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