» WeddingWire travels to NYC

Posted by Meg | October 24, 2008 | 2 Comments

We traveled to NYC earlier this week to attend two great events:

Martha Stewart Weddings Bridal Market Event

The Martha Stewart Weddings team hosted their annual Bridal Market event this past Monday at the Tavern on the Green. We were invited to attend and network with guests! The event was beautiful and we had a great time socializing with the Martha Stewart Weddings team and attending guests.

Here are a few pictures:

Vanessa Holden and Darcy Miller (Martha Stewart Weddings), Mrs. Bee (Weddingbee), Lee Wang and Lynn Carter (WeddingWire)

Carine Halabi (Carine’s Bridal Atelier), Darcy Miller (Martha Stewart Weddings), Lynn Carter, me, and Megan Hermeling (WeddingWire)

Vanessa Holden and Darcy Miller (Martha Stewart Weddings), Mrs. Bee (Weddingbee), Lee Wang and Lynn Carter (WeddingWire)

The Wedding Salon

We attended the Wedding Salon bridal showcase on Wednesday, where the latest wedding trends were displayed. The Wedding Salon bridal showcase brings together the leading vendors and the top spenders in the wedding industry. This year’s show took place at beautiful venue, The Prince George Ballroom, and showcased a variety of great vendors. We even got to meet one of our featured NYC officiants, Rabbi Andrea Frank!

Take a look at some pictures:

Rabbi Andrea (A Featured WeddingWire vendor and Katie Peck (WeddingWire)

Rabbi Andrea Frank (A featured vendor listed on WeddingWire) and Katie Peck (WeddingWire)

Bridal model and me

Table design by The Lincoln Center

» 7 items for effective page titles

Posted by Brian | October 21, 2008 | 1 Comment

Page titles are essential to your web pages for a several reasons, which include SEO and usability. Page titles are one of the first items that search engine spiders crawl when indexing your site, so page titles need to be relevant to the content on that page. Additionally, that page title appears in search engine results so if you want click throughs, it needs to be relevant. Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal details 7 criteria for effective page titles that are good to keep in mind when building or updating your website:

page title should be short and concise (unless you want it’s broken at the end);
each page title should be unique and the unique part should go first (if a visitor keeps several tabs from the same open, he should clearly see what each tab is about);
it should be catchy (to communicate an effective message);
page title should conform to the page purpose (e.g. calling to action or informational);
page title should be based on your keywords (for Googlebot to understand what the page is about);
page title should be focused (don’t try to include all your keywords in the title the home page);
page title should be semantically correct (Google is likely to apply some kind of semantic analysis to titles to make sure they are not spammy).

» Thanks to My Wedding in a Week Sponsors!

Posted by Meg | October 14, 2008 | 2 Comments

The My Wedding in a Week contest in Philadelphia, presented by My 106.1 and WeddingWire, concluded last Friday as the winning couple, Lisa and Victor, walked down the aisle of the Columbus Ballroom in the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing, and then celebrated with friends and family over a Champagne Brunch. Starting on October 3, the winning couple had 7 days to plan their wedding live on the radio with WeddingWire and our team of professionals from the Philadelphia area, including The Queen of Hearts Wedding Consultants.

All and all the event was a huge success thanks to My 106.1 and the team of professionals who worked very hard (and very quickly) to make Lisa and Victor’s dream come true! WeddingWire would like to sincerely thank everyone at My 106.1 and the participating vendors for making this event a complete success from start to finish!

Participating vendors included:

Check out the My 106.1 contest page for highlights from the event!

» 6 PPC Strategies to Consider During These Economic Times

Posted by Brian | October 8, 2008 | Comments Off

I’m sure many of you hear the same thing I do: the wedding industry is recession proof. And indeed there is some truth to that because people will always want to get married. But as the news seems to get worse each and the stock market continues it tumble downward, being prudent would be a smart idea right now. As a wedding vendor you have to consider your budgets carefully and as many of you start advertising on the search engines PPC ad systems, competition will drive the cost up over time. The folks over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog noted 6 PPC strategies to consider right now that I think are worth paying attention to:

Have clear economic targets. Be exact with how much traffic you want or will spend. Don’t be vague right now.
Use strong bid management tools. If you outsource your PPC, stay in touch with your account manager. If you do it yourselves, keep a watchful eye on it. Don’t just let your PPC campaigns sit around.
Shift ad dollars to stronger channels. Consider all your advertising options and use the methods with the greatest return, which may mean putting more into paid search and less into bridal events for instance.
Seek capped agency or technology fees. Just make sure if you outsource your PPC campaigns, that fees don’t eat into your margins too heavily.
Protect your bottom line first. Revenue targets set in 2007 may not work right now and you’ve got to be constantly adjust your targets right now. Protect your bottom line, what that mean a year ago is probably different right now.
Stay calm. Don’t over react and don’t be afraid to be creative with your advertising and constantly be testing new ad units.