If you are anxiously waiting for Google to take a look at your website, this post is for you. You may have recently created a new free website, and you’re waiting for it to come up in search results. Or you may have made some changes  – optimized your site’s title or meta-description, for example – but are still seeing the old version appear in search results. What gives?

Getting Cached…and Re-Cached

Every time a search engine crawler arrives at your site, it takes a snapshot, known as a cache. This is Google’s perception of your website. If you enter in a search cache:yourwebsite.com,  you’ll see the version of your site as it appears to Google. Until your site gets crawled again, this snapshot won’t change, and the way your site appears in Google will remain the same as well.

We’ve written a few posts on the subject of getting Google back to your site, to take a new cache. Backlinks, or links to your site, are paths that search engines use to crawl from site to site. The more backlinks you have from quality websites, the more likely Google is to index your site. There is another tool for getting search engine crawlers to notice your website and keep coming back for more…

Add New Pages to Your Website

Search engines are endlessly hungry for new, quality content. This is how they provide users with the best, most relevant information out there. Otherwise, we’d all still be using our Encarta CDs, or even (gasp!) hardcover encyclopedias.

Adding new pages to your website with new content is like giving your website a big red flag to hold up, signaling to the search engines that your site has been updated. Your new content will also cause people to revisit your site, sending out additional signals to the search engines that there’s something worthwhile going on. You may even score some new backlinks.

Content Tips & Resources

1. Use the post How Do I Know Google Has Seen My Website? if you need help figuring out the last time you were crawled.

2. Here’s a video tutorial showing how to add pages to a website

3. Break up large sections of content into paragraphs. Use subheadings and layout separators. The easier your content is to read, the more likely your site visitors will come back.

4. Do not create pages with spam-like content – for instance, creating an out-of-the-way page and filling it with keywords. The search engines, especially Google, have developed sophisticated ways of detecting spammy websites, and if caught, you run the risk of getting your site removed from Google’s index entirely.

Ideas for New Pages

• Testimonials. Many of the free website templates found at Wix have Testimonial pages – make use of them!  Include some testimony from current or past clients, that demonstrates the value you offer users.

• Clients. Add a Clients page to your site, where you go into a little more detail about a particular client or patron of yours. Write a short story about how your business worked wonders for someone.

• News. Add a page for any important changes, and keep visitors updated as to the very latest in what’s going on with your business or website. Sort of a mini-blog inside your website.

• How To’s. This type of content can really get the SEO juice flowing. Provide something unique like a tutorial that users will appreciate.  Make sure it’s related to your product/services.

You don’t have to go crazy adding a new page every day, but make a schedule and spend some time enriching your site’s content on a regular basis. We’re all suckers for novelty; Googlebot is no different.

Where Are You?

Does your website tell visitors (and Google) where you are physically located, in the real world?

We’ve seen tons of Wix sites with absolutely no geographical information – not even “vague” regional search terms. Many of you are small business owners: photographers, designers, restaurant owners, marketing agencies, medical facilities and so on. Drive more relevant traffic to your website, and attract people who will actually take action and give you business!

There are a few reasons why you should add info about your location to your website:

1. Users search for local products and services.

Your target market is probably more likely to search for “your-location your-product “than “your-product”. In other words “Chicago wedding photographers” makes more sense as a search term than just “wedding photographers”.

2. You’ll build customer trust.

Letting customers know where you’re actually located adds credibility to your website or business. Otherwise, you’re just a vague concept floating around on the internet. Include your physical location so that visitors can place you in their minds.

3. You may improve your rating in search engines.

It has been argued that including a physical address can boost Google’s trust in your website. This has not been proven to be an indisputable fact, but there is some evidence indicating that having a real world, verifiable address on your website boost your site’s credibility according to Google, which DOES impact your ranking. Read more in this article at SearchEngineLand.

How to Make a Website Geo-Friendly

1. Add your postal address to your site’s pages

Depending on what you’re offering, it may be useful to include your postal address to as many pages of your site as possible. If you’re using mini-pages, add it to your main page’s content so that it’s seen throughout your site.

2. Add location keywords to your title, description and headers

Your website’s title and description should contain “vague” regional terms – as well as some well-placed headers. For more info on how to change your website’s title and description, and how to add header tags, visit these SEOMyWix posts.

Blaine Photography, a team of California wedding photographers, added regional keywords to their page headers. Notice the meta title of their site as well, as it shows up at the top of your browser – another source of valuable SEO juice!

