I’ve been a Facebook addict for over 2 months now, thanks in a large part to my good friend and wedding planner, Audrey Hu-Gonzales.  Facebook is a great way to stay in contact with other wedding professionals. We all love to share what we are doing and what we have going on during the weekend as well as seeing what other people are doing. It’s like an online classroom and you can talk to the friends you want to talk to and they in turn can talk back to you, share pictures, share articles, share links, share videos, etc… it’s very social.

Today, I want to share some great blogs that I’ve come across as a result of me joining the Facebook bandwagon. So I want to share some link love with those wedding professionals.

• Events by Audrey : Wedding Planner
• Elias Events : Elias Events is a full service, award-winning event planning company specializing in events in the Greater Houston area.
• A Touch of Bliss : Wedding Planner
• WeddingDaylyTimes.com : Wedding Directory and Blog
• A Day to Remember : Wedding Planner, Linens, Wedding Cakes, & More
• Simply Jubilee Events : Event planning and wedding consulting
• D. Jones Photo Blog : Wedding Photographer in Houston

Facebook is very addicting, especially once you find your little groove and strat to participate in the comments and in the updates.  This post was all about Link love and me sharing some love to other wedding bloggers. I remember wen I started bloggin, it was still considered a Taboo since many people didn’t understand it.

But blogging is now what a website used to be, you have to have one, otherwise you are missing out on some great online traffic!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|

Keywords

Keywords… Sounds simple enough, but most people still don’t understand what they are and how they relate to the success of a website.

First, I want to define the word, Keywords.

In corpus linguistics a keyword is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone. Keywords are calculated by carrying out a statistical test (e.g., loglinear) which compares the word frequencies in a text against their expected frequencies derived in a much larger corpus, which acts as a reference for general language use. Source: Keywords: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_(linguistics)

Thanks to the Wikipedia, we can get a good understanding of the definition of the word itself, and that is ‘key.’

But that’s just one definition, and although a good one, we need to get more depth and precision to the word, so let’ see what Dictionary.com has to say

key⋅word

[kee-wurd]

1. a word that serves as a key, as to the meaning of another word, a sentence, passage, or the like: Search the database for the keyword “Ireland.”
2. a word used to encipher or decipher a cryptogram, as a pattern for a transposition procedure or the basis for a complex substitution
3. a significant or memorable word or term in the title, abstract, or text of an item being indexed, used as the index entry.

Ok, these deal more with databases and titles and gives us a better depth that we can work with.

From the standpoint of a website, keywords have 2 distinct uses that most people don’t understand when they design their web site, or more importantly the text on the web pages.

1. Use keywords to attract the attention of a Bride.

   There are 3 ways to use keywords when writing your website for a bride.

   a. Use keywords to highlight important benefits of your service.

   Have you heard the phrase,’ sell benefits, not features?’ Your website should be full of benefits that your service brings to brides. It’s a good idea to highlight them, bold them, or put it in all caps when you want to emphasize your benefits.  The best practice for this is to have a list of benefits, and highlight the actual benefit. For example, if one of your benefits is that you want to promise a stress free wedding reception, your wedding keywords would look like this: Our 10 years of experience allow us to bring you a stress free wedding reception. That way, when the bride scans your text, she can immediately see the words stress free and her eyes will be drawn to that sentence. She has not choice but to go back and read the entire sentence or entire paragraph.

   b. Use keywords to get the brides to take action.

   When a bride is on your web site, you want them to take some kind of action. So why not use your keywords to tell them what you want them to do? It is a general understanding that ‘PEOPLE NEED TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO!‘ Even if it’s common sense to you that you, that is not to say that it’s common sense to your readers.  When you place a form on your website, as suggested on my post about converting bridal show leads into customers, or your phone number, it’s not automatic your visitors expects you to call them or fill out your form. You really have to use keywords to tell them what you want them to do. If you add the keywords, call us today, fill out our simple contact form, send us your information so that we can contact you, call for pricing information, call or fill out the form to check for availability; you will see a huge spike in the number of people who will either call you or send you their contact information. This is by far, one of the most important calls to action you need to put in your website (and you should have it many times, not just once; but not too many times)!

   c. Use keywords to make a strong point.

   You want to emphasize and set yourself apart from your competition. When you do that, it should be bolded or it should stand out on it’s own… Especially if you are a one of a kind business or if you want to stress how your services have been recognized around the area by the media or by any other means. This will add a bit more of curiosity and trust to the reader’s mind!

