Welcome to the Wix SEO Clinic. An examination of selected users’ Wix websites.

If you are new to the Wix SEO Clinic, you might want to first check out Chapters 1 (Patient History & Diagnosis) and 2 (SEO Treatment) before reading this post. Otherwise, read on for some heartwarming recovery stories straight from the bedsides of our first crop of SEO patients.

Case Study # 1: Blaine Photographers

• Main keyword = “California wedding photographers”
• Google rank before SEO: 650
• Google rank after 5 weeks of SEO: 49
• Google rank after 7 weeks of SEO: 7 (!!!)
  

Score! Consider this a perfect example of successful, organic SEO. A couple of months ago, Blaine Photography was buried deep within the black hole of Google (try, the bottom of page 64!). Now, this husband-wife team enjoys a spot on the very 1st page of Google search results for their main keyword, California wedding photographers.  Talk about high visibility!

Case Study # 2: Jaime Miller Photography

• Main keyword = “New Jersey wedding photographer”
• Google rank before SEO: 350
• Google rank after 5 weeks of SEO: 70
• Google rank after 7 weeks of SEO: 11

Top of 2nd page Google results!? Not too shabby. If this wedding photographer continues her SEO efforts (see “No Check-Out” below), moving up a measly 1 rank to achieve a spot on the 1st page of results is definitely feasible.

Case Study # 3: Studio 48

• Main keyword = “Minnesota wedding photographer”
• Google rank before SEO: 150
• Google rank after 5 weeks of SEO: 25
• Google rank after 7 weeks of SEO: 5 (!!!)
  

If you’re getting married in Minnesota, the chances of you getting exposed to Studio 48 is pretty darn high. With a ranking like this, it’s pretty safe to say that Studio 48 has experienced a very successful SEO treatment.

No Check-Out

There is no such thing as “checking-out” of an SEO effort. There are new sites popping up all the time, so in order to secure your place at the top, you need to maintain your site’s SEO. Refresh your content, add new pages and continue your link-building campaign. Wix’ free website builder makes it easy to keep your site’s content fresh without going through programming hoops.

Takeaway Messages

Using these inspirational success stories to encourage you on your own path to SEO success. Remember:

1. Keywords are called that for a reason. Make a list of yours in the beginning, and stick to it.
2. Get good backlinks. It’s all about “who you know” when it comes to getting your foot in the door. Having a link to your site from a popular, reputable source is great. Having that link use anchor text with your keywords is like gold.
3. There’s no check-out of SEO. Just because you’ve achieved 1st page ranking doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax
4. Be patient. You saw that it took our case studies weeks to get the results they have today. It can take months for a new website to get noticed by Google at all. But as long as you make all the necessary efforts, you will observe real results.

Good Luck!

Staff at the Wix SEO Clinic

Last week, we opened up the Wix SEO Clinic. We took a deep look at the websites of 3 wedding photographers. While the sites may have been ranking well for their own names or domains, the odds are you want your business or website to rank well for your keywords, or words used in a search in Google. Refer back to Chapter 1 of the Wix SEO Clinic, to see the condition of these sites’ SEO before they were checked in and given a full check-up by our team of SEO “doctors”.

Real Results in Google

While conducting SEO for these websites, we tracked the progress made, by searching for each site’s main keyword in Google. We marked down this # every few days. Sure enough, over the course of 5 weeks, some real progress was shown:

Case Study # 1: Blaine Photographers

• Main keyword = “California wedding photographers”
• Google rank before SEO:  650
• Google rank after 5 weeks of SEO:  49

Case Study # 2: Jaime Miller Photography

• Main keyword: “New jersey wedding photographer”
• Google rank before SEO: 350
  
• Google rank after 5 weeks of SEO: 70

Case Study # 3: Studio 48

• Main keyword: “Minnesota wedding photographer”
• Google rank before SEO: 150
• Google rank after 5 weeks of SEO: 25

How Did These Jumps Happen?

Magic? No. SEO efforts? Definitely.

As you can see, some real changes were made in the rankings of these 3 Wix websites. (Remember: in terms of search engine rankings – the lower the ranking, the more visible your site is to those searching for your keywords!)

We provided step-by-step instructions to these users in terms of what they had to do on their end, inside their sites. We supplemented this by submitting these sites to some key places on the web.

