Looking back
Happy New Year!
Amazing the things that have been happening lately. Well, Hawaiian Island Weddings is now celebrating 33 years in business. It was back in 1992 that we first purchased a business license for Tim Clark Photography (Hawaiian Island Weddings was a subsidiary of Tim Clark Photography, not the other way around). This was before the internet! Then, in February 1996, when my wife took my 1 year old daughter to the mainland to see the family, I wrote my first website for Hawaiian Island Weddings. It was on www.weddings.maui.net (or something like that) SEO wasn;t really a thing back then. The website was 2 pages, a home page and a emailed reply form. Shortly after I learned how to make and upload new pages, it was HTML4 back then. I bought a simple book (yes, we learned by books back then) called HTML 4 For the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro.
Now, after a while of changes to the home page, The website for Hawaiian Island Weddings was #1 on Yahoo! , That is Yahoo! with an exclamation point, which is how it is always written, but in this case, it really is an exclamation mark!
You ask,
"What's so special about that?" Well, think about it, what year did
Google come out?
AI? What is the answer?
Google came out in 1998, officially founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on September 4, 1998, as an incorporated company
after developing their search engine at Stanford University starting in 1996
Right, but it was a few years later that Google could over run Yahoo!
Yahoo! was the first and only search engine until Ask Jeeves, and InfoSeek,
AltaVista and others
'Back then, you would write in the description tag explaining what the website was about and add meta tags for keywords. Like this:
You see, the
search engines would read the tags to sort how your page would be significant
for the visitors search, simple. Now, no body believes your description and
your meta tags. This is all because scammers would fraudulently put more and
more in the tags, even if they didn't have a lot of what they were advertising,
just to come up more relevant in the search results. It was a simpler time when
webmasters were honest and the search results reflected it. Now, anyone can pay
lots of bucks ($$$$$) to be #1 on Google, or do some shady ad word campaigns to get your website to the top, even if it is not so relevant in the search
asked for. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! didn't do this.
TitleAnother thing was the Title. Since the search results would only usually show the first eight words, so if you used just three words, like your company name (
Hawaiian Island Weddings), you would be missing out on some results as the title was also taken account of in the algorithm. Here was a eight word Title that we would use:
<title>Maui Weddings Hawaii Wedding Packages Hawaiian Island Weddings</title>
Here is one that we used just sevven words
___________________________________________________
Google also wants all the relevant description paragraph, the parts they will scrape off your homepage and display in the search results, within the first 25% of the page. I assume that the web spiders were lazy in searching for this, and it saved them time. Have you ever seen the code used to write a Wordpress site? it's continuous style sheet gibberish for like 50% of the file.
Next, if that wasn't enough, you would have to include a 175-300 or so keyword rich paragraph (usually "above the fold").
You’re remembering that era very accurately—and your instinct is
right that it’s no longer important in the same way.
Short answer
Google never published an official minimum word count.
However, in the 1998–2005 timeframe, SEO best-practice
advice commonly recommended ~200–300 words of crawlable text,
preferably near the top of the page.
That number came from the SEO community, not from a hard Google rule.
.... From this, informal rules emerged:
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Common SEO
advice (circa 2000–2005)
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Typical number
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Minimum visible text per page
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100–150 words
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“Safe” explanatory content
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200–300 words
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Competitive pages
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300–500 words
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Above-the-fold keyword text
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Often 150–250 words
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That’s likely the number you’re remembering.
Thanks, Fact Checker :-)
Here is what the website would say in 2006 (this would usually take some time to write as you
would research which keywords would be relevant and how many you could cram in, and how it
would read to your visitors)
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<h3>Maui Weddings</h3>
<p>A destination wedding on Maui is now the most popular way to tie the
knot in Hawaii. Maui is both romantic and affordable. We have a variety of
packages to suit your needs, from affordable Maui wedding packages on a
beautiful secluded beach at sunset, to a complete all-inclusive Maui wedding
and honeymoon package. We will help you choose a package just right for you
that includes a minister or officiant of your choice, professional
photographer, on-site wedding coordinator, the perfect location for your ceremony,
and all of the amenities to make your dream come true. You may also add beauty
services, cake, videotaping services, musician, flowers or specialty items to
make your day even more memorable.</p>
<h3>Oahu Weddings</h3>
<p>Oahu is often the choice for couples that have many guests and want a fun and affordable wedding with the excitement of Waikiki. You may want to be married in the Waikiki area, with Diamond Head in the background, or perhaps on the fabled North Shore. With our wedding and honeymoon packages you can either stay at the historic Royal Hawaiian Resort in Waikiki, or at the modern Turtle Bay Resort on the North Shore. Each package includes your choice of minister, professional photographer, on-site coordination, flowers, and plenty of aloha.</p> |
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| | | Well, hopefully this will
start working again now, this is what happens when you are using a website that
is older than Google and was never (or rarely) updated. We registered the
domain hawaiianislandweddings.com and hiw.us (just to have something shorter
for advertising reasons). We had Maui.net host it, and have since then, at
great expense. I think we are one of only a handful that they still host, that's
okay with me, I know my IT guy, Roger, and he knows me.
Russian Hackers
I guess this was about what
time the Russian hackers started making all kinds of bad back links to our
website, Google downgrading our rankings year after year, we were on page 42 at
one point. Oh those Russians, they don't stop screwing with you, lately they
fully took over my site (or at least I couldn't see it from my IP). I got it
back, but I did see this photo (*probably the hacker guy) on my website with
the picture name author.jpg. This is exactly as I pictured him as well.
That's all for now... Next I'll share my convo with ChatGBT about "Retro" website and new high-end site I just got inspired to make. Cheers! T-
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