Happy New Year! Amazing on 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 businness license for Tim Clark Photography (Hawaiian Island Weddings was a subsiderary 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  

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 explaination point, which is how it is always written, but in this case, it really is an eplaination 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 Jeves, and InfoSeek, AltaVista and others

'Back then, you would write in the description tag what the website was about and add meta tags for keywords. Like this:

<meta name="description" content="Maui Weddings Package - Hawaiian Island Weddings brings you the most complete information about wedding packages on Maui, Oahu, Kauai, Hawaii">
	<meta name="keywords" content="wedding, weddings, maui, hawaii, hawaiian, packages, oahu, island, hawaiian island, island weddings, packages hawaiian, weddings hawaii, maui weddings, packages hawaiian island, hawaiian island weddings, wedding packages hawaiian, hawaii wedding packages, maui weddings hawaii, packages hawaiian island weddings, wedding packages hawaiian island, hawaii wedding packages hawaiian, weddings hawaii wedding packages, maui weddings hawaii wedding">

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 scamers would fraudly 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 realivent in the search results. It was a simpler time when webmasters were honest and the search results reflected it. Now, anyone can pay $$$$$ to be #1 on Google, or do some shady adword campagne to get your website to the top even if it is not so relivent in the search asked for. Ask Jeves or Yahoo! didn't do this. 

Title

Another 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

Descriptive ¶

also wants all the relivent decsription paragraph, what 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 time. Have you ever seen the code

used to write a wordpress site? it's continious style sheet gibberish for like 50% of the file.

Next, if that wasn't enough, you would have to include 175 or so keyword rich paragraph

(usually "above the fold".

Here is what the website would say in 2016 (this would usually take some time to write as you

would research which keywords would be relivent and how many you could cram in, and how it

would read to your visitors)

<h3>Maui Weddings</a></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> >Oahu</a></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>