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.

This week I’d like to talk to you about a great new feature being introduced to Wix. Many of you have used Wix to create a Flash website for your business or non-profit organization and this could be particularly interesting for you.

So first things first:

• Wix is introducing a new deep linking feature. This will enable you to send links directly to the inner pages of your website. For those of you who are still confused consider what has been happening with your website until now. Anyone who enters your website is automatically redirected to your homepage.  With the new deep linking feature, you can send visitors to a specific page, leading to a better promotion of inner pages. For example, suppose you have a pretty large photography website, and you’ve met a potential client. You have a specific picture you think will be perfect for him. Instead of sending him to your website with a list of explanations on how to reach the exact picture, gambling that this potential client has the patience and determination to actually reach this page, you can send him (or her) directly to the photo or gallery page you want. Good idea right?

At this point, this feature will only work on regular pages (as opposed to mini-pages).

• Getting Inner Pages Crawled. This part of this post is in direct response to recurring queries that have been sent to our support department. Some have noticed that Google will index your inner pages and they will appear as additional results to search queries underneath the homepage result. In some cases, when you change your website’s description you will see that it has been updated in the main result, while these inner pages are still accompanied by the old and outdated description.

This happens in cases where your homepage is crawled and your inner page is not. To see this, visit the cached view of your inner page and compare the date that appears in the header at the top of your page with the one listed for your homepage.

To see the cached view either click the ‘cache’ link which appears alongside your website’s URL in the Google search results, or enter the following search:

Cache:http://www.domainname.com

The solution for this is simple. You must wait until your inner page is crawled and you can hasten this process using the same techniques you used to get your Flash website crawled. You are welcome to browse other posts that appear in this blog for more tips.

One last thing – many of you have been sending different support questions through the comments option. The bad news is that I can’t answer all these support questions through this blog. The good news is that you can easily get an answer through the Wix support. That’s where you can get answers to any technical or even non-technical question you have!

Good Luck!

We’ve talked about finding the keywords to use in your website but we never really got down into the grit and grind of how best to integrate them.

How you use your keywords is important, particularly now as the new caffeine version of Google is coming out. If you use the keyword out of context, or repetitively in an exaggerated manner, it will not benefit your website in the same way as correct implementation.

Here are a few tips and ideas on how to use your keywords organically to get the best results:

1. Keywords in Your Titles

Even if you have a really catchy poetic title to give your website, you may want to reconsider and use your most important keyword here, or even two if you can. The search engine spiders read article titles and so do users for that matter. The title’s weight in determining indexing is quite large, so take advantage of it.

2. Photos

Adding texts to a picture is called adding ‘alt texts’ and that is how you’ll find it in the source of your website. Search engine crawlers can’t see images, but they can read the texts behind the picture, such as the description and the title so take advantage of these fields to use your keywords once again. In the Wix website builder you can add texts to your pictures as you add them to the galleries or by publishing the picture.

3. Writing a Smokin’ Description

The description is accessed through the settings menu at the top of the builder. The description is very important both for search engines and users. When your website appears in search results your description will accompany the result.  Make sure to include at least two of your most important keywords in your description. If you’ve chosen your keywords wisely, it shouldn’t be too difficult as the subject of your website should be related to the keywords. Take some time to write a super description. It’s worth the effort.

4. Meta Tags

Aside from the description Meta tag which you’re already familiar with there are other ways to get your keywords read in the source. For one thing, consider the names of your website pages. Suppose you’re building a website about flowers and you have galleries filled with pictures of flowers. Now, imagine you’ve divided the galleries by color (ex: red flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers etc). Naming the page on which the gallery is located ‘Red Flowers’ if the gallery includes red flowers can help the search engine crawler figure out what that page is about. If you’ve added tags to each of the pictures and they include (at least some of them) the keyword ‘red flowers’, you’ve moved a few steps closer to optimizing your website. Headers are another element you should consider. Headers receive greater weight in determining indexing than regular texts and can be easily created in the Wix website builder. To create a header use the ‘title text box’ instead of the regular ‘paragraph’ text boxes. The bigger the title, the higher that header will rank. The largest header will appear as H1 in your website’s source (right click over the website > view source), the second largest will be H2 and so on and so forth.

5. Textual Integration

How should you use your keyword? How many times is enough? The purpose of the search engine crawler is to divine what subject your web page deals with. If you keep that in mind it will be easier to figure out how to use your keywords. If you find yourself writing a text and the same keyword keeps coming up naturally, you shouldn’t feel the need to erase it. If it comes up that often though, you may want to consider using different variations of that keyword as well instead, but that is for your consideration. Depending on how many texts you have on your website, using your keyword 3-5 times is more than enough.

To get some more information on how optimized your website is, you can download seaquake. This freeware will definitely give you more insight on how optimized your texts are and what the Google bot will see as he visits your website. It includes different statistics and details that are very helpful in the optimization process.

Google doesn’t appreciate being fooled, and once it discovers websites using inappropriate optimization techniques it may also punish them by reducing the website’s ranking and even removing the website from its search results altogether. If you’re not sure that what you’re doing is acceptable SEO practice or not, keep in mind the one golden rule: If it’s good for your users, it’s good for Google. Incorporating elements that are for Google’s bot eyes alone usually leads to fishy results. The following is a list of ILLEGITIMATE SEO practices. Here’s what you SHOULD NOT be doing:

Using Redirects to Manipulate Google Page Rank

An illegitimate redirect is a one that occurs automatically when you approach a certain URL. As you click on the link to that site, the page URL (address) will appear for a short while and then automatically redirect you to the main site. This technique is used to increase the number of times the website will appear in search results, as it will appear through different domains.

