In 2010 it is a given that your website is your strongest marketing tool, it has also been a given that ranking high in the search engines, particularly Google, has been the primary driver of traffic to your site.  The second part of that statement is no longer true.

What!! That’s right. According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.  I would expect twitter to show up in the next snapshot they take. Still think social media doesn’t matter?

First, the numbers; using a snapshot from December, web measurement firm Compete, Inc , found that 13% of traffic to the major portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook, Google only served up 7%, falling behind even eBay at 7.61%.

What is happening here is that rather than simply navigating the net on their own, consumers are relying more and more on the recommendation of their online friends. Facebook users share links and photos as well as product recommendations with their friends at an ever increasing rate. Rather than going out in search of news and products, they are now coming to us by way of status updates and fan pages.

Everything you knew about where and how to market has changed in the last few years and that change continues. First it was do the right shows and be in the right magazines. Then it was have a pretty Flash website that was really just and online brochure. Next it was use blogs, galleries and HTML websites to rank high in the search engines. Now even that is beginning to fade.

If you think about it, we have come full circle: once again the most important place to market is in the town square. It’s just that the town square now exists in the digital world. Ideas are exchanged over the virtual back yard fence.

Here are a few tips to using your Facebook profile more effectively. First off you should try to separate your business profile from your personal profile. So many of us started out on Facebook on a personal level and to some extent this has helped to blur the line between the two. The question is how much of the comments your sister and friends make do you want broadcast to you business contacts. Set up either a group page or a fan page for your business and work at posting differently on each. For most of you, a fan page is the way to go. You can contact your followers via updates (not as great as PM’s but it works) and your page will appear in the list of pages they joined. Post links to your blog or website to your status anytime you post or update. You can set this up to happen automatically using FriendFeed. You can also link your Twitter account to post on your FB page. Just a word of caution, if you hook all these up you end up with annoying multiple posts.

You should have a link on the homepage of your website, above the fold to your business Facebook page and list it in your signature on your emails.

I was sent the beta last week of a new app for Facebook created especially for brides in the planning stage. Wedding List is a well laid out, very organized planning tool that brides use to ask their friends for recommendations. Hmmm, now doesn’t that tie in nicely with I just said about recommendations? As of 3-01-2010 the application had 2,712 monthly active users and this thing is only a month or so old. One of the people behind this new app is my old contact at Modern Bride, Michelle Prelli, so you know they understand the wedding market. Read the reviews and be on the lookout for the logo in your news feed. If you see it, by all means respond.

All in all, you can’t continue to avoid social media. Not only do you have to be there but you have to know how to use it. Trust me, even Google has taken notice…you have seen Google
Buzz haven’t you?

I am not talking about search in terms of how to come up higher on Google; I’m talking about how to search.  It is fundamental in understanding how to get a desired outcome that you deeply understand how something works.

Every time I do a seminar and I get to the part about search I see all these amazed looks when I tell them the kind of search terms that bride use.  Our brides are very computer savvy. They learned long ago that a generic search brought up too much and quickly learned how to use the tools available to pare it down and bring up more relevant listings.

Brides don’t type in wedding gown; they type in something like lace ballgown with ruched bodice or satin wedding gown+pickups +sweetheart neckline my town. Likewise, they don’t use wedding venue in my townwhere to have a garden wedding for 200 people in My Town. they use

Here is a fun little video that explains it in plain English.

http://www.commoncraft.com/search

For a more technical and in-depth explanation, go straight to the source:Google

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861

Now, why is any of this important? Well, just like any hunter, it helps to know your prey. If you want brides to find your website in search, it helps to what they are looking for and how they do it.

Once you understand how they use search, you can do a better job of using the all important keywords in your website and blog. This is the most basic way to increase your organic search.

Google’s job in life (aside from total world domination.hehe) is to provide the most relevant search results possible. That is part of the reason that the algorithm keeps changing. SEO mavericks quickly learn new tricks on how to game the system. That’s why sticking with the basic policy of great, relevant content, frequently updated will always work.

