Wedding Marketing Blog

Double Standards

As wedding professionals, we are forever telling brides that they should “always book professionals instead of hobbyists/enthusiasts” for their weddings.

For example, most professional DJs will urge brides not to entrust their friend who happens to love music and has thousands of tunes on his mp3 players to be their official wedding DJ. Same goes for photographers, videographers, chauffeurs, stationery designers and so on.

So, when it comes our own branding, why do we completely ignore our own advice? Why is it that only a small percentage of Irish wedding suppliers outsource their branding to the professionals?
Read the rest of this entry →

There have been recent chatterings among the wedding supplier community in Ireland discussing the notion of a possible self-regulating federation for the Irish wedding industry. This blog post will attempt to explain why I believe this would be a massive challenge for any organisation to take on. Read the rest of this entry →

I don’t claim to know a huge amount about SEO (search engine optimisation). In fact, I’m only learning. However, along my travels as an Irish wedding videographer, it’s not unusual for me to meet many different wedding suppliers along the way. Our conversation almost always turns to the direction of SEO and what we can do ourselves to improve it.
Over the coming while on this blog, I plan to reveal the little knowledge I have accumulated of SEO and the basic steps you can take to improve your own website ranking.
Before I get going with those articles, I want to share a list of 10 myths that I regularly encounter when discussing SEO with Irish wedding website owners.

1. Creating a Blog full of crappy keyword focused articles will help my site to rank better. This is one of my favourites. I see it all the time (particularly in my area of wedding videography). I’m not sure who gave this particular advice, but spammy blog articles from firms such as Egypt (or Eejit) Marketing that repeat keywords such as “wedding video” over and over again on a page and associate with a Twitter account belong in one place and one place only – Google’s blacklist of spammy websites.
2. My website will be automatically found and indexed by Google. Not if no other site or page links to it. If you have a Google Webmaster account and configure your website properly, create relevant content, obtain a handful of quality links, then you’ll get indexed.
3. Linking to lots and lots of random sites will boost my rankings. Yes of course it will, not. Linking out to hundreds of sites from your site only shows how generous you are with your time. Just because you once heard that “links” is the key to SEO? Well links to your site (non-reciprocal) of a high relevance and authority will certainly pay dividends. However, randomly linking out to other sites will do nothing to help your own SEO.
4. Linking to Google.ie from my links page will improve my ranking. Another one of my favourites! Why would this be true? Do people think that Google loves to see links to itself and will express its gratitude by placing you at the top of the SERPs?
5. Buying Google Adwords will improve my SEO. Won’t have any effect on your natural listings. Being listed in sponsored site results is not natural SEO and most users ignore these results.
6. Having a fancy PURE Flash-based website will help my site rank better. How could it possibly? Especially a Flash site that doesn’t contain any non-flash code on the page for browsers who don’t understand Flash. A well crafted page title and some on site body text (of the non-spammy variety) may help.
7. Google will love my gorgeous 100% graphic based website. Another interesting one. Many of us will have seen the websites that are 100% graphic based. NEWSFLASH: Google is good but not yet good enough to “read” the text contained within your graphics.
8. Keywords Meta Tag is so important to SEO today. Google confirmed in 2009 that it ignores the Keywords Meta Tag.
9. Keyword density is crucial to SEO. Maybe in the 1990s. Not today. The trick is to write high quality original content and get relevant authoritative links.
10. Hiring a “Google Approved” firm will solve all of my SEO problems. I’ve heard of a few people who have been stung by the cold calls from dodgy SEO firms and especially those who claim to be calling from Google. Be aware, be very very aware. If a call from a company such as these sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Don’t get me wrong, there are a handul of very reputable Irish SEO firms operating in Ireland who do an excellent job of legitimate SEO work. How can you find them? Well use Google.ie and search for “SEO” or “search engine optimisation” and see who keeps coming up in the top 10 natural results. Carry out your own research to see who is suitable.

What do you think?

Have I left anything out? Do you agree or disagree with the points I have made? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Also, if you simply enjoyed this article, please let me know!