Can someone please help me. I have recently registered with a package from Vistaprint (where I have my website also) to contain the search engine optimizer. It gives you tips etc on improving the ranking but no matter what I do, I cannot get past 56%.

What's your website address? Then we could look to see if there's anything to suggest. Part of it is just getting good backlinks to your page, there's only so much that you can so with the code on it.

My website is from Vistaprint so I can only have a certain number of pages, there more pages I have, the smaller the index writing is going to be. Its www.dreamycakesbyalev.co.uk As a meta tag, the optimizer wants you to choose key words on your subject and try to incorporate it in your text but I have run out of descriptions...

I don't know how to optimize yourself (I paid a company to do it and I was in the top 5 listings from day one) but what did concern me was your website says some of the cake images are from other sources, yet I didnt' see where credit was given to those cakes, so visitors to your site can't tell which cakes were actually made by you and which are just for inspiration.

I didn't have a chance to look at the entire site yet, but just from looking at the code in the html on your keywords, you can redo that. There's too much text in there that isn't necessary. There are things in the keywords section that would be more appropriate in the description section. You should keep keywords short and sweet, since most people just type in "wedding cakes" or something like that, not "Blue wedding cakes with swiss dots and scrollwork." I have appointments today, but I'll look at your site in between, or tonight when I get a chance.

And if you do have photos from other people you should either remove them or make sure that you mark where they came from. I'll get to that later...I have a blog entry coming up this week about dummy cakes, so you might want to look for that on Wednesday.

Also, since there's debate about whether search engines actually use keyword tags anymore (some people say that they don't because they've been abused by smappers so often), you need to make sure that your title tag contains your keywords. It can be different for each page, which might increase people finding your site based on what they're looking for. Mine says Wedding Cakes Richmond VA, etc, to make sure that my tags are found when the search engines look for them.

Sorry I don't know anything about search optimisation but wanted to check that you had obtained permission from whoever made the cakes to use their photos, and like someone else said, you really must state which are yours and where the others have come from.

Thanks everyone for your comments. Costumeczar, once you have looked at it, could you please elaborate a little more about what you mean by changing words in the keywords section to the description section etc... All this sounds very confusing to me, I am not that technical.

All of the designs on my site which don't include fresh flowers are mine. For cost reasons, I did not want to buy expensive fresh flowers just to take a photo of them and then wait for them to wilt at home. I am open with the customers and tell them which ones are from different sources once they decide on them. I have purchased them from a website company and have specific advertisement rights over them.

Thanks Costumeczar for your reply. I liked your idea of having an 'inspirational cakes' heading for the other cakes. I'll try to input this onto my website somehow. There is a section on Vistaprint where they do give you keywords but when I type in my business type (food industry) it says that it does not contain any info on that subject which is really annoying. All the other industies have keywords that you can choose but my field doesn't and that is where I am stuck . Once you get the time, could you please PM me? Thanks

Hi! We use Vistaprint too & use the SEO feature. We are up to 85%, but it does take a long time to fool with it.

We went step by step through the process & kept changing the wording & descriptions until the meter went up to 85%.

One thing we learned is that you still need to hae revews on other sites, like Yelp, Wedding Wire or similar sites to get higher on the rankings.

Vistaprint does alot, but it is not as all inclusive as it appears to be when you sign up.

I check our rankings several times a week. It is tough to get customers to leave reviews on external sites if they are not regular users of those sites.

Brides are a hoot. They send us amazing emails, post to FB and once they go off on the Honeymoon they are near impossible to get to write a review on the big sites

We can't offer incentives for reviews, so it is hard to light a fire under people. If you have any suggestions on that, I would love to hear some creative ideas.

Keep working the SEO & you will get there. It is teadious, but worth it We didnt have enough tex on some pages, so that kept our score lower.

Best of luck!!! PM if you want to chat specifically about anything more specific. I dont want to bore everyone

to get reviews on the big sites, is it possible to add a link to your website that would take a bride to these sites? Use a teaser line of "We'd love to hear about your celebration! Post your reviews here!" (click!)

Vistaprint has a paid feature the call 'search engine optimizer' or SEO that you can use if you have your website set up through them.

The basic idea is that if you fill it all out correctly you will be high in the rankings of any search engine, Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc....

You pick the keywords that match your business, like cake, birthday cake, custom cake, etc....then it helps you make sure your site is done correctly to have you come up at the top of the results when a customer seaches for that word & your city.

Ho ho! A paid service, of course! There are some free services that you can use to find out what keywords are being used in your market, so you might be able to save some dough if you did that instead. I don't know how much they charge, but it would be cheaper to go look at what keywords your highest-ranking competition is using, then use those, hahaha!

There's also some debate about whether search engines even crawl the keywords in the <home> tags section anyway. Some websites have taken that part of their code out completely to prove the point, and they still rank right up there. A lot of it now is how you use the keyword in your title and your text, and what type of backlinks you have, but there's debate about backlinks too. It's hard to keep up...

In my blogs are a couple of website articles. One has a comment by a young man named "jmeyer" (my son!) who talks about how SE's browse the home page of websites (so dont' use any flash pages as the home page!)

Part of Google's algorithms look for if your website has been linked on another website and how high that other website ranks, i.e. Your website is linked in on www.cnn.com in a story. Now because you are linked there and CNN's page has a high "Page Rank" your Page Rank will increase.

Stay away from sites that will list your website on theirs to help you increase your page rank as google does factor these types of things in.

Very google specific, but hope it helps

Mayo2222, do you mean this sort of site that offers to e-mail a whole list of addresses for you to link with? http://www.crosslink-builder.com

The search engines look for good quality links, not just random links. They also don't use links as such a big part of their algorithms anymore, and keywords aren't as important as they used to be. They're constantly changing the way they rank pages, so it gets tricky. Right now (that means today, something else could be happening tomorow) everyone is saying that they're weighing the text on your homepage heavier than keywords.