Hi everyone,

Well, we're now over the 9,000 rating mark and I haven't been updating this nearly as much as I intended to.  I do have an excuse though - the early arrival of my baby girl!  It seems that not long ago I was wondering which would come first - 10,000 ratings or my first baby, but Bianca beat the raters to the punch!  So needless to say, the last few weeks have been a pretty busy time with a lot of adjustments to make.  After a bit of a rocky start due to her being 6 weeks early, all is well now and she is thriving.  I am getting back into working on WOMOW now too.  Thank goodness for my husband Paul and business partner Brad who kept WOMOW churning along in the meantime.

After a bit of a break, I'm looking at WOMOW with fresh eyes and I'm absolutely amazed at how far we've come in a relatively short time.  One thing we're very pleased with is the way that WOMOW pages have been indexed by Google.  This means that the business ratings on WOMOW are being found by thousands of people searching Google. 

For example, if you search for "best mechanic Melbourne" (without the quotes), WOMOW comes up first (see for yourself here).  Search for "best hairdresser Melbourne", or "fantastic pizza Ballarat" and you find the same thing.

In fact, many businesses are finding that their WOMOW listing gets a better Google ranking than their own website does.  So if people search for a business name, they end up finding that business on WOMOW - which is great for users as they get to find out what the business is really like.  It's also great for the businesses that have good ratings - there's nothing more credible and convincing than recommendations from real people.

For many businesses, it can be very difficult to get a good ranking in Google and other search engines because they use so many different factors to determine the ranking of each site for different key words.  It's extremely complicated to setup a website to incorporate all of these factors but businesses rated on WOMOW don't need to worry about all of this because we've made sure that all businesses listed are automatically optimised for Google.  The more ratings and extra information a business has, the higher they'll rank in Google.  The fact that many different people describe the business means that the business can be found under lots of different searches - often ones that the business owner might not think to use. 

For example: a customer of a hairdressing salon might say "Jane really knows what she's doing with my hair, I regularly get a great cut and colour.  This is the most funky salon in the Eastern Suburbs."  If a potential customer was searching on Google, they might type "funky cut and colour in eastern suburbs" and find this business.  It's an extremely powerful way for businesses to improve their positioning on Google.  Even the spelling mistakes on WOMOW can be useful - because people make those same spelling mistakes when searching for businesses!

We're hearing lots of great stories about people finding good businesses on WOMOW but I'd like to send a special cheerio to all the mums out there posting ratings.  It seems that WOMOW is fast becoming a great place for new mums to share information on things like baby products, childcare centres, nappy services, play centres, places to buy toys /learning products, and swimming lessons.  I've already started using some of the recommendations (no swimming lessons just yet though)!

We've now got less than 1,000 more ratings to go until we reach the milestone of 10,000 ratings we initially set ourselves.  So if you're reading this and you're in Australia - do us a favour and rate some more of the businesses you've used recently.  We're especially looking to increase our member base in Sydney, so if you know anyone there, it would be great if you could help spread the word...

Ciao for now,
Fiona