3. Add a Google Map Widget

In the website builder, go to Widgets > Google Maps. Now users on your site can easily pinpoint your precise location.

4. Add your site to Google Places

Google Places, formerly known as Google’s Local Business Center, is a free service offered by Google that allows you to control how your site appears within Google maps. This is a great opportunity to have further control of how your site appears to users who search for you based on location keywords. Yahoo! local is also worth taking a look at. Also, Insider Pages will post your listing on Ask.com. You need to sign up for free accounts with all of these sites to get listed. It’s worth it.

Take control of your business’ success by making it easier for your target audience to locate you!

With so many Wix users around the world, we’ve received quite a few inquiries about multilingual content. Are pages that have the same content in different languages considered duplicate content by Google?

It’s a good question in today’s globalized market.

Worldly Wix Websites

Creating a website with multilingual content is a great way to appeal to foreign-language speaking visitors. Your site might be an international business, or you may just want to appeal to members of different communities who live within the same geographical area. It’s also a smart way to ensure your site will come up for users who perform searches in their native tongues.

You’ll be relieved to find out that the answer is definitely NO: The same content in different languages is NOT considered duplicate content by search engines. This actually holds true even if the content is under the same domain, and hosted by the same server. So, if your free website has multilingual content on it, you do not need to worry about Google translating it on its own and choosing only one page of your site to index.

Keeping Things Organized

Separate your site’s multilingual content onto different pages, to make things easy for both your users and Search Engines. Creating separate pages for your site’s different content will be appreciated by users and contributes to your site’s usability. And an organized site is a popular site!

Bonus Design Tip:

Normally, SEOmyWix is not exactly the place to turn for design advice (shout-out to the fabulous Wix Design Blog!), but while we’re on the subject…it’s worth noting that Wix just added some flashy new animated flag icons to the website builder. Found inside the Clip Art section, these icons can easily be turned into linkable buttons that connect to your site’s various language pages, for a sleek and optimized look!

Bonne chance!!

When you conduct a search online, Google and the other search engines try to show you a variety of relevant web pages. Search engines filter through duplicate content, to provide users with pages with distinct information. This contributes to a positive search engine user experience.

However, sometimes the natural process of editing involves creating duplicate content. Say you want to update your Wix website, but you don’t want to save the changes on the Published version until you’re positive you like them. Instead of making changes to your original document, a way around this is to go to “File”, and click “Save As”. This creates a duplicate version of your original document. You can now experiment and make changes to your site’s content without permanently altering your earlier work.

But how will Google (and the other search engines) know which version of your website to index?

1. You must decide which version of your site you want indexed.

2. Go into the Settings of your preferred version.  Under Privacy, make sure the “List in Search Engines” box is checked. If it isn’t, check it. Click Apply and Save.

3. Go into the Settings of your duplicate Wix versions.  Uncheck the “List in Search Engines” box. Click Apply and Save your Wix.

What Google Sees

To see what Googlebot currently has stored in its memory of your site, type cache:yoursite.com into a search. Or, type your Wix’s URL into a search, and under the search results click on the Cached link rather than your site’s Title. You can see the date and time that your site was last crawled. If nothing comes up, your site has not yet been indexed by Google.

If you do not clarify which site you want indexed and which site you want kept private, Googlebot will interpret the most recent version of your site as duplicate content. Older links have more time to build SEO juice and are therefore favored by search engines. Googlebot will then revert to your older web document, and this is what users will see when they search for your website.

Getting Your Site Re-Indexed

Once you uncheck the “List in Search Engines” box in the site you DON’T want indexed, you won’t see the changes in a search right away.  It can take Google 1-3 months to “unindex” a page. In the meantime, there are a couple of things you can do to speed up the process:

• Get good backlinks to your website
• Submit your site to Google again

Saving multiple versions of your site with Wix’s free website builder can be a smart editing tactic. Just make sure you’re in control of what can and cannot be indexed by search engines. Happy editing!

In HTML, they’re called heading tags.  In Wix, they’re called Titles. These texts present the structure of your website’s content, not only to users but to search engine crawlers as well. However, the method you are using to make certain text jump out to your users might not be effective in getting that text to stand out to Google.

