This is a tough post to write concisely because there is an entire industry built around consultants and professionals who sell expensive services to help get your website ranked at the top of a Google result. Of course this is much more difficult for someone trying to be #1 selling a very general product like auto insurance, simply because there is more competition. But even wedding websites can be hard to get to the top of Google result pages, or any other search engine for that matter.
No one can guarantee top rankings, if they could, Google would change their secret algorithm on how they rank sites. So what are you to do?
There are two simple answers:
- Create a wedding website with us, Nearlyweds. Yeah yeah, shameless self promotion it seems – but no – hear us out…there are lots things we do know about how to rank well with Google (we work with those expensive consultants
. One of the most important things you can do to get found is to be linked to, affiliated with, and endorsed by very trusted sites. Well – that’s us! You may be thinking, aren’t there even bigger companies out there I could host my site with, so shouldn’t I go with them? Well, those bigger companies don’t really care if your website gets found in a search engine, so they never expose your site to search engines in a way that will get them ranked. Quite frankly, most of the big companies just use wedding websites as bait to get you using their other, more profitable products, and so they don’t really spend time thinking about, much less building the things that are important to you. We obsess over this kind of stuff for you and employ all kinds of great techniques to help get your site ranked. Proof: even in the past month we have seen traffic to our customer sites increase by 42% because of changes and cool things we are doing to get YOUR WEDDING WEBSITE ranked at the top of results. It even works if you are using a custom domain name through us! - The other thing you can do is simple: ask 2-5 friends who write a blog or have a website to link to your wedding website. Make an even bigger impact by having them link the words [your first and last name, your fiance’s first and last name + wedding website] as the text they link. Here is an example: Katy Perry and Russel Brand’s Wedding Website. Because you link the names and the phrase “wedding website” – it tells the search engines that this is the right page when someone types into Google: Katy Perry Wedding Website, for example.
That’s it. Use us and get a few links to your site from some friends. It may take a little time, but we have been pretty good at this so far.
Note: We also know that some of you don’t want your wedding website to appear in Google. That’s totally cool with us. We think we are the only ones who actually have a whole feature for this. Simply check a box in your control panel and we drop special software code on your wedding website that blocks all search engines, including Google, from crawling and indexing your site.