Wedding SEO and Internet Marketing Blog

How do I get more hits on my website?

Well, if you are looking to get more hits to your website, there are many different approaches you can take.  While it is easy to just pay for traffic to your website, not everyone is in a position to do that.  Plus paid traffic can be a very dangerous endeavor if you do not know exactly what you are doing.

Building free traffic to your website takes some time and work.  One of the most important aspects of a website is content.  You need many pages of content on your website, loaded with information.  It is very important that these pages get indexed by Google.  When your page is indexed, people can get to it by doing a Google search on one of your keywords.  A keyword is a term used to retrieve documents in an information system such as a catalog or a search engine.

In order to get indexed on google, you need to have some backlinks pointing to your site.  Backlinks are any link on another side that, when clicked on, will take the user to your website.  One great, free way of getting these is by using social bookmarks.  Digg, Stumble, and Delicious are some great sites where you can social bookmark the pages of your website.  All you need to do is go to their webpage and submit the links to your site.  You also need to submit some keywords and a description to the site.  You will get some short-term traffic just by submitting your website, but the long-term advantage is that your page will climb the pages of google when you submit more and more quality backlinks.

Once you get your page indexed by Google, just keep finding more ways to post links to your site.  You can post them in your signature in forums.  The more links, the better.  This will help you move to the top of the search engine results pages of Google and increase your percentage of quality bridal leads.

Let me start off by saying Thank you for all the kind words. There is absolutely no angle here, I’m not trying to sell you anything, not looking for you to donate a dollar, just looking to pass on EFFECTIVE Internet Marketing strategies to bring more brides to your websites, and put that much more $$ in your pockets. Times are very tough and us wedding vendors need to stick together and weather the storm. So with that being said, lets start the learning…By the way, I apologize to anyone who knows a little about SEO, I will assume that EVERYONE is a beginner

So What is SEO?

Great!! Now that everyone knows the definition (blue print), now we must build the house.  But before you can build the house, you need your tools.  So here is what we need to get.

MOZILLA FIREFOX BROWSER Delete Internet Explorer forever (so many issues/viruses with the IE Browser.

THE GOOGLE TOOLBAR

The Google Tool bar is an add-on which allows you to show love to Google and assist them with their distributed computing project to help scientific research. By showing Google some love, they just might do the same for you.  It also demonstrates Page Rank (PR) for all websites that you visit.  Page Rank is basically a popularity score ranging from 0 to 10.  What is your Page Rank?  Obviously the higher the better.  We will get into Page Rank as we get deeper into the education.

SEO TOOL FOR FIREFOX. download it for free

No watch this short video – things might not make sense to you, but just get a basic understanding.

Great!! Now that you have some of the basic tools, and there will be many more trips to home depot (for more tools), we can now start with some of the basics.

How do Search Engines Work?

The first lesson in SEO that you will need to learn is that Search Engines are not humans.  While this might be very obvious, the difference between how many search engines and humans view web pages aren’t.  Not like humans, search engines are text driven.  Search Engines spend 24 hours a day crawling the web, looking for text to get an idea what a site is about. Keep in mind this is a brief explanation – Search engines also follow advanced algorithms while crawling, indexing, caching, processing, calculating, and retrieving.

The first thing a search engine does is crawl the web to look for fresh information (content). This is known as a crawler, spider, or Googlebot.  Spiders spend time following links from one page to another and index anything and everything that they find on their voyage.  Now remember, there are over 30 Billion pages on the web, therefore it is impossible for a spider to visit your website daily to see if it has been modified.  Sometimes a crawler may not visit your site for up to three months, so during this time your SEO efforts WILL NOT be rewarded.  But there really isn’t anything you can do about it.

What you can do is learn something new everyday on this blog, and apply it to your website.  Remember crawlers are not humans and they don’t see images, javascript, frames, flash movies, & password-protected pages.  They ONLY see text.  This is the reason why you never see a fancy flash website sharing in the first positions of Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN may seem very similar, however they are VERY different engines, following different guidelines (algorithms).   For example, Yahoo! and MSN, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while Google puts a lot more weight on links.  Also Google prefers their sites like wine, the older, the better, while Yahoo & MSN don’t really take into factor the age of a specific domain.  Therefore you might need more time until your site sits in the top position in Google compared to Yahoo!.

That should be enough for today.  So much more to come in the coming days, weeks, years.

By the way please feel free to tell your friends about this blog.  Think of it as a gift that keeps giving, and they will think of YOU when they have business to refer.