How Google Reads Text

When someone enters your website, they naturally will notice the Titles of paragraphs, before reading the content within them.  Search engine crawlers actually function the same way.  When a search engine crawls a page, one of the first things it does is attempt to know what that page is about. It does this by first reading the heading tags, from the HTML code. Google recognizes <h1> through <h6> tags.  Wix uses only <h1> through <h3>, to make things neater and easier for users. Search engine crawlers prioritize the importance of your headers based on their numbers.  Their importance is arranged by their relative size and position.

Heading Tags in Wix

Use the Title tool in your editor, found inside the Text section, to create headers. Many Wix users might not realize that using large text in a paragraph will never cause that text to gain recognition as a header. You can make text in a Paragraph as large as you want, but it will not gain “heading” status in the eyes of Google. Titles are golden when it comes to attaining text recognition.

Tips on Title Use

Here are a few guidelines for you to make the most of your Titles (header tags).

• The relative font size and position of your Title texts determines their header tag.

Titles with larger fonts and higher positions on your web page are more important.

• For an <h1> header tag, place the Title with the largest text size at the top of your page.

• Use keywords in your <h1> tag.  Keywords used as the first word(s) are best.

• To see the code of your website, and check your heading tag sizes, go to your website (not in the editor), right click your mouse and choose “View Page Source”. Your heading tags will appear along the left margin.

Resizing Titles

You can resize your Titles so that they appear smaller, while maintaining the size of their fonts (and their heading tag assignment). This is easy to do, just by clicking on your Title and dragging the corners of its outline.  The text will change in its appearance, while the size of its font will remain the same.

To see an example of this, see the Green Properties real estate template in Wix’s gallery.  A clip is shown below.  The “Real Estate” text appears to be smaller than the “Hello” text.  However, if you place this template inside the editor, you will see that “Real Estate” actually has a larger font size than “Hello”. This is a great way to get your keywords <h1> status, without having them pop out at visitors.

So we’ve been discussing SEO from many different aspects for quite a while. We’ve touched a variety of different topics relating to the optimization of your Wix website. I thought this is probably a good opportunity to do a little review and summary of the most important aspects of SEO and how to implement it in your Wix Flash websites, and have it posted all in one place. So here goes:

1. Content

Google and the other search engines crawl your website using the text. They crawl text. That is why you need to have as much of it as possible on your website. A website with no text will simply look empty to the search engine. Make sure you have content in your website and that this content is informative, in the sense that it will tell the search engine who you are and what your website is about.

To be more specific for Wix, I recommend at least 400 words in the homepage. Don’t sweat it though, if you’re using mini-pages you can spread the words throughout the mini-pages, as they’re all counted as one.

2. Keywords  & Meta Tags

Keywords are important in search engine optimization. Keywords are the search terms used by your target audience to reach you. For small to medium sized websites, think of 3-5 main keywords which you would like to optimize. These should be terms (they can be one, two, three or more words) that are relevant to your website and are likely to be searched in order to reach you. The first thing you can do is integrate these keywords into your content as naturally as possible. They should be part of the natural flow of information, and they should make several appearances.  The second thing is using headers to emphasize your keywords. Use your keywords in your headers. This is done through the title text box in the Wix website builder.

Third but certainly as important, use the keywords in your Meta tags. Meta tags are added through the website builder settings that appear at the top of the editor.  Add a title (up to 70 characters long) and a description (around 155 characters including spacing). Use the keywords you want to promote and make sure your description isn’t too short.

3. Links

Links are an important part of search engine optimization. A link pointing at you lets the search engine know you’re there. The more links pointing at you’re the higher your chances of getting indexed faster. Links from high ranking websites, or more important websites (aka – websites with a high page rank) are better and more meaningful than links from link farms or websites of low importance (meaning – websites with a low or no page rank). To take full advantage of the linking system use anchor links. Anchor links are links that are embedded organically into the text. For example, I could say that if you want to learn more about using links to promote your website, you should follow the link. So now the search engine knows that the target page has something to do with information on links and website promotion, and if lots of you start clicking on that link, it will also learn that the content on that page must be valuable. This will increase the ranking and rating of the target page.

4. Structure

The structure of your website is the way each page is connected to another and the manner in which information flows through your site. These days it is understood that the best type of website architecture is a flat architecture. By creating a flat architecture you are endeavoring that each page on your website can be reached with a minimum amount of clicks. This is good both for your website’s users and for search engines. If your homepage has the maximum page rank and importance, than that importance is trickled down throughout the pages. That’s why keeping as many pages as possible as close as possible to the home page (close in terms of the number of links apart), increases their importance.