Here’s exactly what we prescribed for these 3 case studies:

1. Optimize Meta Data (Blaine, Jaime Miller, Studio 48)

This is probably the most important thing you can do for your website’s SEO. It’s also really easy with the Wix website builder. There is now a main keyword for each site in both the <Title> tag, and meta description.

2. Added Content to Home Page (Blaine)

To add some content to their site’s home page without disrupting the page’s clean look and feel, we told the folks of Blaine Photography to add footer text. This was done by creating a text box, and simply dragging it to the bottom of the main page. Using the color pickW tool in the editor, a light gray color was chosen for this text, keeping it readable yet not too distracting.

Footer text is a terrific opportunity to get in some quality content, while preserving the look of your site’s homepage. Blaine wrote a basic description of their services in their footer text. And of course, keywords were also included.

3. Added Keyword-Rich Headers (Blaine, Studio 48)

Google loves headers. To add a header in a Wix document, select the “Text” tool and select “Title”. Title texts in Wix are interpreted by Google as header tags.

Blaine was asked by one of our doctors at the Wix SEO Clinic, to add the following keyword-rich headers to various pages in their site.

Home Page Header: “California Wedding Photographers”; Page 2 Header: “California Wedding Photos”; Page 3 Header: “California Engagement Photos”; Page 4 Header: “California Wedding Photographers”; Page 5 Header: “Wedding Photographer Prices”; Page 7 Header: “Wedding Photographer Blog”

Studio 48 was told to add a keyword header on Home page = “Minnesota wedding photographer”

4. Submitted to Google Places (Blaine, Jaime Miller, Studio 48)

This is a crucial step for any small business hoping to get ranked for regional keywords. We submitted each of these websites to Google Places, and customized their profiles. The instructions for doing this are explained pretty well at the Google Places site.

5. Submitted to Wedding Photographer Directories

To gain some more backlinks (and inject some SEO juice into these sites), we looked for some good wedding photography directories. Getting listed in a directory once you submit your URL can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, but it’s well worth the wait. Especially if it’s a directory with a good PageRank. For our wedding photographers, we submitted to the following directories: www.wedplan.net, www.photographypros.com, www.freephotogallery.info,  and www.ferenc.biz.

Resources

We told these users exactly what to do in order to optimize their site’s performance in Google. If you want to do the same for your site, follow the steps listed above. Here are some helpful links to help you along the way:

• How to Choose Your Keywords
  
• How to Fix Your Site’s Meta Data
• How to Make Header Tags in Wix
• How to Get Ranked for Physical Locations
• How to Gain Backlinks

Note: These methods can be applied to both a free website, and a premium site with its own domain. There’s no excuse for applying some basic, subtle SEO adjustments to your site to get the best traffic you can. Remember: SEO is an ongoing process.  We will continue to track the position of these sites as time goes by, more pages are crawled, indices are updated – and SEO efforts continue to be made.

Good Luck, and stay tuned for the next Wix SEO Clinic chapter!

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!

/noflashhtml and /sitebackhtml

Both the /noflashhtml and the /sitebackhtml are necessary components of your site. They contribute to the successful presentation and functioning of your design elements and Flash content. It’s the search engines who do not need to see these files. This issue seems to only occur when performing a search with Google. The crawlers of Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines don’t seem to cache these pages. So, Wix has created a fix preventing Google from crawling these two specific files inside your Wix.

The Fix

We have added a robots.txt, as well as a no-index tag to the source code of all Wix sites. These are like signs telling Googlebot to scram when it encounters the /noflashhtml or /sitebackhtml URLs.

The Caveat

Google is not a person. It is a robot. Robots have limitations. As stated in Google Webmaster Tools:

“Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there’s a small chance that Googlebot won’t see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it’s probably because we haven’t crawled your site since you added the tag.”

So, if you are still seeing those pesky links when you search for your site in Google, it’s probably because your Wix has not been recached since before this fix was implemented. And since Google only displays search results based on the info it obtained from its last visit to your site, the old version of your site may still be inside Googlebot’s memory.

You can check to see when Google last crawled your site by typing “cache:yoursiteURL” into a Google search. In order to refresh this memory and restore your proper Wix URL to Google searches, you need to wait until Google crawls your site again. This may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

All Good Things Come to Those Who Backlink

This motto should be burned into the SEO section of your brain. Not only does link building raise the ranking of your site in a list of search results, but it affects how often your site is crawled by all the search engines’ crawlers. It all boils down to how many backlinks you have as well as the quality of those links. The more backlinks you have (links on other websites pointing to your Wix) the quicker Google will come visit you. Then, it will take a new snapshot of your source code, and refresh its index. In all likelihood, as soon as Google spots your site again, the proper URL for your Wix will show up in a search.

