I check my website stats from time to time and it helps me see not only how my visitors arrive to my website, but it also springs new ideas into my head about articles I should be writing. If enough people are looking for that information on the web, then obviously there is a need for that information on the web. Creating a blog post that is useful and informative helps you achieve that expert status with your clients when they do go through your blog digging for information about your products and/or services.

Below are the top 5 keywords used Yesterday to arrive on my website. If you notice, most of these keywords signify, to me, that the bride or potential client, is in the research stage of their planning (gathering information/research) process… the perfect spot for your name to enter their minds. You know what they say in marketing, the sooner your name enters your client’s mind, the better of a chance you have of winning that client over.

So here are the keywords used to arrive at my sites, organized by search engine, then in order of hits, from Higher to lower. For the Google.com results, I will add a link to the article that is ranking high on the search engine results… Or you could just go to Google.com and type the keyword or copy and paste it into the search bar and see for yourself how high I rank… All of these are on the first page of Google.com…

Site: FHPEntertainment.com

Google.com

1. responsibilities of a dj
2. houston bridal extravaganza 2010
3. list of cumbia songs
4. quinceanera songs
5. guidelines for master of ceremony
6. BONUS: architectural dj uplighting

Yahoo.com

1. quinceañera songs
2. marbella ballroom houston
3. popular spanish wedding songs
4. list of songs to dance for my quinceanera fun dance
5. GOBO’s wedding dancefloor

Bing.com

1. Quinceanera Speech
2. Bridal Extravaganza Houston
3. Dj Insurances
4. Popular DJ Songs
5. Cake Cutting Songs in Spanish

Site: HoustonPartyBooths.com

Google.com

1. photo booth template
2. photo booth rental houston
3. picture booth rentals and houston
4. photo booth
5. photo booth for bat mitzvah

Yahoo.com

1. houstonpartybooths.com
2. photobooth in houston to rent

Bing.com

1. rent a photo booth in houston

It may seem like my website, Houstonpartybooths.com does not rank high for Yahoo or Bing.com, but it is actually ranked number one for many keywords… So that leads me to the conclusion that most people still use and trust Google.com for their research.

I hope this helps you see what people are looking for on the net and how you can get inspired for new ides to write articles about  your line of work.

Happy Bloggin!

|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Reaching the top of the Google.com Search Engine Results is pretty straight foreword with good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as I have proven it wit several websites; Most my own and a few are close friends who are completely clueless about SEO. Once they understand the basic concept, they easily achieve it.  It is challenging, and it even may seem like it’s never going to happen, but with consistent work, it’s ‘easily’ accomplished.

Even more challenging, is staying at the top for years and years to come. It takes consistent efforts of; playing by the rules, staying informed about current methods of SEO, and applying everything you’ve learned thus far.

This morning I was completely surprised that I have reached, once again, the #1 position in Google for the search Term, “DJ in Houston.”

There was a person with extensive SEO knowledge, probably a lot more then me, that went out and did things I don’t even know about, and withing weeks he was #1 on the Google Search results for “DJ in Houston.”

So when that happened, I became #2 and stayed #2 for over a year, which I was fine with. I didn’t stress nor did I try hard to achieve a #1 spot, I was staying busy and I was getting the business I wanted from the #2 spot. I never went lower than the #2 spot.

Today, I opened up the website, Google.com, and as I do about 2 or 3 times a month, I searched for the term, “DJ in Houston,” and to my surprise I turned up to be the #1 result and the person in question was bumped way down, lower than the #2 position.

Now, I have a few theories of why this happened so I will share them with you, in hopes that you can too reach the top of the search engines, just like my friend Audrey, from Events By Audrey, who is now at the top of the search engine results for her targeted keywords.

Theory #1: I’ve Been Doing It The Right Way

Just like everything else in this world, there is a right way of online marketing and there is a not-so-right way of online marketing. The not-so-right way of online marketing is known as Black Hat SEO. These are tricks that work, and work fast, but their practice are usually frowned upon and not tolerated by the major search engines. These tricks include; Hiding keywords into your pages (Example, white text on a white background), Meta Keyword Stuffing, Doorway Pages, and Link Farming. For more information read the Top 5 White Hat and Black Hat Search Optimisation Techniques.

