Over the past few weeks several people have asked me questions to find out how they can improve their listings in general and how to get listed in their local Google listings in particular. Lots of the Wix users are local businesses and small business that rely on their website to get noticed online by potential users. So I’ve decided to post a simple step by step rundown of a few tactical steps you can take to get yourself listed in the right places, and use the competition for your own benefit.

Step 1:

Start searching for keywords relevant to your business and location. Try all the combinations you can think of. For example, if you were to search for a pizzeria in New York, you may use several different combinations.

What you’re looking for is a list of competing and closely related businesses. Imagine you were one of your clients, what possible combinations might you be using to find the service or product you’re looking for?

Step 2:

Start making lists of the businesses that are consistently getting top rankings. The more keywords (word combinations) you try, the more listings you will become familiar with. Get to know your virtual surroundings. For the best results I suggest you get a few dozen listings from your research. You can start a spreadsheet to follow the different data you’re about to derive from each of these listings.

Step 3:

Explore each of these local business’s online profile. Don’t click on the name of the listing, visit the reviews by clicking on the reviews link next to the listing. Each page listed here is a page with information about the restaurant, reviews and information that Google found about the place.

Step 4:

Scroll down the page to the “More about this place” section. This is where you’ll find a wealth of links to websites that contain information and mention the restaurant. This is your goldmine, as you can probably find lots of great places to get listed yourself.

Each of the website’s listed here is a website that Google is crawling for information on that restaurant. You can visit many of these websites and list your own Flash website. Make sure that there is a consistency in your listings, that the phone numbers and address are consistent and true. Google places as much emphasis on quality as it does on quantity, so if you’ve listed yourself in a million places, but those websites are irrelevant or the information on them is irrelevant you’d be doing yourself a disservice.

Even if you don’t care about being listed in local directories but you care about promoting your website, this is a good tactic, as it will bump your website up in terms of ranking. Google will see many good website’s pointing at it and it will consider your website more relevant important.

Step 5:

If you’re feeling particularly industrious you can do the same thing for the “reviews” and “user content” sections. Here you’ll find many more links. Do this process thoroughly and you will reap what you sow. Don’t think small. I recommend you try to get between 50-250 listings, even if it takes you a few days, and of course depending on the level of competition in your field and your area.

Many of you often ask me how to get the search engines to crawl your website more often. Well, the simple answer is that you need to get your website noticed. That means, generating as much traffic as possible and having as many good and established sites pointing at yours, drawing the search engine’s attention to your web page.

The following is a shortlist of common redirects. You may not be able to implement all of the redirects but you may also have run into a few of them and its always a good idea to recognize them and know what they mean. So here they are:

Http 301 – the 301 code means that the URL you are requested, meaning, the website you are attempting to visit, has been permanently moved. This is usually used to avoid duplicate content issues when similar documents are located on different URI’s.

Http 302 – This means the document you are searching for has been temporarily moved to a different location.

Http 400 – This code means that there was most likely a syntax error in the URL entered and as a result the server is unable to understand your document request.

Http 401 – This means that there has been an unauthorized request and that the server requires authentication before carrying out the document request.

Http 403 – The server has understood the request but it refuses to fulfill it. This is a ‘forbidden’ code response. A webmaster may alert the user as to the reason his request is being denied, but if he prefers not to notify users, he may use a 404 status code instead.

Http 404 – This response means in general that the document you requested cannot be found. The client was able to communicate with the server but the server was not able to find the requested document. This could also mean that the server was told to refuse the request without providing a reason.

Http 410 – Similar to a 404, the 410 code indicates that the document you requested is ‘intentionally gone’ and will no longer be available at this URL address, while there is also no forwarded address. This code is usually used for documents such as promotional information and it is up to the webmaster and at his discretion to determine when to remove the 410 status code.

Http 500 – This indicates an internal server error that is preventing the document from loading.

Http 501 – This indicates that the server does not recognize the document request method. Since the server cannot fulfill the request it displays a ‘not implemented’ status code.

This sums up the basic redirects and what they mean. Just remember that redirects are often problematic and collide with good SEO. This is because good SEO will always prefer to have the simplest and fastest access to a website, for the best usability. Redirects complicate things so don’t use them unless you absolutely have to.

Good Luck!

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.

If you’ve been reading the previous posts in this blog than you know that different links have different ratings and different levels of importance, depending on the source page’s page rank. Well, you may also have noticed that your facebook and twitter profiles have a pretty high page rank. So how do you use it? Well, Matt Cutts posted this short and interesting vlog on this subject recently.

Here’s a summary of his key points:
If your facebook profile is completely public, then Google can register the page rank and use it to transfer what I like to call ‘link juice’ to your website. Of course, if your profile isn’t public then Google can’t register the page rank and then this link won’t the same weight and value. It has standard marketing value, but in terms of SEO, you might want to consider opening a public profile specifically for promotional purposes. It’s just a very powerful tool.

Twitter usually adds no-follow to its outgoing links to prevent spamming so its links aren’t as relevant to the SEO cause. Check out his video to learn more on this subject.