Get Re-Crawled:

1. Visit the Yahoo! Site Explorer to see what sites are linking back to you.

Type your URL into the window at the top and click Explore URL

2. Obtain more backlinks to your site

3. Submit your site to Google

Be Patient

We’ve seen plenty of users whose sites were showing the /noflashhtml and /sitebackhtml links in Google, only to be restored to their proper listings once the sites were crawled again. The same will hold true for your site. Follow the suggestions in this post and the related articles on link-building, and restore your Wix to its seat in Google glory.

You should also check out Where Did My Wix Go? – Part 1

Using DMoz to Charm Google

Submitting your Wix website to the Open Directory Project, also known as DMoz, can help in your quest to woo Google’s search engine crawlers. DMoz is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited web directory. It’s purpose is to provide a list of websites arranged by category. Unlike a search engine, this web directory does not rank or promote the sites it includes.  However, Google, AOL, Yahoo and other search portals definitely have search engine crawlers that prowl DMoz to learn about new, relevant and worthy websites. And then they duplicate this data in their own “clone” directories. Why?

The Humans

Websites listed in DMoz were approved by volunteer human editors, who are experts in their fields of interest. Sites listed under a certain category actually do contain information relevant to that category. In addition, it is free to submit sites to DMoz, and only DMoz. So, the websites of large corporations and small business owners (like many of you!) all get the same treatment in DMoz land. The individual attention given to each submitted site is why search engines like to look at DMoz’ data. So, while it’s entirely possible to perform well in Google without getting listing DMoz, it helps a lot to get listed.

Submitting Your Wix

• Make sure your Wix site is completed. At least make sure all your pages have content and all your links go somewhere. Incomplete sites with broken links or graphics get “Under Construction” notices and generally aren’t listed.
• Do a search in DMoz for your Wix website, to make sure that you are not already listed. This step could save you time.
• Select the most relevant category for your website
• Scroll down to make sure that category has a category editor, and not a “Volunteer to edit this category” link.  Submitting a website to a category without an editor decreases the likelihood of your site getting listed. Try the next most relevant category if your top choice has no editor.
• Click “Suggest URL” link on the top of your category’s page.  Some categories are too general to accept submissions, in which case you should find a more specific category.
• Carefully follow the directions on the submission form. Submit your site only once.

Here’s a short video on How to Submit Your Site to DMoz.

While You Wait
It can take some time before a site is included in this directory, but it is worth the wait. DMoz’s editors review each site to make sure that it is completed, and relevant to the category under which it was submitted. It can take two weeks to a few months to get approved. To see if your site was included, check back on DMoz’ homepage in a few weeks and do a search for your site. Be sure to only submit your URL to the Open Directory once, as multiple submissions can result in your site being automatically excluded.

Other Directories

You could also submit your site to specialized directories based on your site’s area of interest. There are many free website directories on the web, but the key is to find ones that will give you valuable links, from reputable sources. This means PageRank. Directories with low-level PageRank won’t do much for your site’s linkability. The paid directories will require payment over the phone, a personal e-mail and even a pitch as to why you should be included in their listings. The harder the directory is to get into, the more link value it probably has.

A few good general directories (some free, some paid) include: ProLinkDirectory, Directory-Free.com, WhitePages.com, HotvsNot and DataSoftSystem

Getting your site listed in directories such as DMoz won’t guarantee that your Google ranking will improve, but it definitely gives you a solid push in the right direction.

When I say “Title” and “Description”, I’m not referring to content that you place on your web page, or the name that you gave to your web document in order to save it in Wix. I’m talking about your site’s metadata – text that is included in your website’s code, which is read by search engines. You do not need to actually do any coding with Wix, but you do need to enter text to your website’s Settings section. The website builder plants this inside your website’s source code automatically.

Add a Title and Description in 3 Simple Steps:

Step 1: Click on the Settings button, at the top of your website builder.

Step 2: In the SEO section, enter your own text in ‘Title’ and ‘Desc’.

Step 3: Click ‘Apply’.

