Promoting the website for Stoney Creek Farm, a bed and breakfast in Maryland

Last weekend my fiancée and I went to a fantastic bed and breakfast in western Maryland, Stoney Creek Farm. No, this post isn’t this site’s first advertisement (at least for anything other than my services). Stoney Creek Farm hired me to help improve its placement in search engine results.

I’m not going to get too detailed here about how I’m helping it, lest another bed and breakfast in the Washington, DC, area duplicate my work for its own site. In general though, my approach involves

• modifying Stoney Creek Farm’s website to make it more search-engine friendly; the original text was well written, but while potential customers value good prose, search engines don’t
• increasing the amount of sites that link to it
• submitting it to a variety of search engines

Perhaps the biggest challenge is trying to draw more traffic to its wedding page. As Margaret and I saw this weekend, the bed and breakfast is a fantastic venue for a wedding: it’s on a gorgeous historic farm, offers reasonable prices, and is just a short drive from Washington, DC; Hagerstown, Frederick, and Baltimore, Maryland; and Shepherdstown and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

The difficulty however, is that there are a slew of websites that promote facilities for weddings in those areas, many of them just consisting of paid advertisements.

I’m giving my most difficult client to my future mother-in-law

The hardest person to edit is yourself. People often read text they wrote as it is in their head, not how it appears on the paper. To overcome that barrier, I’ve suggested having the computer read back your text to you. That trick helps, but it doesn’t catch every mistake.

That’s what a mother-in-law is for—or, in my case, a soon-to-be mother-in-law. My fiancée’s parents were in town last weekend. We had a lovely time perusing wedding-related facilities. At one point, however, Margaret’s mom pulled me aside and said, “I’ve been reading your website.” Ut-oh. “In one post you used a semicolon where you should have used a comma.”

Now, in the long history of conversations between guys with websites and their future mothers-in-law, this exchange was an innocuous one. Nevertheless I was bothered because (to paraphrase Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby) everyone suspects himself of having mastered at least one piece of punctuation, and this is mine: I am one of the few people I have ever known that know how to use a semicolon. (And, yes, it should say “who know,” not “that know.” The mistake is Fitzgerald’s, not mine.)

Later on, when we were back at our apartment, my soon-to-be mother-in-law and I reviewed several entries on this site but, alas, could not find the incorrect semicolon. So now I have a mother-in-law who probably questions both my punctuatory prowess and ability to provide for her daughter and a website that has an erroneous semicolon.