2. Use keywords to attract the attention of the Search engines.

   You first want to write for the brides, then go back and edit it by adding keywords that you want to be found for. Let’s say for example, my website,  Elegante Entertainment, I want to rank for the words Wedding DJ and Houston. Those are my main keywords that I want the search engines to associate with my website. I try to use those words as often as I can and make them fit as natural as I can into sentences. It’s pretty challenging, but it’s well worth the time.

   What you should understand is this: A search engine wants to give relevant results to the person using the search engine (Eg. Google.com). When you search for the keyword ‘doctor’, you don’t want to get results about a wedding dj… you want to get nothing but results that have the words doctor in them. Pretty common sense, right? So when you write your page, the only way a search engine, or a group of computers, can tell that you are a Wedding DJ, or a Wedding Photographer, or a Wedding Coordinator located in houston is to include the actual words, Wedding DJ in Houston.

   You want to include the keywords in your Title, Your Meta Tags, and strategically, throughout your entire web page. This is what is known as Keyword Density (Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. -Wikipedia).

   It would be a great idea to also bold these words or to make them a heading (using the <h1> tag) and working them into the keywords that you previously bolded for your brides to read.  Let’s look at our previous example, Our 10 years of experience allow us to bring you a stress free wedding reception. You can add the words “in houston” for greater search engine density. It may look and read a little odd, but you would be surprised how easily your readers can forgive you for it or make up acceptable conclusions in their head about why you did it.

If you understand the best way to use keywords on your website, you will not only be able to use kewords to lead your bride into booking your service, but you will also fuel the search engines with a great site that they can present to future potential brides.

Happy Bloggin!
–
|o| Simply Frank |o|

Take your blog to the top of the Search Engines

As we all know, the economy is not in the best shape ever, however, if you do any type of marketing or blogging online, you know that your traffic to both your website and your blog has probably increased by about 25% overall this year.

To me it seem that more and more brides are going online to search for their wedding vendors.

Most still rely on the traditional word of mouth. However, I might even dare to say that the wedding vendor with only a website might win the sale over a wedding vendor with only a flier, brochure, or business card.

Online marketing is taking over offline marketing the same way that Google took over Yahoo as the search engine of choice.

If you have an online presence established,  here are 5 tips to keep your website present on the top of the search engines.

1. Post to your blog regularly, Ideally Daily!

   A lot of you have already heard this concept. Post regularly to your blog so that the search engines get into a habit of coming back to you blog and indexing it. The more you post the more the search engine bots come and scoop up your new and great material to share with the rest of the world. It also keeps you current on your readers’ minds. It really sux if you like someone’s blog and they stop posting for a week or two. That just drives readers crazy and may even piss them off. So keep your readers and the search engines happy; post great articles to your blog, and post them often.

2. Update your Main Page Regularly.

   Your main web page should be updated regularly as well. If your main website runs off a bloggin platform then you have no problem as your main page is a blog and it changes every time you write a blog post, however if your website is a static page, then you need to update it regularly, maybe even monthly. It’s a good idea to keep current information in your website. maybe you are planning to attend an upcoming bridal show. It would be a good idea to write a paragraph on your page telling your online visitors where they can go meet you. If a reader reaches your website and it has not changed for over 1 year, don’t you think they would be wondering if there is anyone really on the other side? You want them to gain confidence by your website, not lose it.

3. Check your Web Stats Regularly

   Stats, Stats, and more stats… If you are not tracking your website stats in any way, then you will have a difficult time knowing where to go next. You should have many website goals. For example, my goals are; To rank high on the search engines, To continually grow my website traffic every month, to target more brides in Houston to book my DJ Services or Photo booth Services, To convert more visitors into customers, etc… If you can track how may visitors you have and how they arrived on your website, then you have a better idea of what to do with your website, which pages to tweak, which pages to eliminate, which pages your customers are coming from, why they don’t buy when they land on a specific page, how long a visitor lasts on a page, etc… For example, I use 3 forms of tracking website visitors on my website.
   1. A program called TraceWatch, which is probably the best tool I’ve used to track my website visitors, it’s a little more complicated to use and you do have to know a little bit of programming to get it to work, but it’s by far the best tool. If you’ve read any of my posts where I show you my website traffic stats, that’s the tool that you see.
   2. Google Analytics Tool. This tool is great but it is limited a bit since it uses Javascript and people can opt to turn off javascript, so they don’t get tracked. It is simple to install on your web pages that you want to track and google does all the work for you. All you do is install the script on your pages, and log into your google analytics page and see all the results; how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, what search engine terms they use, what pages they visit most, how long they are on your site, etc..
   3. Wordpress Stats. This requires you to have an account on wordpress.com and is good but it is very limited. Hey, some tracking is better than no tracking. but You need to track, track, track so you can know where you stand.