Done.  Simple, right?

Tips for Good Title Text

• Use up to 70 characters (letters, symbols, etc.) including spaces

• Include the name of your website/business

• Include keywords (your type of business or what your main offerings are)

Your website’s Title appears on top of a user’s browser, while they are in your Flash website. Even though people might not pay much attention to this text, search engine crawlers do. If you DON’T insert your own Title text, Wix’s default text will remain there (see examples in the images both above and below, in this post).

Tips for Good Description Text

• Use up to 160 characters, including spaces

• Describe your website or business in clear terms

• Use one or two appropriately placed keywords

This is the text that shows up in a list of search results, underneath each website’s title.  These are the one or two sentences that you can read about a website, before deciding to enter it. In Google, they’re called snippets. If you DON”T add your own description text, default Wix text will appear under your website’s name in a list of search results. This will look pretty strange to people when thinking about which website to enter. Also, make sure you keep your descriptions short enough for all the text to appear. Ellipses (…) at the end of a description in a search looks sloppy.

Free AND Premium Users

Every single site created with Wix has these settings. You have the power to customize these super-important parts of your site, whether it’s a free website or one that you upgraded to a premium site. It’s especially disheartening for us to discover premium users who don’t adjust their site’s Title and Description, since those users have already taken action toward establishing their website’s online success, yet somehow skipped this basic step. It’s like planning a party and forgetting to invite your guests. So please, take a few minutes to make sure you’ve done this really simple, really important step.

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.

Contribute to the Community

Make a name for yourself as a good source of information, by answering questions in forums or on blogs.  Build a positive reputation for yourself (and your website) by offering something useful to those within your industry or community.  This will increase your level of recognition by others, and will make it more likely that they will include a link to your website in the future.

Social Media

Building a profile on social media is a surefire way to increase awareness of your website.  Everyone knows of the big-wigs such as FaceBook, Twitter and MySpace.  Post a link to your website in any of the social networks you’re already a part of.  In addition to these general networks, you might want to become familiar with the myriad of niche social media networks that exist.  These targeted networks will put you in touch with others interested in the same things you are.  DoshDosh provides a list of more than 50 general and niche social media websites, while Social Media Answers neatly lists major social networks, according to category.

Blogging

Present yourself as an authority figure within your niche by creating and maintaining a blog. Blogs are easy to update and maintain, by commenting on relevant news articles or posting an interesting photograph.  Linking your blog to your Wix website is simple with the RSS widget found inside the website builder.  You can also provide tutorials or how-to guides on your blog (or your website itself) that provide information not offered elsewhere.

Share Something Cool

Offering visitors something useful that they can benefit from will make them remember your website, or even bookmark it. Write a tutorial or a how-to guide describing something that isn’t explained elsewhere. Share your experience using a new product or a tip offered on someone else’s website.

(Weaker Yet Effective Techniques)

Controversy

Draw attention to your site, and compel others to comment and post links, by making a statement that will stir the emotions of those visiting your site.  Make a statement that goes against conventional wisdom, challenge prevailing industry opinions, or even say something positive about something deemed unpopular according to mainstream belief.

Lists

Presenting information in list format is very appealing for readers to easily digest information, but this tactic should be used sparingly to retain credibility.  Lists should be the sugars and fats in your website content’s well-balanced diet.

A Word About Spamming

Signing up for blogs or forums to add spam entries that have links to your website is a great way to damage your website’s reputation.  Doing this runs the risk of being noticed as a spammer by search engines, which are smarter than you think and are well-versed in spamming practices. Practice “honest techniques” when attempting to gain backlinks.  Remember, it’s not just the quantity of links you receive, but the quality.

Checking Your Site’s Backlinks

You can determine the number of back-links to your website.  Yahoo! is widely recognized as the most reliable source of back-link data.  To discover how many websites contain back-links to yours, simply enter in the following text to a search in Yahoo:  linkdomain:www.yourwebsite.com

Google’s Thoughts on the Matter

For some more backlinking advice, here’s a short video tutorial provided by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam. (Notice that Matt recommends “creating a video” as a way to gain links pointing to your website, injecting a little ironic humor into the discussion.) For increased user comprehension, captions are provided.

Good luck putting these techniques into practice, and gaining solid backlinks to your Wix website!