Your website architecture is important both in terms of its target audience usability and also when taking search engines into consideration.

Focusing on the search engines for this post remember that your site architecture may influence and affect your page rank and traffic, particularly for inner pages. A higher page rank doesn’t necessarily ensure a higher ranking in search results, but it helps. It also tells your users that the information on your page is reliable, having passed the Google test.

So what does ‘flat architecture’ mean? Flat architecture is the alternative to ‘deep’ or ‘nested’ architecture. A deep architecture refers to a long chain of links, leading to inner pages, while a flat architecture refers to a system where practically no link chains exist and each page can be reached in one, two or three links.

Having a flat website makes it possible to access each page on your website quickly. From a search engine’s perspective less clicks translates into higher importance and fewer clicks into diminished importance. This is also based on the logic that the more clicks it takes to reach a page, the fewer the viewers who will reach it. This doesn’t mean you should put all your content on one page. Keep in mind that the logic behind Google’s algorithms is to target improved usability, if all your content is on one page and assuming that you have enough content to fill in several pages, will clog the page and make it harder for users to understand where and what to look at.

Here is a sketch of what was traditionally considered the best practice for an SEO structured website:

Here is a sketch of a modified web architecture, based on the flat structure theory:

This modified web structure is a good idea for websites. If you have hundreds of pages you may find that you’re clogging your homepage with links and damaging the usability of your website, not to mention that Google traditionally does not crawl over 100 links on a specific page.

In terms of transferring the ‘link juice’ and improving the ranking, the more links on a page, the more the potency of the link juice is diminished. Most experts agree that the typical algorithm for link juice is something along the lines: .85 * (1/X), with ‘x’ representing the number of links on the page.  Even so, homepage links are stronger and more valuable than deeper links and the further away a page is (in terms of links) from the homepage, the lower its page rank and importance.

Please remember that this is referring specifically to small websites. Websites with thousands of pages will have to utilize a completely different strategy that will be compatible with their size and subject. If you would like to read further on this subject, you may enjoy Sergey & Larry’s famous original paper on Page Rank .

Good luck with your new Flash website!

Previously I touched the subject of hyperlinks or links and their role in search engine optimization. Search engine crawlers use natural links to identify the subject, relevance and importance of a page. When an important page (as defined by the page rank) sends a link to your website it improves your page ranking. There are different types of link structures and links may carry different attributes with them, affecting the way the search engine crawler identifies the link source and target.

So for starters, what is a natural link? A natural link refers to a link that was created with the user in mind. Supposing you have a paragraph on elephants in your website but you don’t plan on expanding on the subject much yourself. Instead you insert a link into the paragraph sending the user to a website with loads of information on elephants with anchor text that says ‘elephant’. That would be considered natural. An artificial link on the other hand is a link created solely for the purpose of promoting the source or target website in the search engines. This type of link gives value to the site owner or to a third party. The target page is irrelevant to the source and the average user/surfer who clicks on it will probably hit the back button as soon as he can or disappear forever.

Each link has two ends called anchors and a direction. Each link starts at the ’source’ anchor and ends at the ‘destination’ anchor.

The simplest link is created by opening a tag and using the ‘href‘ attribute which specifies the location of a web resource or document, the URL, the ‘anchor text’  and a closing tag, in the following manner:

<a href= “http://www.wix.com“> Wix </a>

The link above is a simple html link to the wix.com website, using the word Wix as anchor text. The anchor text in a natural link gives the Google bots more information on the subject and topic of your website, as well as the target website. If you have links pointing at your site with an anchor text that says ‘free cameras’, Google’s crawlers will assume that your website, or at least the page linked to deals with free cameras. If the site sending you the link is a strong site, with a high page rank, it will be considered a more reliable source. The more ‘link juice’ your homepage gets, for example, the more this ‘juice’ trickles down to your other pages – as long as they are linked to the homepage.

Internal Linking

Up till now, we’ve only been discussing links from and to external websites, but links inside your website, connecting the pages, are also very important. A good internal linking structure can:

1. Make sure your entire website gets crawled properly, as discussed in previous posts about sitemaps and links.
2. Strengthen the relevancy of a specific page for a specific keyword, by using anchor texts as well as other practices.
3. Increase the page rank of an inner page.

Using inner pages to consolidate keywords is particularly useful when you have a large site and/or you want to get ranked for a large number of keywords. In this case, it is a good idea to create specific pages targeting a specific keyword.  If your inner page is targeting the keyword ’round swimming pools’ you would make sure that all links using ’round swimming pools’ as anchor text will be directed to this specific page.

Increasing the Inner Page PageRank

As I mentioned before, link juice trickles down from the homepage to the pages connected to it. The closer a page is, in clicks, to the homepage, the more link juice it gets and as a result, the pagerank increases.

This doesn’t mean that all your pages should be linked from the homepage. Creating too many links from the homepage will diffuse the weight of each separate link. Create solid pages for the phrases (keywords) you are targeting and link to those specific pages. A good navigational structure could use:

-           A footer text with good, organic anchor text links. Keep the footer clean looking, don’t spam it with hundreds of links. For one thing, this could be flagged by the search engines, another reason is that you are diffusing the value of each individual link, so what’s the point?

