Outsmarting Google: An SEO Workshop for SEO Pros with Nicole Munoz

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Wedding MBA


Wedding MBA C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 1 1 www.startrankingnow.com. All rights r e s e r v e d . N i c o l e M u n o z , www.startrankingnow.com.These materials contain proprietary content and must not be duplicated, excerpted or distributed without written permission.No portion of these materials may be shared or reproduced in any manner under any circumstance whatsoever without advance written permission.

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field, including, but not limited to, financial or legal matters. Under no circumstances will Nicole Munoz, www.startrankingnow, or any of its representatives or contractors be liable for any special or consequential damages that result from the use of, or the inability to use, the information or strategies communicated through these materials or any services provided prior to or following the receipt of these materials, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. You alone are responsible and accountable for your decisions, actions and results in life, and by your use of these materials, you agree not to attempt to hold us liable for any such decisions, actions or results, at any time, under any circumstances.We’ve taken every effort to ensure we accurately represent these strategies and their potential to help you grow your business. However, we do not purport this as a “get rich scheme” and there is no guarantee that you will earn

any money using the techniques in this program or these materials. Your level of success in attaining results is dependent upon a number of factors including your skill, knowledge, ability, dedication, personality, market, audience, business ethics business focus, business goals, partners, luck, and financial situation. Because these factors differ according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success, income level, or ability to earn revenue, nor can we state that any results suggested in these materials are typical. Any forward-looking or financial statements outlined here are simply illustrative and not promises for actual performance. These statements and the strategies offered in these materials are simply our opinion or experience. So again, as stipulated by law, no future guarantees can be made that you will achieve any results or income from our i n f o r m a t i o n a n d w e o f f e r n o professional legal or financial advice.

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mailto:[email protected]

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http://www.startrankingnow

http://www.startrankingnow


Title Page

Introduction

1% Factor

Search Engine Optimization

Online Market Research

On Site Optimization

Title Tags

Google Webmaster Tools

Brick and Mortar

Getting Ranked

Claiming Your Google Place

Using Video to Rank

Blogging

Conclusion







The purpose of this book is to teach you about how to get more traffic and sales to your web-‐site! I am going to try to break it down into some ac<onable steps that you can start implemen<ng today to start moving your site up higher in the search engines! Sound good? I got started just like many of you by opening up my own online retail store. One of the first things I learned was that if I was not geDng any traffic, I was not geDng any sales. I spent a lot of money on my online marke<ng educa<on. Within about 6 months my online retail site was ranking number one in Google for some extremely compe<<ve keywords and started to send me tens of thousands of visitors every month to my site which in turn resulted in a lot of sales! AKer running my online retail business for a few years, I decided to start my own SEO Company called StartRankingNow so I could help other retail businesses achieve their own success.

Introduction




In January of this year, I started to work with Wedlock Magazine as their SEO Manager! It’s mission is to teach marke<ng to those in the wedding industry through a monthly print magazine, bi-‐monthly Webinars and a forum where members can get their marke<ng ques<ons answered usually within a few hours, and I will talk to you more about that in this book. So, I am going to try to make it simple and effec<ve so that about this <me next year, you are going to be that person who stands up and says that your business has exploded as a direct result of the things that you will learn here in this book!

Introduction




Before geDng started, I would like you to ask yourself a ques<on. The ques<on is this: Is your site currently making you money? If not, why not? The other day, I was reading a book and it reminded me of the 1% factor. Did you know that sta<s<cs show that if you only improve by 1% every day, within 70 days, you will have doubled your produc<vity? So what we are going to do is give you some <ps! My number one goal for you is for you to be able to implement these <ps and strategies yourself. A lot of <mes, when we learn so much, we are not sure where to start and we get so overwhelmed with informa<on that we don’t put anything into prac<ce. So, today, as you are reading this, ask yourself, what is my 1% that I can change, that I can improve, that I can implement? Then focus on that 1%... That small incremental change… knowing that as you do, you are moving forward to double your produc<vity, double your marke<ng, and double your sales! So let’s get started!

1% Factor




Do you know what SEO stands for? SEO stands for Search Engine Op<miza<on. So what we’re going to talk about today is how to get your site to the first page of Google and possibly even the first three posi<ons for a keyword. We have some clients that are realtors and if you talk to any realtor they will tell you that the #1 factor in buying a house is always loca<on, loca<on, loca<on! SEO works exactly the same way! If your site is ranked in the top 1-‐3 spots, you are going to get all the traffic to your site. If your site is buried on page forty-‐four, the only traffic you will get is if someone types in your website address or finds it by your business name. The problem is that people are not searching the Internet for a business name; they are searching for what we call "keywords." That is going to be one of the first things we cover today! Don’t worry if all of this sounds unfamiliar. By the <me you finish reading this, you are going to know what a keyword is, what keywords you need to focus on to get you the most traffic, and exactly what you need to do to get to those most trafficked spots on the internet!

Search Engine Optimization




In business school, one of the things they teach you is the importance of doing market research before star<ng a new business or launching a new product! Before releasing any new products, Apple and similar companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on market research to find out what people want. They have study groups, test groups, and they also create prototypes of their products to make sure they will meet the needs of their consumers. Market research is numbers driven. It is all about finding out what people want and then mee<ng their needs. On the Internet, we call this market research "keyword research." Keyword research is finding out what keywords people are typing into search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing when they are looking for a product or service. Keyword research is also numbers driven and there are a lot of tools that will show us approximately how many <mes a keyword is searched per month. The more <mes a keyword is searched for, the greater the demand is for that product or service. The key to a successful online marke<ng campaign is to find keywords with a high demand and preferably a low compe<<on.