This is the most popular question that we get asked by you, in our Wix Forum and our Wixpedia Help Center.  Creating an attractive website is great, but it doesn’t matter if no one finds out about it.  For those of you who want your Wix website to do its work FOR you, there are a few things you’ll need to do on your end first.  The indexing process can be a tricky one to master, but our Wix team is here to help.

It is also worth noting, that while the debate continues over the SEO compatibility of Flash websites, Flash websites created with Wix are SEO searchable.  This is what makes Wix stand out.  Wix is the only website builder that enables search engines such as Google and Yahoo to read Flash websites.  Want proof?  Wix.com was created using Wix.  Do a search in Google for “free website design.”  Look who it is!  Wix.com – a Flash website created using Wix – proudly pops up as the #1 result according to Google.

As long as you do your part, and make sure your ducks are in order, your Wix Flash website can and will be indexed by Google.  Here’s how.

Tip #1    Check Your Settings

You know the feeling when you think your internet is messed up, but then you realize that the cable was not plugged in?  You should feel exactly this way if you have not made sure your Wix website has its “List in Search Engines” box ticked.  Without this step, all the rest is pointless.  Click on the Settings button at the top of your Wix editor menu, and make sure that box is checked.

Tip # 2   Take Advantage of Metadata

Metadata is text that describes what is on your website.  It is extremely important to search engine crawlers when they are indexing a new or updated site.  There are two types of metadata:  Title and Description.  Both are easily added through the Wix editor’s Settings menu.

Title: Include the name of your website/company/self.  Use no more than 70 characters, spaces included.
Description: Include relevant keywords. Do not exceed 190 characters, spaces included.

The keyword settings box is also provided, and you may enter 5-7 keywords here.  However, keyword metadata no longer carries the SEO juice it used to.  Still, it doesn’t hurt to use this feature.  Just make sure that your keywords actually appear in your website’s text.

There are a few other places you can insert content, and relevant keywords, in your Wix website.  Alt Text is text that describes images.  This text won’t appear on your website, but it is crawled by Google.  Add alt text to a photograph by clicking on the image and selecting Manage Photos.  You can also add page titles to your website’s pages by clicking Manage in the upper right-hand corner of your editor.  (Mini-page titles are the labels you used for your menu.)

Tip # 3    Build Solid Content

Search engine crawlers crawl on words – not images, music or intentions.  Include thoughtful, relevant and useful content.  There should be at least 400 words on your website’s homepage, and at least 250 words on every other page.  Where appropriate, use your keywords.  Google knows what spam is, so make sure your keywords fit organically into your text.
Headers hold more SEO juice than general text. In Wix, headers are known as Titles, and can be added from the Text button in your Wix editor.  Use Titles to introduce sections of text.  Your readers will digest your information much better, and Google will take note of your Titles.

Tip # 4    Link Up

Your Google ranking is partially determined by how many other sites contain links to your site.  The first rule of thumb for gaining another site’s vote of confidence in you by linking to your site is to create quality content.  Make your site a place where original and valuable information can be discovered.   The goal is to have someone visit your website, and appreciate your content so much that they want to share it with others, through a link. Blogs can be a fruitful source of back-linking.  Participate in discussions on blogs, earn the trust of others, and eventually work your way into a mention in that blog’s content.  Posting links to your website in comments on blogs is usually detected as spam, and will be deleted by that blog’s webmaster.

Filling your site with relevant content, and taking advantage of metadata and linking possibilities should secure you a ranking in Google.  But patience is required as well.  Google crawls sites according to an algorithm that is purposely unreleased to the public.  This protects the internet from becoming flooded with low-quality content manipulated by crafty webmasters.  So it may take anywhere between 1 and 3 months for Google to index a new website.
When those spiders come crawling, have your Wix website ready and waiting for them!

5 Ways to Get Your Keywords Noticed:

Many users want to know how to get search engines to recognize specific keywords that they’d like associated with their website.  The goal is to attract potential customers who don’t know you, through organic Google searches.  Follow these steps to have your targeted keywords correctly inserted into your pages.

1.  Make a List of Keywords

Stay organized and focused. Study your competition. Make a list of keywords that are relevant to your business. Start with the obvious ones. For example, if you were creating a website for Lisa’s pancake house you may write the generic word “pancakes” down first, then perhaps “best pancakes”  and then you might get even more specific and choose a local keyword, such as “San Francisco pancakes” or “strawberry pancakes in San Francisco”. You may be able to get indexed for each of these keywords, but the greater question is how well you can get ranked. Even if you get indexed in the 100^th page for pancakes, it probably benefit your business much. Each keyword has different levels of competition which you can see by the number of results and by undertaking some research to find out how many people search for that keyword. Software is available to help such as WordTracker or Google AdWord.