Theory #2: I’ve Become Active Online

I’ve recently started participating in forums where the subject is the DJ industry. As a Wedding DJ, I felt I had something to say and I wanted to get feedback from other DJ around the world. So I researched some forums and started participating and putting my ideas out there to be heard.  Some agree with the ideas and some, strongly disagree with the ideas, even though reason that I provide them with my ideas is to help them out. Some people are so attached to their way of doing it that if you try to suggest to them a way to improve (even after they ask for it), it seems to backfire on you and before you know it, they are attacking not only your ideas, but you personally, without even getting to know you. Being active works on this principle: You participate on the forums, get well known, and people visit your site and Google can see that you are an active leader on your field.  So be sure if you do decide to participate on forums, that you include a link to your website (s) on the signature of your posts.

Theory #3: Uninformed Competition

This is the key to it all. I’ve almost hesitated giving this one out but, I guess if I want to help you out, as my regular reader, I’ve got to give you all my tools. Most people do very little to get to the top of the search engine results. They become complaisant, they stop trying when they don’t get what they want, they are following the wrong tips to getting to the top, they are focused on too many tasks at once, or they simply don’t know anything and don’t care to find out! When I realized that about the DJ industry, my heart and my thoughts started running 199 miles per hour with  ideas, plans, techniques, to-do’s (I’ve never been a to-do list type of person), and so on. I quickly found out how easy it is to get to the top… BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE IS REALLY TRYING TO REACH THE TOP… and this has been so for the last 5 years, well with the exception of the person mentioned at the top of this article.

I will keep it at 3 theories… I have more but they fall under these top three. One thing to notice is that Facebook had almost nothing to do with the fact that I am at the top of the search engines, and I’ve recently done little to no Twitting so I’m almost sure that had nothing to do with it. I’ve also done little to no blogging on my website, but I have done enough, about 1 post every 2 weeks just to keep the search engines coming back to my website and so they know I’m still active on my site.

Hope it helps you understand a little more. If you have a question or comment, don’t hesitate to leave it down there, and feel free to post a link to your website… as it will definitely help you out!

Happy Bloggin!

|o| Simply Frank |o|
Wedding Marketing Expert

Wedding Marketing Case Study Continued…

Well on my last post I started to a Wedding Keyword Marketing Case Study about a client of mine who allowed me to share her website statistics. I guess it’s time I post on here the conclusion, to that case study…

I will post statistics from August of 2009 even though it is the beginning of November just so that I can show you how quickly the search engines picked up her website and started showing it to her clients

Wedding Marketing Keyword Results (August 2009)

So let’s see, Now her website is ranked for ALL the keywords she was after, even though she is not highly ranked for some, she at least is ranked for most of them now.

The more popular keywords she is now ranked in the first page of the search engines.

Once again, the process is simple, and with the help of some very basic search engine optimization, her website is now picked up by all the search engines…

What is the Wedding Website in Question?

The website In question is Our Coordinator Friend, Events By Audrey… at http://www.EventsByAudrey.com.

How is her website doing now?

Why not check for yourself, today, if you were to go to Google.com and search for “Wedding Coordinator in Houston” you should see her website rank #3 or #4 on the search engine results.

Click the following link to see for yourself ( it will open up a new window)
Wedding Coordinator in Houston

Conclusion

Getting your website ranked high on the search engines is not hard work.

The steps taken for this case study were:

1. Search for Wedding Coordinator Keywords
2. Eliminate Blogspot.com, Blogger.com, and Wordpress.com
3. Install the Wordpress.org Blog on http://www.eventsbyaudrey.com domain
4. Install a FREE wordpress.org theme and edit it to fit our needs
5. Do some basic SEO
6. Blog at least 1 time per week

How easy is that? Besides 1 or 2 semi-technical steps, the rest is pretty easy and basic and now EVERY Blog post that Audrey Creates will benefit her and help her website increase her traffic.