5. Sitemaps, Directories and Submitting to the Search Engines

There are a number of methods to help your website get indexed along with all the pages in it. The first method of getting all your pages indexed is by using sitemaps. Sitemaps map out all the pages of your website through links. As the search engine crawls your website, having a sitemap increases the chances that all the pages will be crawled and indexed.

Get listed in as many directories as possible. The more traffic a directory has the better. Getting listed under the most relevant category lets search engines know more about your website and also leads relevant traffic your way. It’s an all round beneficial method of promoting your website online.

Last but not least, you can also submit your website directly to the search engines. Both Yahoo and Google have manual submission pages. This does not ensure that the crawler will index your website but it certainly increases the chances.

Good Luck.

In this blog we’ve been discussing search engine optimization from many different angles and one of the primary subjects has always been keywords, and how to use them. But how do you choose the right keywords for your website? Good question.  Here are a few tips.

Choosing your keyword involves several stages:

1. Brainstorm. Visualize your potential customers. What kind of words would your customers use when attempting to find information or services which your site offers. Think of alternative spellings, different word combinations, synonyms, slang…
   A good way to find out what keywords to optimize is by researching the keywords being used by your current customers. If you already have a website this is a good way to go.
2. Take Advantage of Keyword Research Tools. There are several online tools that can help you sift through the thousands of keyword options. These include Google Adwords, Google Trends, Wordtracker and Overture. I will go into further detail on each of the tools, but suffice to say using these tools can give you data on trends and statistics related to keyword selection.
3. Check Out the Competition. Certain keywords are very popular but very competitive. Take a look at the websites currently ranked in the first places to understand the scale necessary to overtake these spots. Your website may be a spiritual haven for example, but using just the word God as a keyword, may not be the wisest decision. God is the second most popular search term on the internet (after sex of course), and when you search for it in Google, there are 397,000,000 results as of today, November 2009.
4. Create a Chart. Analyze the keyword data you’ve collected in a chart and compare traffic, relevance to your website, each keyword’s conversion rate etc. This method is the best way to reach an informed decision. After you’ve selected and implemented the targeted keywords, you can use analytics programs (such as Google Analytics) to review and refine your choice of keywords.

Keyword Research Tools

Adwords – Adwords is dedicated to advertising in Google, but it also has the keyword external tool that is very useful for finding new keyword ideas.  You enter a word or phrase, and it will generate related keywords along with some basic information on them. This is a good place to start your brainstorm session.

Google Trends – Google trends is great because it lets you see which keywords are more popular than others in a simple graph. In both cases you have the option of changing different parameters to suit your specific search needs.

WordTracker – another popular tool for keyword data collection. WordTracker acquires most of its statistics through the meta search engine Dogpile that has approximately 1% of all searches online.  WordTracker provides a lot of detail, and even though this information comes from a relatively smaller piece of the pie, it is relatively reliable.

Overture – Overture was re-branded Yahoo! Search Marketing and provides data collected from searches performed in Yahoo! Yahoo has 22%-28% of searches online. It provides good data and methods for measuring comparative numbers.

Keyword Analysis Parameters

Even after choosing your keywords and implementing them in your website tactfully you should always stay alert to changes in trends and the general data. Here are a few parameters by which you can test the keywords you like best:

• Conversion Rate – this parameter covers the percent of surfers searching for that term who converts. To convert in this case, means to click on an ad, to purchase a product etc)
• Predicted Traffic – a prediction of the amount of surfers who will be searching for this specific keyword each month. This data may change as trends do, so stay updated
• Per Customer Value – this parameter covers the average revenues per customer using the keyword and leads to a comparison of lucrative keywords vs. less profitable ones.

Once you’ve analyzed this data you should be well on your way to optimizing your website for the best keywords possible. Remember, it takes more than a couple of days and the key to SEO is also a lot of patience and persistence.

Don’t try to grab the entire pie at once. Rather, work slowly and carefully through the keywords and build your site gradually. This is also a better method of working with Google, which usually credits older sites before new ones anyway. Target one or two main keywords or phrases per page tops and work your way up in the page ranks. As your website matures, gains more and more links, grows in terms of content and pages and acquires greater legitimacy with the search engines, you’ll find targeting multiple keywords more feasible.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Duplicate content is a term that comes up often as you embark on the process of optimizing  your website, and always as something that needs to be avoided like fire. Having duplicate content on your website will damage your ranking in the search engines. If Google, for example, perceives that duplicate content was used in an attempt to manipulate page rankings or deceive users they may even remove your site from their index altogether.