Online Market Research




We are going to use the example with the keywords “San Diego wedding flowers” just because I am from San Diego area. There is a completely free tool out there called Google Keyword Tool that is available to you within your Google Adwords account. You can sign up right with your google account and if you have gmail you already have a google account. Just do a search for Google Keyword Tool and you will be able to use this tool completely free. What this tool does is show you

exactly how many <mes someone is searching for your par<cular product or service on the web. So, in this example, I did a search for the keyword "San Diego wedding flowers." What I found Is that the keyword “San Diego florist” is searched 22% MORE than the plural version of “San Diego florists”. What this means is that the keyword that I want to focus my marke<ng efforts on is “San Diego florist." San diego wedding flowers also has 1000 searches per month, whereas, the keyword “San Diego wedding flower” has so few that it is not even registering! The keyword “wedding florist” has 368,000 searches per month while the plural version has only 60,500. This is 509% MORE. You can do this research for any market and the best part is that this tool is completely free. As a bonus for you advanced users out there, many <mes I get asked by people in smaller areas about how they can figure out exactly what keywords to focus on as they are not sure people are looking for their product or service in their town even! In these cases, what I like to do is to run an actual pay per click campaign with Google Adwords but do it in such a way to target just a specific town or city. So, when you setup your campaign in Google Adwords, and again, this is for the advanced users, but when you set it up, you can change the seDngs so your campaign only runs in a specific geographical loca<on. What you can do then is to put in a lot of different keywords… in fact, it is beker to put in as many different keywords as possible, and then set your daily budget to be something low like fiKy dollars a day and then just let the campaign run for two to three days or so. AKer two to three days, what you are going to have is some data that is going to tell you the exact keywords that people are searching for in your specific local area! This is going to be gold because then you can focus on just the keywords that people are searching for in YOUR area!


Now that you have determined which keywords to focus on, the next step is to do what we call "on site op<miza<on." On site op<miza<on are the changes that you make to your own site to make it show up higher in the search engines. Off site op<miza<on is what we are going to be talking about next and it primarily consists of building links to your site. Off site op<miza<on is anything you do to help your site get ranked higher on the search engines that is not directly ON your site. Both on site and off site are important, but most top SEO experts agree, on site SEO should account for ten to twenty percent of your <me spent marke<ng your site and off site SEO should account for the other eighty to ninety percent.

On Site Optimization



The best part about on site SEO is that you can do most everything you need to do in about one day and in a lot of cases just half a day. If you have a huge site with thousands of pages it might take longer, but even then a programmer who knows their stuff can do a lot of these changes. So what we are going to cover in the next few minutes are changes that you can make on your own site right now yourself, or send an email to your webmaster telling him what changes you want done.

Don’t do it right now, but the next <me you open up your website take a look at the words that show up at the top of your browser. Those wo rd s a r e t he words that you or your Webmaster have placed within the code of your s ite in a place called the Title Tag. Now the <tle tag is the absolute most important

part of all that we will be discussing about on site SEO and should be the very first thing you take a look at fixing on your site. A lot of websites get this wrong. If you put into ac<on what I am about to tell you right now, your site will be more op<mized for the search engines than the majority of other wedding sites out there!

Title Tags




This is an example of a website that has the <tle tags setup correctly. If you check out the browser you will see that their keyword “Wedding Aisle Runner” is showing up right there in the browser. This is how you can know for certain that your <tle tags are setup correctly so you don’t have to learn how to read techie html code! One thing I also want to point out here is that the keywords in the <tle tag are also what show up in

the search results. In other words, any <me your website shows up in the search results for one of your keywords that you are op<mizing for, whatever your keywords are in your <tle tag, is what is going to show up in the search results. This is so important because you can use this to your advantage to get a higher click through rate to your site even if your site is not yet ranked number one for your keywords. This is a perfect example of this. Do any of you watch Shark Tank? If you don’t you should check it out! I want to write a blog post called What Shark Tank has taught me about my Wedding Business! Even though I don’t always agree with their decisions on who to fund or not, their show gives you a perspec<ve on the type of ques<ons investors might ask to determine if your business is worth inves<ng in or not. In this case, the Original Runner Company was actually ON the show The Shark Tank I happened to see that episode and I could NOT believe they did not see the poten<al for this business! So, the owner of this website has placed "As Seen on Shark Tank" right there in the <tle tag of their home page. This is awesome because they are using their publicity from The Shark Tank and also The View to increase their click through rate on the search results. What that means is when someone types in one of their keywords, let’s just say “wedding aisle runners” for an example, and saying that their site was ranked number two in Google and their compe<tor, who did NOT appear on The Shark Tank or the View, was ranked number one. If someone viewed the search results, they would be more likely to click on this lis<ng as it has the credibility and authority from The Shark Tank right there in their Title tag and the credibility and authority from The View also right there in another tag called the Meta Descrip<on Tag!




