Marketing Your Wedding Venue Series by VenueApp : PageRank

PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to order the results of a search. Typically, your PageRank reflects how important your site is relative to the rest of the industry. A new site begins with a PageRank of zero. As you accumulate links to your site, your PageRank goes up. So just like you should have a keyword strategy for SEO, you will also need a PageRank strategy.

Wedding Venue PageRank: Five Ways To Better Your PageRank Today

1. Linking Strategy: Getting other sites to link to your site is an important step in ranking well, but keep in mind that not all links are equal. The more popular the site that links to you, the better.

Think of your site as an empty glass when it starts with a page rank of zero. And think of “link juice” as someone linking to your site. When a referring site links to your website, you get a bit of link juice from the site that referred to you. The higher the PageRank of the site that sent you the link, the more link juice you get. The more filled your juice cup is, the higher you appear in Google search results.

But link juice isn’t just about the sending site’s popularity. Search engines also make sure the link is relevant to the industry of the site receiving the link. So having your mom’s knitting blog link to your wed- ding venue website won’t fill your glass with much link juice. On the other hand, an industry magazine publishing a link to your site along with an online article about one of your events will contribute a lot of link juice.

As you continue to attract incoming links, your glass fills steadily and your PageRank increases, moving you up in search results. But beware – by linking to other sites from your website, you give away some of the link juice you have acquired. More on that later.

2. Producing Good Content: The better the content on your site, the more likely that people will link to it and give you some of their site’s link juice. Content for wedding venues usually means images, so as images changed on the site or blog make sure to add a useful title and description to the metadata.

3. Properly Naming Images: The typical title of a photographer’s file is something like 6524.jpeg, or date.couple’sname.jpeg. But for searching that doesn’t make sense, since people are unlikely to type anything like that into a search.

What makes your images searchable are titles like venue’sname.jpeg or yourstateweddingvenue.jpeg. (For example: frenchspoint.jpeg or maineweddingv- enue.jpeg.)

This naming convention should be applied to im- ages you post on your blog and your site. If your site is built correctly, these images will be found in a search. For example, the image file name of french- spoint.jpeg is “French’s Point” and its keyword de- scription is “Maine Wedding Venue.” This metadata will be pulled into your site or blog in most cases. Correctly naming your images will help with SEO and help you get found.

4. Hosting Your Blog and Site on a Different Server: As we’ve said, as your site fills up with link juice, you gain page rank. But to create goodwill among your peers and vendors and show that you are knowledgeable about the industry, you’ll need to link to other sites from your website. Problem is, websites that have links going out of them are giving away some of their link juice.

So how do you join the dialogue without losing juice? Blogs.

Blogging is about showcasing your venue daily. Blog- ging traditionally means frequent links to articles, images, or vendors in each of the posts, all activi- ties that lose juice. But if your blog is hosted on a different server than your site, you can protect your site’s searchability juice. So you have a site that can continually gather link juice and a dynamic blog that can give it away.

5. Commenting on Other’s Sites and Blogs: This will create a link back to your site and, more impor- tantly, grow your online community. As you comment and others find your terrific content, they may link back to you and expose your site or blog to a larger audience.

Bonus Tip: Consistent Posting

Posting on a regular basis will draw web crawlers to your site more regularly, and more readily serve up your content in searches.

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Make sure to check out our first installment on Marketing Your Wedding Venue Series : SEO