The more websites I build, the more I learn. So time for a little sharing.

Here are the top five things that have to be on your website, in no particular order. These are all aimed at wedding professionals. The list may not be the same for other markets.

Images.

Your target market is visual, very visual. I once had a young lady stand up in one of my seminars as I was talking about tagging your images and how GenY mostly surfed for pictures. She stated straight up that she was firmly Gen Y and truth be told, they ONLY surfed for pictures, rarely ever reading a word. So, add them to your blog posts and include large galleries of eye candy. Bue sure that you images are added in a way that the search engines can read them, in other words, don’t use Flash. Be sure to annotate and tag every single image with any relevant keywords, paying special attention to include subject matter and location.

Local Content

Most of my readers are based locally, by that I mean that even though they would love to book wedding all over the world, most of them are in their home town. With that in mind, be sure that you put a lot of local flavor in your website. If brides are looking at your site they want to know that you know all the best places and faces in your location. Remember brides search locally for their vendors. The other part of getting local on your site is that it give you an excuse to use the name of your town or neighborhood frequently. Why is that important? If you want to come up high for wedding planners in Washington, DC you need to have the actual words”Washington, DC’ appear in your content for the search bots to see. Search bots read words, only words; so the more often you can logically mention wedding & Washington, DC in you site the better off you are. (assuming of course you are a planner in Washington, DC, but then you know that)

Testimonials

As many and in as many ways as possible. Give them their own page, add pictures of either the smiling couple or the service that you provided. If they are complimenting you on the flowers and décor, add a picture of that.

Get the Wedding Wire Review widget and put that on your front page. Not only will brides read your reviews but it will make them more likely to give you a review themselves.

Add endorsements from other vendors. Those carry a lot of weight as a bride tries to decide if you are stable and reliable. Any one can get one or 2 good reviews from clients but it is the people you work with week in and week out that can really speak to what you are made of! Incidentally, I spoke with Wedding Wire last week and in their next revision they are adding a widget to add your endorsements just like the review widget. Yeah!

Prices

The number on thing that brides ask to have included in their online experience is pricing. This is something that hasn’t changed in as long as I have been at this. They want to know if they can afford you before they fall in love with your work.

Lead Generator

Right there on the front page and even in the post sidebars, you have to have a lead generator to collect email addresses. You never know when you are going to need them. Email marketing should be an important part of your overall marketing plan. Read why here. You can use it to promote any events you have coming up.

Of course there are other things that will be specific to you, but these 5 things are a must have for any wedding vendor.

I am always telling people that you need to know how to read the stats on your website. Today I want to share a great practical application.

I was chatting  with Sarah. Last year I designed a new website for her bridal salon. It seems that she has been watching the patterns emerge in he web stats. She can now tell by her traffic on Tuesday and Wednesday how busy her shop will be on Saturday.

She tells me that she now uses that information to decide how to staff her shop for the weekend. How cool is that?

Tracking your stats is really all about patterns. I have been uploading all the member content for Think over the last few weeks, every time I do my stats skyrocket. So now I am uploading a couple a day instead of spending a day and uploading in bulk.

If you follow the pattern, you can adjust the way you do thing to maximize the benefit.

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.

Do you realize how important the images on your website are to your search traffic?

I was speaking to a regional conference of ABC members recently and was telling them about the way their target market searches when planning their wedding. In the early stages they primarily are searching for images.

One young lady stood up and identified herself as a member of Gen Y. She then went on to say that not only was it true that  they were looking at images but that in truth, they rarely took time to read even the smallest amount of copy. Only if an image really caught them would they bother to find out more. Half of the time they never even bothered to visit the website hosting the image, just surfing though a panel on Cool Iris that matched their search.

How does your website fit into this pattern?

First off, if all of your images are locked into a Flash gallery, they aren’t search-able at all. You may have the most beautiful image of “Winter Candle Centerpiece” but if it in a Flash gallery it won’t show up in a Google (or Bing or Yahoo) image search.

Your images need to be labeled and described using related keywoods; including any long-tail keywords that apply. This is the sum total of what the search engines see; they don’t “see” pictures, only the words attached to them.

I see so many websites that are Flash that have been optimized to get the homepages to show up in search. They are  full of metatags and some even still have hidden text. I have news for you, that is not where most people land from a search, they usually land somewhere in the middle on a specific image, page or post. If we are talking about GenY, it will most likely be an image.

So, knowing all this, how does your web presence stack up?

If it doesn’t, give me a shout.

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.

I found a great video today about why blogging works for SEO. It is a question I am asked nearly every day. John Haydon of CorporateDollar.org does a great job of explaining it in easy terms.

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