Search engine placement work paying off!

What a busy summer! Our traffic is nearly triple that of last summer, so this one-woman shop has been hustling. Last winter we put up pages for regular wedding programs (in addition to the popular wedding fan programs we had been selling) and more content for printed napkins, and both those pages have taken off. We are top 5 for our target keywords in Yahoo and MSN and just broke top 10 for printed wedding programs in Google; wedding napkins is still at 12 or so. Neither existed a year ago, or were so far down I couldn't find them.

I haven't done much with our wedding planning sites, www.idoinmn.com and www.idoinnj.com, but I updated them a little bit this summer. I also added some content pages to the weddings area of my main site, new info on wedding invitation etiquette, writing your wedding programs, and save the date cards. There is a dearth of good information out there on these topics; most of the search results are just lists of sites where you can buy the stuff, not actual information. I think that is why our sample pages (for programs and program fans) are so popular--people want to see what others have done to get ideas.

As for Post-its, after slipping a bit in the rankings on Google for our main keywords (custom Post-its and personalized Post-its), we are back in the top five. Fewer people search for custom Post-its than for custom Post-it notes, but those who do, find us! The majority of the search results for either term are big companies that don't sell fewer than 500 pads anyway. (Those companies contract directly with 3M as their supplier, but 3M doesn't deal with the small orders themselves.) So our challenge is to help people find us. We plan on reworking the Post-its section some more this winter, as the wedding season slows down.