4. Get new incoming links to your website.

   This is a hard task to do but if you can accomplish this, you will move up the ranks of the search engines fairly quick. What you do is go to the free directories and fill out the information to get listed on those directories. Sometimes they require you to post a link to their website on one of your web pages. Create a links page and host their link on your page; that’s their only requirement. Ask other vendors if  you could trade links with them and tell them exactly how you want your link. A great idea, is to have your targeted keywords on the link text. Instead of saying “Click Here” you might want the link to say “Houston Photographer” or “Houston Coordinator” Or “Houston Wedding DJ.” This is the optimal way to get links to your page as the search engines rank your page for those keywords. The more you have pointing to your site, the more ‘votes’ you get, the higher you rank in the search engines for those keywords.

5. Leverage your Social Medias

   Social media is a great tool to use. I’ve found that Myspace is great to get business from other individuals, for example brides, personal parties, etc.. to where as Facebook I have been able to network myself for other wedding vendors. Twitter, I would also say that you can network better with other wedding vendors. I have not gotten completely into the whole twitter bandwagon, but I have an account. My advice for the social medias is just to be a part of them and find out the best way that you can get something of value out of them. They are a new way of marketing so if you can find a way to leverage them, you will be one step ahead of your competition. Youtube, now there is something most wedding vendors don’t really want to get into. I’ve had great success both from search engine traffic and as a good way to gain my client’s trust. Videos are great for customers who don’t like to read, you can make a video, upload it to youtube and you will have a great representation of you and your services and display it on your site. The best part, if you use your keywords on your video title, you will rank highly on the search engines for those keywords, add a link to your website on your profile or on the video itself and you will have an extra added flow of targeted traffic to your site.

These are the 5 basic steps that I follow to make sure that my websites increase their traffic every month.

Happy Bloggin!

Simply Frank

I’ve attended some luncheons ( like the Perfect Wedding Guide’s Luncheons in Houston and NACE Wedding Trends Luncheon also here in Houston) and networking meetings lately and always the question comes up… How do you  rank so well on the search engines. Do you pay someone to do that? no. Are you paying per click? no. So how do you do it??? I wish there was a simple answer I could give, but there isn’t. If I say SEO, then I would have to explain what SEO stands for, which is not the most exciting topic, I guess. But it ends up being the what the conversation turns into.

I am considering putting together a workshop for the Houston wedding vendors that may be interested, but I have to make it a limited amount, like 20 or 40. That’s pretty hard considering that the Houston Bridal Extravaganza claims to have over 600 vendors at their show!!! That’s not counting the ones who cannot make it to the show.

I’ve gone and recapped what are the steps that I took in getting into the search engines and then making sure I rank high for the search engine terms that I am going after. As well as WHAT to do with the traffic once it is on your website…

Most people think that; “Oh well, I have a website already, I’m done with my online marketing…” In reality, building a website is the very first step of your online marketing life…

Next you have to drive traffic, after you drive traffic you must compel them to contact you, after they contact you, you have to have a selling system and after they are sold, you must put them into a different category so that they don’t continue to receive your sales material.

This is what is called in the online marketing world as an funnel system. And the sole purpose of your funnel system is to try to get as many potential customers to the top of your funnel and get them to go through it completely.

It’s a funnel because you may start with, let’s just say 100, and in the end you will end up with 3, which in marketing a 3% conversion ratio is really, really good.

So if you are not getting a lot of online prospects, then guess what, you have to make sure more people can find your website or that you can send more people to your website so that the number of people that convert is much greater!

Which makes sense. Let’s continue to assume that your website is converting 3% of your total visitors.

If you send 100 people to your website and you are converting at 3% then you only get 3 clients.
If you send 200 people to your website and you are converting at 3%, well you now have 6 clients.

So that means that the more potential customers that come across your website, the more clients you will have. Agreed? Good.

So how do you get more potential customers to your webstie?

Well, some ways may be to include your website on your business cards and fliers and pass out a whoooooole lot of them to a whooooole lot of people.

Sound expensive? Yes but there may (or may not depending on whether or not they are well classified potential customers, simply handing out business cards to just anyone will do you no good) be a good Return on Investment (ROI) and in the end it may be worth it. But one thing is for sure, you have to spend a lot of money upfront.

Another option would be to put your website on all your magazine advertisements and other forms of media that you may advertise in. Again, it involves spending money up front and again could be very expensive. Most magazines start their rates at over one thousand dollars for a 1/4 or 1/8th of a page. $1,000 Dollars!!!! Yikes.