Here’s my tip. Think about the product you sell and how your customers would describe it. (Note, not how you would describe it) Then use those words and phrases and any variations on them in your content as often as you can without it sounding funny.  Here is an example, I was maintaining a large site for a group of wedding vendors and a men’s formalwear store called to ask why her shop didn’t come up on the site when she searched “tuxedo”  I asked her if that word appeared in her copy? It didn’t because as she said, it is properly called formalwear. I knew that and of course she knew that but the brides don’t. Heck, even she searched for tuxedo! Google is only so smart. You have to use the words that your bride will use and not hope that Google will just understand.

OK, Christine, what word should I use? You already know the answer to that, it’s what your customers ask you for when they call or email. What the heck do they ask for, what word do they use?

The other thing that you need to remember is to put your location in your copy. You know that you serve the, oh let’s say, Orange County, CA area but unless that is spelled out, search won’t just understand because it is on your contact page. Pepper that phrase throughout your site and your blog.

• XYZ is my favorite florist in Orange County
• I can’t think of a prettier place to get married in Orange County
• The next time you are in Orange County, stop by and check out…

See what I mean by including your keyword phrases in a way that doesn’t sound funny? The more you do this, the easier it gets.

Why is that important? Brides will search for vendors in their area. If you don’t use it, you may place high if brides search generically, but hit the bottom of the list when they add the My Town modifier. That put you in competition with the world, not just those in the area you serve. I don’t know about you but I would rather be one of 40 or 50 possible choices than 1 of 1,000,000.

There are so many things that go into propelling your blog or website to the top of search. One of the things that so many people forget is the basic structure that supports it all. So hung up are they on keywords and shiny new tools like Facebook and Twitter that they think that site structure itself isn’t important. Maybe that explains why so many people are still struggling to make their flash site search. You can keep throwing money at self proclaimed SEO experts but unless you have the proper foundation it won’t really make any difference.

You know by now how strongly I feel about using WordPress as the content management system for not only your blog but your entire website. There is more to it than just that. Not all WP themes are created equal. As they say “the devil is in the details”

You need a team that understands all the nuances and details behind all of the themes and what makes a great WordPress blog/website. A team that knows how to find the one theme that will not only work for you in terms of look and content layout, but more importantly how each of them is inherently optimized to behave and react in a way that the search engines expect. You need someone with a deep understanding of how the search engines work. Additionally you need someone that knows which plugins, set which way are going to add to your search mojo. And most of all you need someone who can create a great look, so that you grab the interest of the visitors the search engine delivers.

Let me tell you a little story. Last Friday we set the Wedding Dish to maintenance mode and rolled it to a different WP theme. Over the course of the next 24 hours we dressed it up, added a plugin here, tweaked a bit there and set it back to live. By Sunday, the unique visitors had increased by 20%! What’s more, the number of page views per visitor and time on the site went through the roof. That is overnight folks. We did nothing, not one thing to the content. This is purely the power of the right theme, optimized correctly with a look that engages the site visitors. Those numbers have continued to climb each day since and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon.

Here at the Agency, we have assembled a team with the experts that understand the power of WordPress and how to build a site that can harness that, an award winning graphics team that can give you the look you need to keep you visitor engaged and express your brand and the deep background in the wedding industry to understand how to appeal to today’s brides.

So tell me, what is stopping you from rebuilding your foundation?

Many wedding professionals are using Email blasts for marketing. Let me show you why moving to WordPress will make that easier and more beneficial.

In today’s fast paced environment, email marketing works best when it teases several articles rather than using the full article content. If a reader doesn’t get hooked by the first one, there are more chances on down the page.
I have been doing this with my Think Like A Bride newsletter. The great thing about it is I can look at the stats for the email campaign and see what articles are catching my reader’s eyes. Then I of course write more of them. The thing is, you have to have somewhere for those full articles to live.

Publishing content remains a huge barrier to small businesses who too often rely on static Web sites – and sometimes-expensive, often-hard-to-reach Webmasters to update those sites.
That is where WordPress comes in. Publishing via WordPress is something that most anyone can grasp. It becomes a simple task to get your content online. Even if your newsletter is just a collection of images from the last month’s weddings, you can still manage it yourself.