Happy Bloggin!!

|o| Simply Frank |o|

Wedding Marketing Case Study Introduction

Wedding Marketing is a subject that covers many topics. First, there is Print Marketing which it itself is divided into subtopics such as magazine marketing, post card marketing, business card marketing, etc…

Next we have the online marketing which is endless in possibilities and MOST of them are free. There is Blogging, Social Medias (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace), Paid Search Engine Marketing, Organic Search Engine Marketing, Link trading, Directory listings, etc…

As mentioned on my previous post about Wedding Marketing News, I am a firm believer that all you need is a website,  a properly hosted blog, and a bit of patience in order to build up a business. I have completely survived without any offline marketing for the last 3 years. I had an ad on one magazine, but it did not generate much income, mainly because by the time I got a lead from the magazine I was already booked. I have not done a Bridal Show in years… I can’t even remember off the top of my head when my last Bridal show was. I was considering doing the Houston Bridal Showcase in August, but I could not find anyone to help me with my booth. I did not want an untrained person there either.

Wedding Marketing Case Study

Well to prove that effective blogging, blogging with a properly installed blog on your existing domain name, as stated on my previous post about wedding marketing news, I have taken an existing website, one with a blog on those free blogging platforms, and completely redesigned the website to include the blog on it’s own domain name as opposed to having it on the free blogging platforms.

Audrey Hu-Gonzales is a wedding coordinator in the Houston Area, she used to host her blog at wordpress.com. Her OLD blog can be found at http://eventsbyaudrey.wordpress.com/. She was under the false impression that she was doing good by blogging on the free blogging sites and had no clue that her efforts were really pointless.

After Months and months of blogging, her website

1. did NOT generate any traffic because of her blogging
2. did NOT go up in the search engine traffic rankings
3. did NOT increase it’s lead generation
4. and did NOT benefit completely through her blogging efforts.

I took on this project back in March (March 27th, 2009 to be exact) and the first thing I did was to set an initial benchmark to see how her website ranked on Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Live.com (now Bing.com)… Yahoo and MSN Live did not even know her website existed, Google knew it existed but ranked her very very low…

OUT OF 24 KEYWORDS, GOOGLE ONLY RANKED HER FOR 7 (NOTE THE LOWER THE NUMBER THE BETTER)

Do you know if your website is even showing up on the search engines, and for what keywords???

Out of those seven keywords, the closest she could get to the first page of the Google.com search results was one keyword which ranked #83. That showed up on the 9th page of the Google.com search results for that one keyword. That means that people looking for a wedding planner using that ONE keyword had to go through 9 pages of results before they got to her website… NINE PAGES!!!

There is a common belief on the web that says that most people do not even go past the 3rd or 4th page of Google.com when they search for information.

Just think about when you search for something, and can’t find it, how many pages into the search results do you go in before you try another keyword or phrase or just select the best looking page for what you are looking for? I’m guessing not very far, and the majority of the time you don’t go to the 9th page. I know I don’t.

Wedding Marketing Case Study – the Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With some minor tweaking to her site, a few off-site optimization techniques, and some Search Engine Optimization to her website, only a month later, on April 24th, 2009 to be exact, was already indexed by Yahoo, MSN Live and Google.com

Out of her 24 targeted keywords her website was ranked as follows (NOTE THE LOWER THE NUMBER THE BETTER)

Well as you can see, just by doing some Search Engine Optimization to her website, the search engines started to rank her website and more importantly, to rank her higher for some of her highly targeted keywords. Now I cannot release the keywords that she is going after because that would is one of the things that I am highly guarding. After all, the keyword hunting was one of the first things we did and that gave us a target to shoot for.

Some keywords are more more important than others because they are searched for, more often.

The keyword hunting took us about a couple of days and it was not too hard but it did involved some head-aching brainstorming and figuring out which keywords were the ones we wanted to go after.

As you can see from the Search engine results, we can conclude that Google.com is slow on ranking a website higher, yahoo.com immediately took her website to the #10, 11, and 19 for some very competitive and highly targeted keywords.

To Be continued…

Happy Blogging!

|o| Simply Frank |o|
Professional Blogging Wedding DJ in Houston

I was inspired to write today because one of my readers sent me a friendly reminder that I have an interesting blog, but that I had not posted since JULY!!!!

That’s like the #1 rule of blogging that I broke, post often.