Consider the size and amount of traffic you are likely to generate to your website. If you’re creating a 10-20 or even 50 page website, I don’t recommend trying to compete with the Apple website, for example.

2. Remember Content is King

This cliché survives because it holds a world of truth.  Your website must contain quality, relevant content in order for its keywords to be caught.  Writing the same key phrases over and over again will be recognized as spam by the search engines. If you’ve chosen good and relevant keywords you should have no problem inserting them into your text naturally and organically.   Insert your keywords throughout your text.  Spread them out evenly and discretely without making it obvious.

Aim for your homepage to contain 400 words.  A footer is a good place to add text if you prefer an image-based homepage.  Aim for 250 words on all other pages. For the best results, you should aim for you keyword to appear about 3 times for every 250 words. This includes your titles, headers and regular text.

Google loves headers. More emphasis is placed on any text that appears in your headers, so make sure you word and phrase your headers wisely. In the Wix website editor, select the Text button from your menu, and choose Title. The text you write here is what will be interpreted as a header tag – it’s that simple. The larger your header text, the higher it will rank.

The more text you have, the more opportunity to insert a keyword. Having trouble finding room for more content? For Lisa’s Pancake House, an “About” page or a ‘Reviews’ page may be good places to add some content.

3. Use Your Meta-Tags

Search engines rely on 2 types of Meta tags to discern the subject of a web page or website.

.  These are both found in the Settings section of your Editor, in the SEO Settings box.

Title Tag: The most important part of your page, in terms of SEO.  The title appears on the very top left-hand corner of your browser when you are viewing your Flash website. Make sure your title contains relevant keywords.  Also note that keywords found at the beginning of a title are much stronger than those placed toward the end.  Titles should not be longer than 70 characters, including spaces.

Description Tag: The description tag is another great opportunity to use your keywords. The description cannot be viewed from within the site, but it is the text that will appear alongside the link to your website in search results. This is an important text. Try to keep this text between 150-160 words.  Use at least two of your keywords in the description.  Keep it to the point, be direct and catchy.

You may also add up to 7 keyword tags in this same section of the Editor. Make sure you’re adding keywords or phrases that actually appear in your content.

Alt Texts: You can add “Alt Text” to your images that will be read by search engine crawlers, and cannot be seen by users.  Take this opportunity to use the keyword you are promoting one more time. In the Wix editor, you can add Alt Texts to your gallery pictures through the Manage Photos option.

4. Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to the navigation within your website and the infrastructure of links pointing from one page to another within your Flash website. Since your homepage (or landing page) is usually the page that gets the most traffic and the most links pointing at it, it is usually the most important page in your website.  Use text links to point at the different pages of your website to make sure that the search engine knows what that page is about.

For example, all links within Jack’s New York Pizzeria website pointing at the website’s homepage can use the ‘anchor text’ “Jack’s New York pizzeria” instead of the generic ‘Homepage’. An inner page in Jack’s website might deal exclusively with pepperoni pizzas, so the link to that page can use the anchor text “Jack’s pepperoni pizza”.

Pages with more links pointing at them will be considered as having more importance and relevancy from the point of view of the search engine crawler. The more often a link is used, the more relevancy and importance it is allocated.

5. External Linking

The same principles of internal linking are applied to links from the outside. Get as many backlinks to your site as possible and make sure your links are properly anchored in relevant text – keywords.

You can optimize specific pages for specific keywords by dedicating specific keywords to specific pages. For example, all links using the anchor text: “Jack’s anchovy pizza” to point at a page that has lots of text on the subject of anchovy pizza. Use all the links with the anchor text “Jack’s New York Pizzeria” to point at the home page that has that specific keyword inserted into it repeatedly.

Links will have greater potency when they come from a powerful website. Powerful websites are websites with a high page rank and a lot of traffic. A web page that simply has a long list of links from it (also known as a link farm) won’t have the same effect on your website as a link in a popular pizza review magazine, pointing at your website from an article raving about your great pizza.

Bottom line: the more anchor links pointing at your website – the better. Make sure these links are active.