-          Text link navigation, which is basically a menu with texts. Make sure to use the keyword you are optimizing. This doesn’t mean that every link to that page has to be crammed with the keyword. Try every other link, or one of three. Keep in mind that the page should not natural and appealing to users (you know, those people for whom you’re building your website).

-          You can also use internal text links, which are links that appear organically within the text of your website. They are given extra weight because it is assumed that their relevancy to the content is superior.

Doing all this doesn’t mean your website will automatically be launched into the first spot of the Google search results, but it will improve your standing in terms of SEO. Moreover, you are identifying specific inner pages with specific content or subjects and increasing their individual importance. This will help your entire site get crawled and promote it in Google and the other search engines making the effort worthwhile.

Good Luck!

Bots or Spiders – Search engine bots, or spiders, use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ pages and documents. Estimates say that search engines have crawled between 8-10 billion pages of the approximately 20 billion pages that exist on the World Wide Web today.

Links are a method of identifying the popularity and/or importance of a specific website. Using link analysis search engines analyze both the source page and the destination. Link data provides information on different affiliations between websites as well as contextual data about the website – which websites are linked to that site etc.

Search engines will also denote greater value to links coming from stronger websites, aka websites that are known to be reliable and popular. This is why using a link farm to promote your website is probably a waste of time and getting a link from the Wikipedia website for example, will create a much greater splash for your ranking. How do you know which websites are more powerful than others? Take a look at the website’s page-rank. So what is a page rank?

Page Rank – This is an explanation of the PageRank as it appears in Google’s technological overview page:

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

Google considers links as votes. When you link your website to another, you are saying that their content is interesting and relevant and you are also helping define the type of relevancy by providing more information through hyperlinks or anchor text links.

Anchor Text Links – search engines will use the anchor text as additional data helping them determine the content of the destination page. If I wrote an article on free Flash templates and used the term as a link to Wix, as I just did, what I am actually telling search engines is that the term free Flash websites is relevant to the Wix website, therefore, Wix deals with free Flash templates.

Search engines are also known to consider the text surrounding the link and allocate greater importance to this text than the rest of the texts on your website. This gives links that are part of a paragraph greater importance than links in a footer or sidebar.

Another factor that is part of the search engine’s considerations is the subject matter of the destination page. If you create an anchor links with the words ‘free Flash templates’ and this link leads to a page that discusses free Flash templates in its content, the link will probably receive greater value.

You can get information on links through the search engines and the most reliable source is Yahoo! Here are a few commands that will give you information on links:

1. Linkdomain:url.com
   This command will give you results that display all the pages linked to any web page hosted at the url.com domain.
2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
   This command shows those pages that are linked directly to the page specified in the URL.
3. Linkdomain:url.com word
   This search command will display all the pages that include the term specified in the “word” that are linked to pages hosted at the specified URL. Use this command to find topical pages linking the URL.
4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
   Use the “– “ symbol to indicate that pages that include the term that appears after the symbol should be excluded from the search.
5. Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
   In addition to the “-“symbol, you can also remove specific sites from the results. This may be especially significant if a large site links to the destination website on every page, and you only want to see links that don’t include that site.

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

Site maps can benefit the optimization of a website by ensuring that all of your website’s  pages can be found.There are two types of site maps. One is a sitemap you can create for your website’s users if you have many pages and you want to make your website’s navigation user-friendly. The second is an xml sitemap, and is dedicated wholly to the search engines and getting them to index each page on your website.

Site Map for Visitors

Suppose you’ve just built a Flash website with Wix and you have 20 different pages. Even if you’ve built a great system of navigation, it’s more than likely that several of your pages are harder to get to. To make the visit to your website easier on your user you can manually create a dedicated sitemap page. This is particularly useful if your website is dynamic and growing. A good sitemap saves your visitors a lot of headache and keeps your site organized.

Site Map for Search Engines

The second type of sitemap is an xml sitemap. XML is a markup language, a textual data format often used to store information, specifically for usability over the internet. The xml sitemap is specifically for search engine crawlers. It lists URLS for your website as well as additional metadata information about each URL such as the most recent update, the frequency of page changes; its importance in relation to other URL’s listed for your website, etc. XML sitemaps are simply a great way for webmasters to let search engines know what’s going on in their site.  It is not used or viewed by visitors to your website. When you create a free website with Wix, your website pages are automatically updated and included in the Wix xml sitemap. This is done to ensure that Google will index all the pages of your website.

When you create a premium website with your own URL, a dedicated xml sitemap is created on your behalf. You can see this xml by entering your domain + /sitemap.xml.

Example:

http://www.eventsbysandj.com/sitemap.xml

What will appear looks like the following image:

As you can see, it’s not really meant for users, but it’s good to know what it looks like anyhow.

Remember, using a site map doesn’t guarantee that all your website pages are indexed by Google. What it does is pinpoint their location to the web crawlers, significantly increasing the chances your website will be indexed properly.

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