I am not saying that passing out business cards, fliers, or even advertising in magazines is bad… It’s actually a good thing…

but….

What if there was a way that you could advertise absolutely for free and you would have to pay NOOOO ONE!!?? EVER!!??

Sounds like a dream? an unreachable dream?

That’s what I thought back in 2004 when I first set my eyes in being at the top of the search engines.

Guess what, it’s not impossible, it’s not a dream…

It’s easily achievable by anyone that wants it bad enough…

For the last 5 years I’ve enjoyed the traffic that Google.com, Yahoo.com, and MSN.com send me for free.

All I had to do was learn a few steps, repeat them a few times, and viola, 5 years later, I’m still at the top of the search engines…

Feel free to see for yourselves…

(Website Name is www.fhpentertainment.com)

1. DJ in Houston #2 Position in Google Results
2. Houston Wedding DJ #1 Position in Google Results
3. Bilingual DJ in Houston #1 Position in Google Results
4. Wedding DJ in Houston #2 Position in Google Results

Now there are Hundreds of Search Engine Keywords that I have targeted. The above are just a few so you can get an idea of what you should be using as your keywords. And realize that I only used Google for 2 reasons: 1. It is the hardest one to rank for and 2. EVERYONE uses Google (Ok, not everyone just 70% of the US as of June 2008).

So again, maybe I’ll have a Workshop or Seminar in June sometime, but I really would be interested in knowing how to rank well for your targeted keywords.

Please let me know by submitting your name and your email address on the upper right hand side of this page… Right where it says… “Subscribe to our Newsletter”

And then you must confirm your subscription,  just to make sure someone else did not submit your address for you.

As you can judge by reading this blog, writing does not have to be your strongest point…

P.S. feel free to leave a comment below in addition to submitting your contact information above.

Very few is done to educate wedding vendors how to properly run their blogs. It’s exciting news to hear that there will be an upcoming bloggin Bootcamp here in Houston. If you want to learn the correct way to run a blog, this might be an event worth checking out. $150 is not a lot compared the the benefits you WILL receive once you properly run your blog. As stated in my previous Post, My blog currently brings in over $100 a month by doing NOTHING, just sitting there and hosting Links for other advertisers. And that’s beside the amount of business that is brought to my website as a result of a properly run Blog!  Most, I would say over 80%, of the people who already have a blog are doing it incorrectly, losing out on a huge opportunity that is the internet, and missing out on a lot of money and business because their blog is not run correctly.

So, there could be nothing but great benefits from attending any form of training on how to properly Blog!

You already know why you should blog.  We’ll show you how.

Blogging Bootcamp :: Houston
presented by Liene Stevens of Blue Orchid Designs and The Smart Planner™

Who: Any wedding professional who wants to effectively leverage online media to grow their business
When: Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Time: 9 am – 4 pm
Where: For Your Memories at the Lofts of Post Oak
Cost: $150 per person

Since the launch of the Blue Orchid Blog in 2006, it has grown to include over 3000 unique daily visitors and is partially to credit for the launch of two new Blue Orchid Designs offices on the East Coast.  In the Blogging Bootcamp, Liene will share specific strategies and techniques she has personally used to grow the Blue Orchid Designs blog to where it is today.

This workshop is open to all wedding professionals, not just wedding planners.  Space is limited and will be filled on a first come, first served basis so reserve your spot now!  Laptops are optional and lunch will be provided.

Topics covered will include:
*How to discover and leverage your blogging voice
*How to maximize your blogging ROI
*How to develop killer content – consistently
*How to set short term and long term goals for your blog
*How to effectively analyze your stats and blog traffic
*How to increase your readership and keep them coming back for more
*Specific strategies and techniques to use your blog to improve your main website’s SEO or “findability” on Google
*How to promote your brand through your blog’s design and content
*Maintaining professional boundaries while still being personable
*And more!

The Blogging Bootcamp will not be a class on blogging philosophy.  You already know that blogging is a good idea.  We’ll be showing you how to do it so that it is worth your time. No topic will be off the table, and any questions you may have will be fair game.

This event would not be possible without the generous support of Beginnings Wedding and Event Planning and For Your Memories Wedding Consulting.

Questions? Please send an email to workshops{at}thesmartplanner.com.

The fine print: Payment must be made in full prior to the event and is non-refundable.  Payment may be made via credit card or PayPal at the Eventbrite website.  Lunch will be provided and is included in the cost of the event.  Space is limited and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. In the event that the workshop is cancelled due to not meeting minimum registration requirements, a full refund will be issued to each registrant via PayPal.  Prices and terms are subject to change.