3 tips on How to SEO your Website

As wedding professionals needing to pull up when brides search for our product/services, it’s absolutely imperative that our website SEO is up to par.  Most likely, you’ve received calls from SEO “experts” that say they’ll get you to the top of search engines…but buyer beware!  Many SEO experts can do nothing for your website unless they have access directly into the html of your website and have permission to change a few things.

Before hiring an SEO expert check your website to see if it has the ability to be search engine friendly in the first place:

• Do you use key words? –  If your website doesn’t use the same words that the people searching for you do, your content will never show up for those searches.  The solution? Use Google Insights for Search to compare potential keywords, and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (both free!) to assess search volume for those terms. Based on your research, you should use the more common terminology in your titles and headings.

• Was your website created using Flash? – Search engines read HTML text, so if all your site’s content is contained in images or Flash, search engines won’t know what your site is about.  If you have an entire website created in flash, all search engines see is a blank page.  Putting text in HTML will not only help you rank higher in search engines but will also help those accessing your site using mobile devices, screen readers or slow connections.

• Do you have a call to action? – The point of having a website and ranking well in search engines isn’t about getting a lot of visitors — it’s about turning those visitors into customers.  If you have a local store, do you include store hours and your address? If you sell a product, do your educational pages include links to that product?

How does your website rate so far?  What have you done to ensure that your website ranks in search engines?  Please tell our readers your success with SEO.