ding Cakes offers on the home page. This is, believe it or not, the most tricky part of search engine opti­mi­sa­tion. It’s tricky because the page text needs to do 3 things. It needs to con­tain my key­words for search engine opti­mi­sa­tion rea­sons, it needs to be easy to read, and it needs to con­vert traf­fic into sales.

So many web­sites I see write their main page con­tent for the search engines. They repeat key­words at every oppor­tu­nity, and their just doesn’t read well at all. Why bother with search engine opti­mi­sa­tion at all, I mean why even have a web­site, if you are going to write your con­tent for search engines and not your poten­tial customers?

Sta­tis­tics show that if a vis­i­tor does not know exactly what a web­site is about within 7 sec­onds, they will move and search for another site. So for­get about writ­ing for the search engines and write for your cus­tomers. On your home page you need to say exactly what you offer and to need to do so in such a way your read­ers know what you do within seconds.

Get­ting started

Firstly you start with a head­ing, which, in your HTML should be sur­rounded by tags that look like this… <h1>Your heading</h1>

You should make sure, if you are using CSS, that your head­ing is con­sid­er­ably larger than the other text on your page.

Text in head­ings is impor­tant in terms of SEO, so your head­ing needs to both let your reader know what the page is about, and con­tain some of your more impor­tant keywords.

For Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes, that’s easy.…

<h1>Bespoke Wed­ding Cakes, Top­pers, Stands and Cake Decorations</h1>

This leaves the reader in no doubt what this web­site is about, and it con­tains some of my main keywords.

You can use sub head­ings too, such as <h2>sub heading</h2> and <h3>sub sub heading</h3>

I now need to write the main text of Clara’s Wed­ding Cakes home page. Again, this needs to be easy to read, but also needs to con­tain my key words and phrases. I need to use my main phrase — Wed­ding Cakes in Sus­sex — within the first two sen­tences of my text, to let the search engines know it is impor­tant to the page, and I want to include my other key­words two or three more times. I do not want the text to be too long, because I know huge pas­sages of text can put peo­ple off if they are look­ing for prod­ucts and services.

Splash Pages

I wanted to add a lit­tle bit about splash pages because I have noticed that quite a lot of wed­ding busi­nesses are using them.

Splash pages are web­site home pages that usu­ally con­tain a pic­ture, or Flash movie that says some­thing like ‘click here to view site’ or ‘enter site’. Don’t do it, no mat­ter how ‘arty’ you think it makes your site look. Users hate them and your home page is your best chance of get­ting search engines rank­ing for your key phrases, don’t waste your home page on a splash page that holds no content.

Page speed

Now more than ever, the time it takes for your page to load really mat­ters. It mat­ters mostly because users on slower inter­net con­nec­tions may not stick around to see your page load, and there­fore you lose poten­tial cus­tomers, but now it also mat­ters from an SEO point of view.

Google now has page load speed as part of its rank­ing algo­rithm, so if your site is slow to load, you may get a lit­tle less traf­fic from Google. Google’s Matt Cutts has made a point of sug­gest­ing that it is not yet a major fac­tor, and does not affect rank­ing as much as some­thing like Pager­ank, but it is a fac­tor none the less, so we need to make sure pages load as quickly as pos­si­ble. Google pro­vides lots of infor­ma­tion ded­i­cated to help­ing web­site own­ers reduce page load times… http://code.google.com/speed/articles/

Links and Pagerank

I don’t know if you have heard, but hav­ing links from other web­sites point­ing at your web­site can improve your website’s posi­tion on the search engines. Of course you have heard, every­one knows that now, so let’s set about exchang­ing links with each other and get links from any­where we can, right? Wrong!

OK this is a tough one to write about because it is SO com­plex, and there is so much poor infor­ma­tion about it on the inter­net about it. Let me start by say­ing that nobody other than the search index and search spam engi­neers at Google really knows every­thing there is to know regard­ing the true value of inbound links, and what makes a good or or not so good inbound link.

We do know a few things though. We know that nat­ural organic links, that are not bought or bartered for are great for us. If some­one links to our site sim­ply because they love our site, per­haps they men­tioned our site in their blog, that link is valu­able. We know that the anchor text in the link can add even more value to a link, but we also know that hav­ing too many links with the same anchor text point­ing to our site could make Google sus­pect foul play. We know that some web direc­to­ries no longer pass any pager­ank to those they link to.

Good links for your site

Here’s a healthy way to look at link build­ing that will not get you penalised by Google, and will put a stop to your wor­ry­ing about how many links are point­ing at your site. Google only wants to give you any credit that do, and should, count as a vote for your site. If a blog links to your site, it is most likely telling peo­ple that your site is worth look­ing at, for what­ever rea­son. If your web­site is poor and has lit­tle con­tent, it is unlikely any­one will write about it. So if your web­site is get­ting men­tioned a lot, your site must be good, and there­fore Google will rank it that bit higher. So your focus should not be to exchange or buy links, that is a com­plete waste of time these days. Your focus should be on devel­op­ing good con­tent, and forg­ing good rela­tion­ships with other peo­ple in your industry.

Social net­work­ing

Here I will touch on the role social net­work­ing has in SEO. Social net­work­ing, such as Twit­ter and Face­book allows you to talk with and forge rela­tion­ships with other peo­ple in your indus­try. You will get ten or more times more links from other people’s blogs if you are reg­u­larly in con­tact with them, and are on friendly terms with them. You will begin to notice more and more over the next few years just how well the web­sites of those who reg­u­larly use twit­ter do.

Blog­ging is also an essen­tial part of SEO now. Blogs nat­u­rally bring in traf­fic, sim­ply because every blog post you write becomes a new piece of con­tent listed in the search engines. But it is also a very impor­tant fac­tor in link build­ing. If you write a blog, you will get reg­u­lar read­ers, and many of those read­ers will most prob­a­bly be writ­ers of other related blogs. If you write a blog your posts keep your read­ers com­ing back for more. The chances are they will reg­u­larly ref­er­ence your blog on their own blogs.

Exchang­ing links no longer holds a great deal of value. It won’t do you any harm at all, but don’t expect to see a great deal of dif­fer­ence in your search engine posi­tion due to links gained through link exchanges. There is likely to be some ben­e­fit, but not very much, so your time is much bet­ter spent cre­at­ing tools and con­tent that will attract nat­ural links from your readers.

Adam Ley­ton, cre­ator of compareweddinginsurance.org.uk and toptableplanner.com has taken the time to develop some truly use­ful tools for his site vis­i­tors. These are sure to attract links from other sites because they are very use­ful tools that peo­ple will talk about on blogs and forums. Devel­op­ing use­ful tools for your users is another great way to attract links.

In the next Part

part 2 of this arti­cle will cover the fol­low­ing subjects…

Inter­nal link structure

Site Maps

Google Web­mas­ter Tools

Google Anayt­ics

Links From Busi­ness and Wed­ding Directories

SEO meth­ods to avoid