In each teaser in your newsletter you link to the post for the full article on your WordPress site. By posting it on your site you have the benefit of added content and better SEO. That is something that just putting it in an email won’t give you.

Additionally, WordPress sites are set up to easily allow you to install the tools needed to gather leads as well as cross post your material to all the other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Again, great for SEO and a timesaver for you.

Even if you aren’t ready to completely switch you website to a WordPress CMS, (which I highly recommend) you can still just have a WP blog set up on your existing site. Call it something like “Latest News” or “Fresh Ideas” and let your articles live there.

It is something to think about. Why not get all the benefit you can out of the effort you put into writing articles for your newsletter? Kind of seems like a no brainer to me.

Last year we began pioneering the concept of using WordPress not only for a blog, but even better using it’s content management system for a full website including the blog. Our clients saw instant search marketing results. Plus the new found ability to manage their own websites with lower costs. The win-win of a web/blogsite.

For the last few weeks I have been working to add a shopping cart to a new WordPress web/blogsite I am creating for a friend. We are doing the full site from art to design to programming/implementation. The purpose of the site is to market Trollbeads. The goal was to have a small business affordable website, that can be managed by the business owner and with superior front page organic search results, so the choice of WordPress was pretty quick.

But what for the cart? Third party shopping carts even from Yahoo or GoDaddy can cost $50 to $100+ a month plus transaction and processing fees. We wanted a less costly option with better styling options. We looked at ZenCart, osCommerce and WPe-Commerce. All of them were good and provided an excellent low cost self hosted cart with the ability extension. I was familiar with ZenCart from some other projects but wanted to try something a little different and that would not have the standard Zencart look.

WP e-Commerce is what we used for Trollbeads Trail. Like many WordPress plugins, it is free with full functionality and the upgrades with a grid layout and really cool drag and drop cart are very inexpensive. It is a little complex to setup (all shopping carts are to some degree), but very straight forward once you understand the application’s terms (the developers are from New Zealand).

The finished look is outstanding and the SEO power over the first 30 days has been even better than expected. So much so that we cloned it for a second site for the same customer replacing the existing website for her jewelry store, Santa Fe Trail Jewelry.

This is excellent for anyone wanting to increase their item sales or rental potential while keeping expenses as low as possible. Take a look at the finished site, remember it is all WordPress even the shopping cart, and let us show you how we can put this feature to work for you -

After yesterdays article on labeling your images I realized something. Wedding professionals have begun to wake up to the positive effects of blogging. They are adding blogs to their website and posting occasionally but still aren’t seeing any results. Well the truth is it takes more to reap the search benefits of blogging than just having one. There is an art to writing blog posts for SEO. It isn’t hard, you just need to know what makes those posts so valuable and then follow the pattern that works for your business.

The investment you make in writing an effective blog post has long lasting effects. For example, due to my recent down time, I have only posted twice on my Wedding Dish blog this January. Amazingly enough, my traffic still doubled that of January 2008, thanks entirely to posts I had written over the life of the blog.

You can learn how to write effective blog posts, it really isn’t that hard. What you need is to see exactly what one looks like for your business. The best way to do that is to have a few professionally done. You then have some solid examples to follow.

That is where I come in: let me write some posts for you. I normally charge $127 for 4 blog posts, as a first of the year special I am offering that service for $99. Just enter the coupon code BLOG at checkout.

You send me a couple of images and the who, what, where and when of the event. I’ll put together a few paragraphs that are keyword rich and craft effective labels for your images; then all you have to do is post them. Easy. It saves you time, starts you on your way to effective posting and saves a few coins in the process.

At the beginning of the month we ran a special on blog transfers and I want to make sure that all those clients get off to a fabulous start. I also want to show you how easy it is to do. This offer will only be good for a limited time so don’t delay. Kick you 2009 off with a bang by doing something that will pay you back for years to come.

It may well be that the most important things you post on your blog or website are the images. We all know that brides love pictures; they spend literally hours looking at pictures on the internet. There isn’t a better way to communicate your unique style to prospective clients. That is only the beginning of why they are important.

