Wedding website ads and stats
 

So as I'm still trying to figure out the trick to geting better search engine rankings for my website, I've decided to register with several wedding resource websites. I have free listings with most but looking to ante up some marketing dollars to upgrade my listings which typically provides better visibility and direct links to my site. Has anyone had any particular success with any of the following? Also I dug up the traffic stats for each at a site called quantcast.com. Just type in the name of the website (i.e theknot.com) and it will give you traffic and demographic stats

http://www.quantcast.com/wedplan.net

SITE UNIQUE VISITORS/MONTH
wednet.com 4,286
onewed.com 83,048
wedj.com 41,547
partypop.com 580,337
theknot.com 552,018
allwedding.com 13,128
gatheringguide.com 208,926
weddings.about.com 151,332
brides.com 288,252
wedplan.net 59,187

The trick to having a well ranked website is the relevant info you have on each page description, headers, internal links ,keywords, backlinks, there is so much to be done

Linking to free directories wont help your ranking

Could you post your url so i can have a look

Robert - I know there is a lot to learn about page ranking and SEO which is why I was thinking it would be better to just get myself listed on several of these portals that already have good visibility on the web until I can figure out how to get myself better ranked via the techniques you described. Here's my URL - any feedback appreciated.

vargaproductions.com

I'd also recommend using something like the following piece of code when you enter your website on forums and other websites. (ie: in your signature).

<a href=" paste Web address here "> insert text that will display as the link here </a>


It will help with providing links to your site and also when you look up your stats you will know which site people came to it from, ie if they clicked on your site from a post. Useful if your paying to list on listed sites etc as well. Hope that helps.

Here's a real good place to start:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/

More than 50% of our work is web design and I've got a developer that specialized in SEO. It's not an easy task and is somewhat of a moving target, but that link will get you started.

Thanks for the tips! Just for grins yesterday I ran one of Yahoo's search engine analysers against my website and two of the top ranked sites that have a high page rank for my selected keywords ( wedding video new jersey) I outscored both sites but yet my site doesn't come up at all within the first 10 pages on google or yahoo. I'll keep studying up on this stuff....

Art

another tip is to post your website on other sites with anchor words as well.
For instance, I just built this site for a client
www.edmontondiscjockey.com and I will have him do some exchange links with sites that deal with weddings, dj's and anything else relevant. What I will also do is have him use anchor text so it doesnt just have his web sites name like above, but so it has relevant key words like
Edmonton Wedding DJ - which would be a clickable link to his site.