Also, some of you have shared that you found it difficult to index a new site that was similar (or even identical) to the old one that was still available online. So here are a few ideas on how to avoid duplicate content and make sure that visitors see exactly what you want them to.

Well, you can hire a copywriter to write unique texts for each page on your site, but what happens when you actually want to use the same content? If you’re using the Wix website builder and you have two websites that are very similar in content, simply open the older one (the one you don’t want ranked) in the editor and open the ‘Settings’ menu. You need to uncheck the ‘list in search engines’ option. Don’t forget to apply the new settings and save the website. Next time Google and the other search engines send their crawlers over – this site will be erased from indexing.

Avoid publishing a page for which you don’t have real content yet. If you want to create a placeholder page, remember not to publish it.

If you are syndicating content from your website to other websites, Google will display the version it considers most appropriate to the search.  This may be the version you prefer, but it may not. Try to make sure that every website that uses your articles includes a link back to your website and the original article. Also, there’s nothing wrong with asking the users of your syndicated material to block the version they’re using from indexing.

To read more about getting your Flash website indexed visit our previous blog posts or visit Google’s webmaster guidelines.

They say wise men consider their words carefully. This rings true in our case as well. I’d go so far as to say that you should do more than consider your words, you should research them. Sounds easy? Well, in fact it is. Find out how to work with Google and help give your site ranking a bump in the right direction, using relevant terms of course. Let’s break it down into a few simple steps.

First of all, let’s say you have a supermarket website and you want surfers to know that you sell the best bananas in town. Check out Google’s freebie Search Engine tool, Adwords , to find out what good keywords should be interweaved into your site texts. Type bananas for example, and you may discover that other good keywords include ‘green bananas’ and ‘ripe bananas’ for example.

Web Page Settings

Title and Description in Google Search Results

Another place you can look is the Google search itself. Type in your keyword and find out how many other sites are already listed under this keyword as well as keyword ideas at the bottom of the page.

So now we get to the point.
The first thing Google really loves is a good title. Titles should be short and precise. Google will display up to 66 characters and crop the last word before this total is exceeded. Yahoo allows for up to 120 characters. If you want to be really smart, why don’t you create a primary title with a secondary supplement so that you can take advantage of both search engines? The title is one of the most important elements which the search engine crawls to determine how to index the site. Make sure you use at least one of your primary keywords here. To enter a title visit the document settings in Wix’s Flash website builder as can be seen in the picture. The website title will appear at the top of the web page as well as in search engine results.

The second thing Google absolutely loves is a good description. Try to be savvy in the way you build your sentences to include as many keywords as possible, and perhaps even repeat a primary keyword that is important to you, while creating a logical and eye catching sentence. This is the text that appears under the title in search engine results. Another factor to consider is its length. It should not be longer than 200 characters. You can write more, but no one will ever see it.

The third thing Google wants is a lot of texts. The texts on your page make the keywords you listed in you Meta tags (no more than seven) relevant. Optimizing your text is one of the more important steps in helping your website achieve a higher ranking in the Search Engines. Your web page should include plenty of text and should contain each of the keywords and keyword phrases you listed in the Meta tags, used in different variations and different locations on the page. If the keywords and keyword phrases you listed in your Meta tags don’t exist inside the text body of your website, they will simply be ignored by the Search Engines.

Each of your keywords and keyword phrases should appear at least three times within your text, but not more than seven, Google and other search engines recognizes spamming when it sees it.
Last but definitely not least, Google is head over heels for headers. A header appears in the Meta text as H1, or H2 and so on and so forth. However, to insert a header you need to use the title tool in the Wix Flash website editor. This is the difference between paragraph blocks and title blocks which you use to insert texts into the actual web page. If you have a title, you can insert it into your website either using the paragraph’s option or the title option, but why would you waste a good opportunity to strengthen your keywords?

Wix Editor Title Tool

That’s it for today. Get creative; it’s basically you against the machine and I’m sure you can find a way to outsmart it.
Remember!! It takes a few weeks for Google to index your page and the same goes for any changes you make, so don’t expect you ranking to change overnight.

You can also always visit Wix’s support to get some more information on how to optimize your Wix website.

This is just the very basic beginning of the journey we’re about to embark on as we explore different facets of Search Engine Optimization. So start researching keywords and lets meet again next week to discuss a few of the other ideas and possibilities open before you.

Have a good one!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…