First off, remember that your web presence has two target markets: Brides and search engines. The real gold in your images is with the search engines, here is why.Search engines don’t ‘see’ your pictures; they only read the text you use to describe them.

Every time you post an image you are given the opportunity to give it a title, an alt tag* and a description. Every one of those is an opportunity to add a gold mine of keywords.

Yesterday I was working with a client to set up his galleries and all his images were labeled along the order of img1434.jpg. That was the title, there was no alt tag or description. Those pictures were virtually invisible to search, unless someone used img1434 as a search term.

If instead he had taken the time to properly identify the image he could have added a long list of search terms that his prospective clients may actually use. Let’s take a look at a sample image. I have highlighted the potential search terms in red.

Title: Centerpiece in pink and purple for outdoor summer wedding

Alt tag: Centerpiece in pink stargazer lilies and purple stocks for outdoor summer wedding

Description: Décor for outdoor summer wedding at The Frist Learning Center at Cheekwood Botanical Gardens in Nashville, TN. Featuring Stargazer lilies, pink peonies and purple stocks in comtemporary glass containers on white damask linen with mahogany chivari chairs. Designed by Branching Out Event Florists, Nashville, TN

When a bride searches for any or all of those red words your website is now in the mix. Believe me, that is the way they search. They use incredibly long, very specific search phrases. Or you could just leave it titles as IMG_0367, which is how it is labeled on my computer.

Your website and blog come with some amazing tools to increase your search if you just take the time to use them.

*an alt tag is what shows up in the unfortunate event that your image does not open in a visitor’s browser.

Why is blogging such a powerful tool for search? A lot of it has to do with the sheer mass on content that gets added to you site over time. If you post 3 or 4 times a week you are adding 12 to 16 new pages to your site every month, over a year that’s an amazing 144 to 192 NEW PAGES a year. Yes Virginia, the search engines do look at how many pages you have.

Now if you figure that every one of those posts contains 2 to 3 possible terms that your future brides may be using to search, you have built a powerful base of keywords, without really trying.
Without really trying I mean that you can’t just write a blog post as a frame for your keywords. You may or may not know that I ghost write for some blogs. The first thing a client says is I want you to include these keywords. Sorry gang, it doesn’t work that way. Don’t get me wrong, keywords are important to search but just seeding your posts with them doesn’t work. You have two end users for your blog: your readers and the search engines. If you write exclusively for search your readers will disappear.

If you want to write effective copy for your readers you have to think more about what you want to say and less about the keywords you think you need..First off, brides don’t search by keywords, they search be questions and descriptions. Second, the images you choose and how you label them may be your most effective search weapon anyway. Unlike a static website, you get more than one chance to hit the words they are using to search.

Let’s look at how that works. Suppose you put up a post talking about a recent wedding and you use descriptive words. Example:

“I loved how this contemporary centerpiece of red and orange gerber daisies turned out for Sara & Mike’s wedding at (local hot venue)in (town) last week.” Follow it up with “Designing the floral décor for (local hot venue) is always fun because it offers so many possibilities.” Now label your image as “Contemporary wedding centerpiece at (local hot venue), (town).”
Every one of those highlighted words is a possible search term but the paragraph reads well to the end user. You add a dozen posts like that a month and without really trying you are going eventually cover just about every possible search term that a bride could use to describe what you do.

Are you starting to see how this works? It is about volumes of descriptive words that you use every day to tell people about your work that just build up over time. You bundle that with a well designed blog that is built to be search friendly in the first place and you have gold.
The bonus is that once indexed by the search engines, those posts are there forever. I am still getting hits off a post I put up nearly 3 years ago on an old blog I don’t even post to anymore. Yes, I do check that stuff and use it to improve my search rankings, but that if for tomorrow’s topic.

I have been saying for a while that the rules of Search have changed. It is all about content and structure.

Recently I had my eyes opened to just how powerful it is. Read more

I had an interesting dialog recently with a baker. In looking at different ways their website could be set up to improve their search ranking I noticed that if you searched for them by the bakerery’s name you had to drill down at least six pages on Google for them to even come up, and then only as a link on someone else’s website. Read more