Here i s another example of a site doing this correctly! T h i s s i t e i s op<mizing for the keywords “ordained non-‐denomina<onal wedding officiant” and they have those keywords in the <tle tag which we have discussed and also in the meta tag and also within the text of their website! We touched on the Meta descrip<on tag a second ago, but let’s discuss this a likle more. The Meta descrip<on tag is another tag within the html code of your website that also allows you to tell the search engines exactly what your site is about. Think of this as food for the search engine spiders. All search engines have what we call spiders that go out and crawl the different sites on the Internet. The spiders find other sites by links and that is something that we are going to cover in a few moments, but for now just know that the spiders find the sites by links to other sites and then the keywords on the sites are like food to the spiders that tell the spiders what each site is about. The spiders then go back to Google and Google in turn ranks each site by what informa<on the spider found out! The more keywords you have on your site, the more likely it is that your site will get ranked for your keywords. So the Meta descrip<on tag is another piece of code on your site where you can write a unique descrip<on for each of your pages and tell Google exactly what your site is about. The meta descrip<on tag usually shows up in the search results right under the <tle tag so this is also a good place to put not only some keywords, but other key informa<on about your business to increase click through rate. Also, some<mes Google will pull the first paragraph of text that shows up on your site, so this is why it is also extremely important that your keywords show up in the first sentence or two on your site! Such is the case in this example. You can see that the content under A Brief Introduc<on on the site is exactly the same as the content showing up in the descrip<on area on the Google search result.




So now that we have discussed how important it is for each page on your site to have a unique <tle tag and a unique descrip<on tag, let’s go back to the tool that I was discussing a likle bit earlier: Google Webmaster Tools! With Google webmaster tools, which again is a completely free tool available to anyone with a gmail account, you can install a likle piece of code onto your site and Google will spider your site and tell you how many duplicate meta tag descrip<ons and exactly how many missing or duplicate <tle tags you have on your site. Once you open up the results you can also click on the blue underlined links and it will show you the exact urls of the pages on your site that need work on. This is something that will take a few minutes to run and once you run it, you can go in and write some unique <tle tags and unique Meta descrip<on tags for all of the pages on your site. AKer you make the changes on your site and once the spider from Google re-‐visits your site, usually within a few days, this report will be updated and you should see 0 in all of the rows. If you don’t, just go in and make some more changes and then check back again in a few days. This is something that you will want to set on your calendar to do every ninety days or so or even more oKen if you are adding a lot of content and new pages to your site on a regular basis.

Google Webmaster Tools




Let’s review! So far we have covered how to do market research with the Google Keyword tool, how to use Google webmaster tools to determine if your site is suffering from duplicate <tle tags or duplicate meta descrip<on tags, how to feed the search engine spiders by having keywords in your content, and how to increase your click through rate on the search results by having “borrowed credibility” statements in the <tle and descrip<on tags! And we are just geDng started! Everything that we have covered so far is applicable to all sites on the Internet. What I want to touch on for the next few moments is specifically for businesses that have a brick and mortar loca<on that customers can walk in and make purchases. This would be anyone with a physical loca<on such as a florist, or an event venue, or a wedding dress store and so on. For those of you without a brick and mortar, can I assume that you are offering services to your clients such as a wedding consultant or maybe an online wedding directory? For those of you without a physical loca<on, what we are going to cover right now can also work for you but you will need to get a virtual office address such as an address at a Regas. A post office box won’t work! You need an actual address where, poten<ally, customers could meet you in person. You could use your home address for this of course, just know that your home address may appear in the search results and in some cases even a picture of your home from the Google maps might even show up!

Brick and Mortar




When someone does a search for certain keywords, Google has determined that at least for some keywords, the intent is to find a local business. So what they have done is they have integrated within their search results a way to show sites that they know are local brick and mortar. Remember, Google is a business, and their business is to get as many people to use their search engine as possible so that they can sell adver<sing. In order to do that, they have to have the best results as possible for the users. If, for example, someone searched for “wedding flowers” that may or may not mean that someone is looking for a local store but on the other hand, someone that searched for “wedding flowers San Diego”, you can preky much assume they are looking for a local business. When someone searches with a keyword plus a local search query such as a city name, Google shows what we call local search results. The local search results usually result in a map lis<ng on the same page or at a minimum they have the red balloons showing up in the search results next to the local search results lis<ngs. The local search results are usually stacked within the organic results. In this example we have google pay per click ads showing up on the top and on the right side, the local search results trigged a map lis<ng on the top right. The first result in the middle right below the pay per click lis<ng is an organic lis<ng. In other words, the site Google says is most about those keywords. We know that that is not a local lis<ng as there is not a red balloon next to it. Under that lis<ng we do have two local search results and another interes<ng thing is that the pay per click ads are also showing as blue balloons on top of the map.

Brick and Mortar



Local SEO is extremely powerful for local businesses as it is easier and faster to rank for local search terms that it is for na<onal or global search terms. In fact, I am going to reveal to you right now the three main things you need to do to get ranked in the local search results. And unless all of your compe<tors from your city are here also listening, if you put into ac<on the three things I am going to share, you will be outranking your compe<tors in the local search results in a very short <me. Also, as you are implemen<ng these strategies for geDng ranked in the local search, you are also helping your site to get ranked in the organic search results. Remember the 1%? This could be your 1% today that will put you on the path to double your marke<ng results and doubling your sales in the next seventy days!

Getting Ranked




The first thing you need to do to get ranked in Google Local is to put your address on all of the pages on your site! If you only service a local geographic area, then also consider puDng the local search term right in your <tle tag and Meta descrip<on tag as well. If you service clients in mul<ple geographic areas then put the main area on the footer of every single page. This is also where a likle bit of market research will be very helpful. If you go back to what we talked about in the beginning about puDng your keywords into the Google keyword tool, what you can do is put your main keyword plus local search queries and see which ci<es have the most search results. This is a very powerful technique to help you to determine which local areas to target first with your marke<ng budget. AKer doing the research with the Google keyword tool, make a list of the top ten areas that people search for a DJ in in this example, and then in the footer you can put in city 1 DJs, city 2 DJs, city 3 DJs and make those all clickable links that go to another page on your site just about each of those ci<es or areas. Each of those ten or so pages have a 500-‐1000 word or more ar<cle that uses the city 1 DJs keyword throughout the ar<cle and has pictures and <ps all about venues or vendors in each of those areas. Be sure to put in vendors or venues you have a working rela<onship with and not your compe<tors! You could also put in pictures of your company working in those specific local areas! If you actually have different physical loca<ons that service customers, I recommend you build out a separate website for each brick and mortar store and also have one corporate site that links to all of the individual sites. This will help you to have more links to your main corporate site and also help you to get more targeted search results for each of your local businesses. If you have more than ten or so businesses you can do the same thing but with a database driven site that builds out a subdomain lis<ng for each of your stores. That is something preky advanced but also easy to implement for an experienced programmer. For the majority however, the only thing you need to do is to get your address on all of the pages of your site!




The next thing that I am going to show you is something that even today a lot of business owners are s<ll not doing and those who are, are not doing correctly! As stated earlier, Google wants to show the best results to its users so it has set up a way for local business owners to announce to Google that they have a local business. They have even set it up so that you can publish photos, videos, your store hours, and even a link to your main website! This is extremely valuable because what you put in here will show up on Google maps when someone is doing a search on their smartphone as they are driving around. This is very valuable as someone driving around looking for a business is even MORE likely to buy! Even more, if you can get your customers to leave reviews and checkins on your business lis<ng they will be even MORE inclined to purchase from you even if your prices are higher! We are going to cover reviews and checkins in a second, but first let’s look at how to claim your Google places page!

Claiming Your Google Place




Google places is where you can claim your lis<ng of your brick and mortar store from Google. If you have a gmail account, you can go to Google Places and just hit Get Started and it will walk you through the process to claim your lis<ng. When you do this, Google will send a postcard out to your place of business with a likle code on it. You will have to place that code onto your account before your lis<ng shows as ac<ve and before any changes that you

make are live on the Internet. This is very powerful as a lot of <mes in the local search results; there will even be unclaimed businesses that show up in the search results. When this happens, you are GOLD! Just go in and setup your lis<ng, add in as much informa<on as possible, and very quickly your site will improve in the local search results. I am going to show you in a second what an op<mized lis<ng looks like, but also in the same place on Google places, your customers can login and leave reviews. Most of the <me they can also do this directly from Google Maps on their smartphone. A good idea for ANY local business is to have some signage up where you show customers exactly how, step by step, they can leave a review for your business right from their smartphone! I have even seen where some businesses have offers for free stuff for leaving reviews or liking their Facebook page! Very smart!




Your Google lis<ng is probably the second most valuable piece of real estate on the Internet for your business, second only to your own website. You definitely want to spend some <me making sure this page is op<mized for Google and the search spiders in the same way that we discussed making changes on your own site. Some of the most powerful

changes that you can make on your Google lis<ng is to make sure that your keywords show up in the <tle of your lis<ng and in the descrip<on of your lis<ng. This is the same as making sure your keywords show up in your Title Tags and Meta Tag Descrip<on. And just like you can op<mize a page on your site for up to three keywords, a great idea that will help you to stay a h e a d o f y o u r compe<tors is to work in mul<ple keywords into the descrip<on of your business! You can also upload up to ten pictures. One thing that most SEO experts even forget is that it is always beker to upload original pictures and not just stock photos purchased from a stock photography site or photos provided by a manufacturer. Any<me you can take new pictures either yourself or even just modify the pictures with photoshop to make them beker will help give you the edge over your compe<tors. Pictures of your actual physical loca<on, your signage and even customers at your place of business are great pictures to upload not just for Google, but also because when someone searches for your place of business on their smartphone, they are going to be able to see those pictures and if they are awesome, like they should be, it will increase your foot traffic also. Also be sure to <tle your pictures with keywords and here is where you can get crea<ve and try to add in as many keywords as possible. So, for example, name of the pictures Wedding Flowers San Diego, and another one Wedding florist San Diego, and for another Wedding bouquet.




You can also upload videos. If you have not had a professional video done of your place of business, this is something you can get done for a few hundred dollars and use over and over again. But don’t let that stop you. You can always take pictures of your place of business, upload them to inexpensive soKware called Animoto where you can also edit them, add some background music, and save as a video. It takes less than an hour to do and can allow you to have a video to upload to your Google lis<ng quite quickly. If not, just ask your neighbor’s teenage son that probably has tons of experience uploading youtube videos. You can probably find a kid willing to do an awesome video for your business for less than a hundred dollars! The last thing you want to make sure is that your lis<ng is owner verified. You can check that when you are looking at your lis<ng and on the top right it should say owner verified. If it doesn’t then you need to put in the code from the postcard aKer you receive it or some<mes Google creates duplicate lis<ngs. If that is the case, there is a place right there to report to get the duplicate lis<ng removed.

AKer you claim your Google places, there are some other sites you want to also make sure you claim your lis<ngs on. Some of the more important one’s are Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, Best of the Web and Horrog. Yelp is really important as a lot of people have the Yelp

app downloaded on their phone and check it first before going to a place of business. When you open up Yelp on your smartphone you can type in a keyword and then choose the loca<on to be where your business is located. This is a really good idea so that you can ga the r some compe<<ve intelligence. Don’t just look at the lis<ngs for your keyword, you can also check out what others are doing just in the wedding industry to get some ideas! One of the first things you will no<ce is that there are a lot of reviews and also check in offers! Check-‐in offers are offers to your customers for checking in with their smartphones on the Yelp app. A lot of <mes, people will leave reviews when they check-‐in making this is a great way to get reviews for your business as well. A check-‐in offer could be something like a percentage off of their order or a free giK! Bing and Yahoo are more similar to Google places. Bing also requires you to confirm your lis<ng by sending out a leker to your place of business with a code that you then have to place onto your lis<ng. What I really like about Bing however is you can post up to ten of your products or services within your lis<ng. Best of the Web and Horrog are two of the more important directories to get your business listed at.




There are two important things to remember when filling out your lis<ngs on these sites. One is to fill out as much informa<on as possible. Use every single opportunity you have to put more informa<on about your business. When possible, also include reviews, tes<monials, and pictures of happy customers! Also, even though you are trying to put in keywords into your lis<ngs, always be sure to write for your customer first. Don’t keyword stuff your lis<ngs by puDng a bunch of city names of areas you service all in a list in the descrip<on area of your business lis<ng, but rather, work the keywords into your lis<ng in a natural way that will compel people to want to visit your place of business. A good idea also, is to work in the URL of your website into the descrip<on. That way, if someone wants to get more informa<on about your business, they can find it easily. The second thing you always want to make sure you do is have a link back to your main website within the lis<ng. Usually they have a specific place that they allow you to put the URL.

AKer claiming your lis<ng at Google and the other five main sites, a way to stay ahead of your compe<tors is to work on submiDng your site to more directories on a monthly or even a weekly basis. There are new one’s coming up all the <me and a good idea is to also look for some specific wedding directories to submit your site to. Many of the specific wedding directories will not only help you with your search rankings, but will send traffic to you as well.

The third thing you need to do to get great local search results is get some reviews directly on your Google lis<ng. The best way to do this is to simply ask your customers to give you those reviews! We covered a likle bit about this already. We discussed puDng up signage at your place of business showing them how to leave reviews. This is going to work more and more as a lot of people today have smartphones. If you have a lot of clients without smartphones, be sure to have a system setup to collect their email addresses so you can email them the informa<on about how to leave reviews from their home computers! In fact, no maker what, you should have a system setup to collect email

addresses from your clients and prospects, but that is another presenta<on on email marke<ng, something that we also cover within Wedlock Magazine, forums, and Webinars! I think we actually have one scheduled that covers a lot of this especially about how to follow up with your customers in an automated way so that you only have to set it up one <me and then they get emails with your marke<ng messages and special offers automa<cally delivered to them on a weekly basis.


So, once again, let’s review! Make sure your address is on each page of your website, think of your Google places as a mini website and op<mize it for your keywords just like you would for your main site by keeping the keywords in the <tle tags and descrip<on tags. Add as many pictures and videos as possible always being sure to add unique photos and not use stock photography. Don’t forget to claim your business lis<ngs and make sure they are owner verified and then set up a system for collec<ng reviews from your customers!




One of the things that we have touched on but have not gone into great detail yet is about video. Using video to get ranked for local search terms is another strategy successfully used by many websites. More and more, people want to see, feel, and experience before they make a decision to purchase something. By having video on your site, you will not only help to increase sales, but if done correctly, you can publish your videos on video sharing sites such as Youtube and get more traffic to your site as well. Now videos don’t have to be a complicated thing with a script and video crew! A video can be as simple as puDng together some photos with some audio and conver<ng it to a video. There are a lot of tools out there that will allow you to do this quickly and inexpensively, but if you have never made a video it is probably not the best use of your <me to be making the videos yourself. What I would recommend is that you checkout some of the job board sites such as elance.com or odesk.com and put up a project to create some videos and tell them that you will provide the photos and the royalty free music to use and let them do the rest! If you do have a staff member that can be crea<ng videos, the easiest soKware that is commonly used is called Animoto. Once you create your video, the next step is to upload it to some of the video sharing sites. You can use tools such as Traffic Geyser to distribute to a lot of sites all at once. Since we normally only upload to the top three to five sites, you can also just upload them manually. If you upload to Youtube, you can then also embed the youtube url into your website. When you are uploading videos, you also need to be sure to op<mize your videos just like we learned about op<mizing our website and our mini lis<ngs on Google places and other directories!

Using Video to Rank


One of the best advantages of crea<ng videos with local search terms is that there is usually very likle compe<<on and you will be able to get ranked quite quickly! The end goal of each video is for the viewers to click through to your website so you want to make sure that your website URL is one of the first things that appear in the descrip<on of your video. When trying to decide what sites to upload to the top one’s are youtube, DailyMo<on, Vimeo, and Metacafe. You should also do a search to see what sites show up as hos<ng videos in your market and make sure you also have a presence on those sites. You can upload the same videos to mul<ple sites. But if you do that, change the <tle of the videos or the descrip<on just enough so it does not exactly duplicate what you published on another site.

Using Video to Rank


Youtube videos rank high on Google based on how many people view your videos and if they are leaving comments or not. So, be sure to have all your staff members watch your videos and also to leave comments not only on your company youtube channel but also have someone login to your youtube account and leave comments on other people’s videos, preferably in the wedding industry. This works out k ind of l ike r e c i p r o c a l c ommen<ng because once someone sees you leK a comment on their videos, the most natural thing is to go check out your videos and return the favor by leaving comments on your videos as well!

One of the factors of the google algorithm that determines whether or not your site ranks high is the <me people spend on your site. Now don’t quote me on this, but in my opinion it is well worth the investment to have a really high quality video made that calls aken<on to the visitor and gets them to click on that video. Just those extra few seconds they are on the site can help your site exponen<ally! Here are some examples of websites doing this the right way! Some have videos showing up on the top right, some on the leK, some in the middle of the content area. So, how does crea<ng a video and

submiDng it to other sites like youtube help your SEO? It helps in two ways! First, your videos can get ranked in the video search results! This is helpful to send more traffic to your site! Second, on all of the sites where you can publish a video, both in the profile area and also in the descrip<on area of each video, you can add in a link to your site! It is best to get as many different links from as many different sources as possible!


So, now that we have done some keyword research, fixed our <tle tags and meta descrip<on tags, claimed our Google places lis<ng and setup accounts on Yahoo, Bing, Botw, Yelp, and Horrog as well as other directories, created a video, submiked it to the video sharing sites and placed a high quality video on our own site, the next thing I am going to teach you is how to build links to your site by blogging! For those of you are not sure what a blog is, a blog is a content management system that allows business owners to easily publish content to the web with “a what you see is what you get” editor very similar to a Word document. In other words, if you can use Word, then you can write and publish a blog post! It is that simple! The blogging plarorm of choice by SEO experts is Wordpress. Your blog should definitely be on your own domain and not setup as a subdomain of Wordpress. So for example, your blog should be on www.yoursite.com/blog, and not on yoursite.wordpress.com. Your Webmaster can visit wordpress.org and download Wordpress that your Webmaster can install on your hos<ng account as a subdomain of your own site. Some hosts will even setup Wordpress on your own domain with a click of a bukon. One really great thing about Wordpress is that there are a lot of free plug-‐ins out there that once installed will automa<cally make your site SEO friendly.

Blogging



http://www.yoursite.com/blog

http://www.yoursite.com/blog


Blogging is extremely important and there are a couple of reasons why you should have a blog. The first one is because it gives your company a voice and a face! A famous marketer said: “People don’t buy from websites, they buy from people!” A blog is much more than just a place to add advertorial content to your site, but rather a place to showcase your company image and personality! Zappos is a great example of this. If you check out their blog, what you will find is that they not only have ar<cles about their products, but they also have interviews of industry experts from trade shows and spotlights on their employees!

One of the reasons that their blog is so effec<ve is that they are pos<ng two to four blog posts per day on their blog! This is huge. Zappos is so successful because they “get” Internet marke<ng and they realize the power of a blog. They understand and we are going to talk about this in a second but Zappos understands that if they blog on a consistent basis, that the Google spider is going to visit their site more oKen. If you check out their blog posts, you will also see that they “get” the power of internal linking. We are going to cover internal linking

more in just a second!

The second reason blogging is so extremely important, especially in the day and age we live in, is because of reputa<on management! With twiker, Facebook and online review sites like Yelp, a blog enables you to publish knowledge and informa<on and control your message to your audience. It also allows you to respond quickly to customers and answer ques<ons. And we are going to talk about this in a second, but it is extremely important for you to establish a presence for your business on twiker and Facebook not just to promote

your products, but to be where your audience is. Some<mes your clients will have a problem with an order and instead of calling or emailing, they will search on twiker or Facebook for your business and contact you there! This is geDng a likle into social media, but some<mes people ask, what is the return on investment of social media, well, the answer is what is the ROI of the phone? You can’t measure it but it is a tool that every business owner has. Your customers are already using these tools and as a business owner, you need to be also! So, all that was extra!




The third purpose of a blog is not only the SEO benefit that you can get by building links to the pages on your site, but also, if done correctly, you can drive traffic to your site! Let me tell you a story about a guy named Marcus Sheridan, CEO of River Pools and Spas. In 2005 his company was failing, and he just found out that someone embezzled $200,000 from his company and that the IRS was aKer him and his partners with liens on their homes. By November of 2008 aKer figh<ng for 3 years to keep his business alive and to get out of the hole they were in, the economy tanked. In March 2009 he started to learn about blogging. By November of 2009 most of his compe<tors were out of business but his company was thriving, finishing the year off successfully! By September 2010, his site was the number one site in the industry and he accredits this to the blogging he has been doing over the last 18 months. To date his adver<sing budget has dropped from $250,000 to $18,000 per year and the business

con<nues to grow! Wouldn’t you like that to be your story? It can! So how does Marcus blog? His simple strategy is this: He an<cipates his customer’s ques<ons, and answers them on his blog! Amazing. If you don’t do anything else, if I had to say, what ONE thing could change your business, it would be this: An<cipate your customer’s ques<ons and then answer them on your blog!


We have now discussed the three main reasons to blog are to give your company a voice and face, reputa<on management, and the traffic benefit by an<cipa<ng your c l i e n t s q u e s < o n s a n d answering them on your blog. What we have not yet really covered is the SEO benefit of a blog! Here are some examples of some bridal sites that are doing this correctly! In the example on the top

right under Elegant Wedding Accessories for Your Special Day, we see that they are working in their keywords right into the text of their blog post, but not only that they are linking them to the pages on their site that they are trying to rank for those specific keywords! This is exactly what you want to do and the best part, is that it is the fastest and easiest way to build links to your site. This is

kind of difficult to understand as the blog is on your site and you are also building links to your site, but this is actually one of the most overlooked and easiest way to build links. It is so overlooked that even a lot of SEO consultants skip this step!




Google not only counts these internal links as links to your product pages, Google also sees that your site is being updated on a regular basis with fresh content. Every <me your site is updated, if your site is setup correctly and what I mean by correctly, I mean on a Wordpress plarorm with all of the right SEO plug-‐ins installed, then every <me you add new content to your site, the Google spider will be no<fied and they will come and visit your site. And geDng your site visited by the Googlebot is good. Huge news sites that add content on an hourly basis get their sites crawled every few minutes or so!

The last thing I want to men<on i s that a b log complements your social media strategy perfectly. Now we will be touching a likle bit about social media in a second, but aKer you

establish your presence on Facebook and twiker. In other words, aKer you setup your accounts, a lot of what you can do is post links on your twiker and Facebook to you r b l og t e l l i n g you r followers and fans to go check out your blog posts! This is the right thing to do and the right way to use social media… the way to promote your site by telling them to go check out a cool informa<ve ar<cle you wrote. Or maybe someone asked a ques<on on twiker or Facebook and there is already a blog post on your site that you wrote 6 months ago that answers the i r ques<on perfectly, then you can point them to the blog post and ask them to leave a comment!

The last thing I want to point out here is that these sites are working the keywords not into the blog posts, but also into the blog post <tles.

Remember how we talked about the page <tle is the most important part of your page? Well if you are using Wordpress as most SEO Experts recommend, you can install some plugins. Plugins are some completely free modifica<ons that you can have your Webmaster install on your site that will make it m o r e S E O f r i e n d l y automa<cally. In this case, what happens is exactly how you < t l e y ou r po s t i n Wordpress that is what shows up in the <tle tag code for each page. So it is important to try to work in your keywords into the headline of the post as that is what is going to show up in the <tle tag and that is going to help your post rank for those keywords!




So, let’s review blogging! We discussed the three reasons to blog: to establish your company face and voice, to pre-‐empt any reputa<on management issues, and to build traffic to your site by answering your client’s ques<ons on your blog! We also covered the SEO Benefit of a blog: that it will help the Googlebot visit your site more frequently. Then we discussed how a blog is the easiest and fastest way to build links to the internal pages on your site and also how a blog is a key component of your social media strategy!




If you are like most business owners, you need results now! The fastest and best way to get results fast is by blogging and if you follow this strategy you can get more traffic and more sales in less than 6 months! Even though crea<ng content is the MOST effec<ve SEO tac<c, according to Marke<ng Sherpa, it comes in sixth in terms of popularity with only sixty percent of marketers using it. Most agree that the most difficult part of blogging is the content crea<on. As we have discussed, this problem is made easier by focusing on just an<cipa<ng your client’s ques<ons and then answering them. Set a goal to write two posts per week for six months! Get your staff involved! Get them to write the blog posts! Talk to your customer service reps! Create a system for them to keep track of the client’s ques<ons and give them to the staff responsible for content crea<on!




Another factor that Google has is a metric that they use in their algorithm social media metrics. A likle while ago I men<oned that your blog was a key component of your social media strategy! Right now we are going to talk about how this all works together! We just got done discussing the first step in an effec<ve social media strategy and that is blogging! Having great content on our site that we can link to and share with to others is core. The second step is to do something we call blog commen<ng. Now blog commen<ng is where we go out and find blogs talking about our topics and read what other people wrote and leave a comment on their blog post. For example, if we read a blog post about the Top Five Wedding Day Pictures Most Brides Forget to Ask Their Photographer to Take … and we sell wedding dresses… and maybe that blog post did not men<on to take a picture of the ring on top of the lace of the wedding dress, then we could comment about that right there on the blog post. We want to provide a valuable, related comment that contributes value to the reader and soK sell our service at the same <me. The SEO value of a blogs comments comes in to play when you are allowed to link your name in the comment to your website. This is how it works in most cases. When you go to post a comment, it will ask you your Name and website URL. Where it asks for your website URL, put in the URL of your new blog post or the main URL of your website. This will help build not only links, but also traffic to your site. The third step in a successful social media strategy is to use twiker! Once you have your blog post up, go to your twiker account and ask your twiker followers to check out your blog post and to leave a comment on it! The fourth step is to do the same thing with your Facebook Business page. We get into how to setup a Facebook page correctly on the Wedlock Webinars and forums but it is really as easy as just going to Facebook.com/pages and crea<ng a new page for your business. Once you have it setup, you need to promote your Facebook business page and also post updates on it. A really cool app on Facebook is called Networked Blogs. Now this is going to save you a lot of <me! If you setup Networked Blogs on your Facebook business page, it will link your Facebook business page to your blog and every <me you update your Blog, a post will automa<cally be published to your Facebook business page telling your fans that your blog has been updated! You should have some more interac<on also, but this is an easy way to get started! The last step is Google Plus. Now the jury is s<ll out on Google Plus, but I would be remiss if I did not at least men<on it here. With Google plus you can “plus” a page and it will show up on your Google account. You don’t want to misuse this but you should definitely plus your own blog and anywhere else you can get content published!




This brings us to our next topic: Guest Blog Pos<ng.

Guest Blog pos<ng is called the “new” ar<cle marke<ng even though it has been around for a while because only since the recent Panda update where Google penalized a lot of the main ar<cle directory sites a lot of people were using to build links to their sites has it really become popular. Guest blog pos<ng is where you offer to write an informa<ve helpful ar<cle for someone else’s blog and in turn they allow you to link back to your site. When done correctly, this helps your site in two ways. It allows you to build links to your site which helps with your

SEO, and also it allows you to get qualified, targeted traffic to your site as well. Guest blog pos<ng is a natural complement to your social media strategy as well because as you build rela<onships with other bloggers in your industry, it is a logical thing to offer a guest blog post to them! Guest blog pos<ng is a way to build your business off of the authority and credibility of others in the right way. The first step is to go to where your target market is hanging out and par<cipate in the community.




So how do you find out where your community is hanging out? I did a search in Google for wedding cupcake websites and came across this site! The first thing you want to do is to Like the page with your Facebook account. You can do this with your Facebook Business Page or with your own personal Facebook account. That is up to you! Next, find a blog post that is related to your site or just one that you find interes<ng and leave a comment on the site. When you do you will be given the op<on to put in your website URL. This URL will be linked to your name! This will help build back-‐links to your site! The next step is to come back every

week and comment on one to two more blog posts. Friend the blog owner on Facebook, follow them on twiker, and connect with them on the other plarorms as well! Build rela<onships with them! AKer establishing a rela<onship, offer them a guest blog post or ask them to review an ar<cle on your blog!




Here is a super secret <p! My top three favorite ways to get guest blog posts is from these three sites: Bloggerlinkup, MyBlogGuest, and Business2Blogger. You can sign up for free accounts on all of them. All three sites connect business owners to bloggers. AKer you sign up for a free account, you can log on to the sites and post opportuni<es for bloggers to write a review about your business. The people on Bloggerlinkup and Myguestblog are looking to get free content on their sites and allow you to place links within your ar<cles that link back to your site. So they are benefi<ng because they get new content added to their site that is

valuable not only to their readers, but also helpful to keep their blog fresh and updated which Google likes. Business2Blogger targets another type of blogger… a group of bloggers we some<mes refer to as mommy bloggers. Now the mommy bloggers are usually looking for revenue so on that site you can make offers of cash or product in exchange for a review of your site.




Another easy way to build links to your site is by using press releases. Most of us are used to thinking about only using a press release when something really really major happens in our business. With online marke<ng, it is very beneficial and economical to use press releases as a way to get buzz and links to your site. So, if for example you decide aKer akending this session that you are going to start a social media strategy and start a Facebook page for your business, then you could write a press release about that and distribute it through one of these two sites. For example, your press release could say, Vegas Wedding Photographer

launches new Facebook Business Page! Something simple but announces real news!




Now press releases are good, but what is even beker is to become a source for someone else’s press release or ar<cle. Haro, Reporter Connec<on and PitchRate are three sites where you can register as a source for reporters. Each day you will get an email summary that tells you all that the sources reporters are looking for. I have seen where editors from Beker Homes and Garden magazine were looking for experts about pa<o furniture. If you owned a pa<o furniture online store, you could become their source and possibly get cited in their ar<cle and if it is published online, even a link back to your site! This is one of the more underused

strategies that actually have a very high poten<al for geDng some really powerful back-‐links to your site!




We have covered a lot here! We started out with some on site SEO, got into Local SEO, video marke<ng, social media marke<ng, blogging, and even some press releases and infographics! You might be reading this and wondering, does this really work? Now, of course I will tell you yes as I have seen it over and over again for our clients that we work with, but don’t take my word for it!




I want to introduce you to someone that I have been working with over the last few months. Joseph has provided us with an audio clip of a tes<monial of how the implementa<on of these strategies has revolu<onized his business. As part of a promo<on, we offered Joseph some coaching from Wedlock Magazine where I worked with him and his business partner teaching them via Webinar some of these same exact strategies we discussed today. To listen to this tes<monial, click here hkp://www.startrankingnow.com.I want to introduce you to someone that I have been working with over the last few months. Joseph has provided us with an audio

clip of a tes<monial of how the implementa<on of these strategies has revolu<onized his business. As part of a promo<on, we offered Joseph some coaching from Wedlock Magazine where I worked with him and his business partner teaching them via Webinar some of these same exact strategies we discussed today. To listen to this tes<monial, click here hkp://www.startrankingnow.com.








One ques<on I always get asked is, "Can I just hire you to do all this for me?" The answer is YES! BridalBusinessMarke<ng.com is the official SEO Company of Wedlock magazine and you get your SEO done by an experienced team of SEO experts that are also Experts in the wedding industry! My business partner Richard Weiler and I can provide you with informa<on about our packages. We have some amazing specials going on for those that sign up with one of our packages! We have also put together a great WeddingMBA bonus so be sure to come visit us at hkp://www.startrankingnow.com!






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