Due to many things going on in life like, my PHOTO BOOTH Rental business growing tremendously, My Houston DJ Service business BOOMING with events, dedicating as much time to my wife and daughters as possible (there is never enough time in the world for that) and maintaining a ‘regular job’ from Monday through Friday… I’ve left blogging to the side.

Blogging is an important part of any online business. I’ve grown two very successful businesses through blogging and I’ve helped countless other people do the same. I guess because of my success that I’ve already achieved I’ve left blogging alone for, well now going on two months. It has not affected my bottom line, I have established both of my wedding vendor websites on the first page of Google.com for my targeted keywords and the business has been so steady that I actually turn away business on a daily basis.

But that is no excuse to find an hour a day to dedicate to my blogging habits.

Wedding Marketing News

As time goes on, I am finding out that more and more Wedding vendors are creating new blogs incorrectly. And that is by going to the FREE blogging platforms and getting a blog started on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com or Blogspot.com.

Those who spend the extra $50 to have a blog installed on their domain name will almost instantly see the effects of it.

When you get a free blog at wordpress.com, for example, your domain name is
my-wedding-blog.wordpress.com.
So wordpress.com gets credit for everything you post and all the traffic that you generate.  Your website will never get any credit for that. Why is that important? Well the reason you blog is #1 to attract readers to your blog and #2 to attract traffic for the search engines… in order of importance. And in the hopes that those readers or that traffic converts into a lead and then into a client.

When you get a blog at your website, my-website.com, for example, the blog would be
my-blog.my-website.com
and all the traffic generated by your blogging efforts will go to my-website.com. So every time you create a new blog post, the search engines start ranking your website since it is hosted by you, not the FREE blogging websites.

Getting a blog through blogger, blogspot, or wordpress.com is free and easy for many reasons …

1. All your hard efforts WILL go unrewarded, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
2. Your website will NOT get credit for any new traffic that you generate (Traffic is key to any website). the FREE Hosts get ALL the traffic benefits
3. It is NOT a professional way to blog (Kinda like printing your own business cards at home)
4. Whenever you post a new blog post, the search engines WILL NOT index your site, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
5. Your Website WILL NOT move up in the search engine rankings for your targeted keywords, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
6. You CANNOT target your keywords effectively, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
7. YOU DON”T OWN YOUR BLOG!!! (At anytime, for any reason they can take it away and leave you back at NOTHING). This has happened over and over again and why would you risk someone taking away your blog? All the hard work and brainstorming that you have done… GONE, in an instant, no warning, to time to back up, no time to save or transfer your previous posts… just GONE!

Do you remember when websites first came out, NOBODY wanted to invest in putting their website on their very own domain name. People would go to the free hosting places like Geocities or AOL and they would put that address on their website on their Professionally designed business cards. I can even remember people not wanting to tell others they had a website for that same reason… they were ashamed of it… cuz it was free, or very badly developed. Man how times have changed.

Now, YOU KNOW you must put your website on your own domain name because it looks more professional.
Today, we are in the same situation with blogging. We don’t now what is the best way to do it, so we see what others are doing and we figure, hey if they are doing it, why can’t I? Right?  Save yourself a few years of going in the wrong direction.  PUT YOUR BLOG ON YOUR DOMAIN NAME.

I would NOT recommend that you go out and buy a new domain name for your blog as it will also not help you in your quest for more traffic and better search engine results.

Here are the top 5 Reasons I’ve discovered of why hosting your blog on your already-existing domain name helps your search engine rankings.

1. Every time  you post a new article, the blogging software automatically pings, or tells the search engines, that there is some new content on your webstie.  Search Engines LOVE new, unique content, so they visit your website and add it to their search results.
2. Every Post increases your page count. This is important because the more pages that you have the more authority that your site builds up.
3. You can target MORE keywords that you are going after. So if you find a new keyword that you want to rank for, you simply write a new post about it, do some search engine optimization and before you know it you will be ranked for those keywords. I used this to get ranked for Wedding Venues in the houston area, up lighting, etc…
4. Your clients only need to remember 1 domain name.
5. It is the most effective use of your time.

So spend some money, to the right thing and host your blog on your professional website. You will almost immediately see the power of a blog!

Happy Bloggin!

|o| Simply Frank |o|

Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston