Wedding Photography Cornwall - Good guide to help get yourself some exposure! And as you say for the most part you can do a lot of it for free! Can make all the difference to a business :)
Heather Corporan - Thanks for sharing MJ. I'm working on a web address now, so this is helpful as most stuff dealing with SEO is still new to me! Love your posts with business tips!
Chastidyi Parrott - Thanks so much for sharing! I'm trying to get my page a bit more seo friendly, and this was very helpful!
Peter - Thanks for sharing that you book so few clients through google searches! We recently raised our prices a bit and at the same time we're receiving a ton more inquiries through google searches. I was getting a bit discouraged that we weren't booking any of these inquiries b/c they said our prices were too high. Your post came at the right time because I was also beginning to think that SEO isn't the end-all to booking weddings as well!
Tira J - This is great Melissa. I just had Brock make some updates to my pages and will have him do more. You may want to ask him about the Key Word box on our back end. It does help a lot with Google, IMHO. I'll send you a screen shot of mine if you want.
Alicia -- Beba Photography - Wow, I didn't know about your templates--the prices are great too! I just might have to buy some of those ; )
Angela - I just went through a short training session on SEO this week and have implemented many of the points you listed! I hadn't been blogging regularly, so my goal for this year is twice per week (which still isn't great, but I'm working toward consistency). And thanks for sharing that Ronk Checker site - love it!!
Malia - Thanks Melissa! I had just emailed a friend of mine asking about SEO and he sent me a link to you the same time that I saw your blog post on my reader! Such great info! I'm hoping this will help me get my business going since I just moved to Fiji!
Holly - Alternately, I get about 90% of my wedding bookings via Google. So I LOVE SEO! :)
Megan Refner - I am a part-time portrait photographer and for my full-time job, I actually do SEO. I'm the SEO facilitator for my company here in Colorado. Melissa, you are correct in many of the concepts you mention. If I could expand on some of them.
Title: THE most important part for on-page SEO. Make it good - no more than 70 characters including spaces. I actually prefer to put your business name first because then searchers recognize your name in the search results.
The next most important thing about SEO is to gain links from other websites. Search Engines is a popularity contest. Whoever has the most links from other websites gets higher in the ranking.
One other tidbit. If you're thinking about hiring an SEO firm for your website, be careful when choosing. There are a lot of companies that do not do SEO legitimately and can mislead you. If a company promises that they can get you to rank #1, that is a BIG red flag. What my company commits to is getting your site on the first page. Our goal is to get you to #1, #2 or #3, but sometimes that is just too difficult.
If you have any other questions, let me know and I can answer what I can.
Shawna - GREAT Blog Melissa...you broke SEO down in simple and understandable terms and advice--Kudos!!
Gail - MJ, you are AWESOME for sharing this! I've been wanting to get more serious about SEO but had no clue where to really start! So THANK YOU!
Holly - You are a mind reader!! I was just researching SEO and I thought " I bet Melissa has something"! Sure enough- you just blogged what I needed as usual!! Thanks as always
Alex Palma - Thanks once again Melissa! Such helpful tips....for everyone else you just need to create a quick account so you can download the firefox extension for the Rank Checker!
kristin brown - thanks so much for writing this post! seo scares me, but this sounds manageable. :)