Google’s crawlers will see a different page than the users, fooling the robot into giving a false page rank.

Not all redirects are considered spam, there are several redirect types that Google accepts and acknowledges, which you can read about in other blog posts here, or through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

100% Frames

We’ve already discussed iframes here in this blog. Just like the redirect, and the golden principle of SEO, if what your users see is different than what the Google bot sees, it’s a problem. A 100% frame page is a page covered completely by a frame that consists of different content from the rest of the website. End result – Google sees one thing on which it bases its page ranking and the user sees something entirely different.

Just like the redirect, this enables spammers to index the same site over and over again under different domains. While the different domains may have different content and get ranked as a result of that content, the end user will find himself viewing the same main site.

Hiding Texts and Links

If a text is visible to search engines only it is considered spam. So what does Google consider hidden text?

• Any text written in the same color (or close to) as the web page background.
• Any text situated in an area of the page that has been defined as hidden or invisible using CSS.
• Extremely small fonts that are not legible to internet user.
• Any text that is being hidden behind an image.

While you might find this useful, particularly if you don’t want to overload your web design with texts, it may very well backfire at you. It may get you kicked out of the ranking game altogether, not to mention that clicking ctrl-a in the browser may reveal your texts anyway.

Other Illegitimate Practices to Avoid

Spamming the keywords – using the same keyword over and over without any real content involved.

Cloaking – this is a technological ruse. As you enter the website, the website issues a query inspecting your status. If you are discovered as a crawler you will end up seeing a different page than you would have reached as a regular user.

Doorway Pages – these are pages created solely to optimize for a specific word. The chosen keyword is repeated over and over again on this page, suggesting high relevance to search engines. This doorway page will either include a link to the main homepage or it will include an automatic redirect to the homepage. Either way, this doorway is considered unethical SEO practice.

Excessive Linking between Websites – an exaggerated amount of links between two sites. What’s considered exaggerated? Good question. There isn’t a specific number of links and it depends greatly on the balance of the rest of the content. There is higher risk of getting caught when the two sites use the same IP. In general, triangle linking is much better for SEO purposes. This means that if your website is site A, and you sent a link to site B, site B will link to site C and site C will send the link right back to you – site A. Another unethical practice involves a bombardment of links on a single page or website. Link farms are a particularly deplorable practice.

Selling Links for PR

Lately, websites that have integrated a practice where they sell links to other websites (meaning, website x pays website y to include a link to it) have been losing ground fast. This is done in order to increase the page rank and is also considered deceptive.

So, How Will You Be Discovered?

Search engines use three different methods to discover culprit websites. The first is technological. Search engine bots are programmed to uncover some of the more obvious deception techniques. When the crawler runs in to such cases it will raise a ‘red flag’. This will lead to a temporary PRO penalty (in Google). Usually these penalties are only temporary but in certain cases they may become permanent.

Google and the other search engines also encourage users to report unethical website promotion techniques. You can report other websites through a special web page dedicated to this subject. This is Google’s Spam Report page. You need to sign in to use it though.

Forums are another method of discovering SEO scams. Apparently Google employees read webmaster forums and if they run into something suspicious… they do something about it.

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…

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…

Its official, Yahoo is no longer using keywords for ranking purposes either.

A few weeks ago Google came out with an official announcement stating that it does not use the keyword Meta tag to rank websites. According to Google, this has been the case for a very long time, as a result of the excessive spamming of this particular Meta tag.

Now Yahoo has just announced the same during the Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition at the SMX East conference. Later during a Q&A session with Cris Pierry, Senior Director of Search, Yahoo also noted that Yahoo no longer refers to the Meta keyword for its rankings and that in fact, Yahoo has not been using it for several months.

Just to clarify matters, this does not affect keywords in general, but only the keyword Meta tag. This is the tag you fill in when you enter the settings menu (from the top of the Wix editor) and fill in up to ten keywords with comas separating them. This Meta is also still relevant if you use different paid search applications, both by Yahoo and Google. In any case, as you optimize your website, it’s quite useful to write down your keywords before you write them into your description Meta tag (still very important) and title Meta tag (also crucial) along with the rest of the texts in your site.

Many of you have been asking good questions about the code of your Wix Flash website, so I would like to take this opportunity to begin providing some information on the subject.

Right Click for the Source. In order to see the code of your website you simply need to right click your mouse and choose the command ‘view source’. If you’re trying to do so but can’t find the ‘view source’ command this is because you are hovering over a Flash element, and the right click is giving you options relevant to Flash. Simply move your mouse over to the perimeters of your website and try again.

The code of any website, Flash, Wix or otherwise, will appear in tags. The tags begin with a rectangular bracket and end with another closing bracket. The area in between contains all the information regarding that specific command or sequence. The three main Meta tags will normally appear at the top of the source page. If you can’t see them, search (Ctrl + F) for the word ‘description’ or ‘title’ and you’ll find it soon enough.

Using Headers. Headers appear in the source code with the letter H symbolizing them. Usually, a website will have several headers, and they will be numbered according to their rank. This means that you can have an H1, H2, H3 etc. Google and the other search engine crawlers use headers as part of their indexing process. They will also prioritize the importance of the header depending on its number. In your Wix website headers are created using the Title tool in the editor. They are automatically arranged in order of importance depending on the size of the font.

Another cool tip regarding headers has to do with the page name. In the Wix website builder you have the option of changing the names of your pages. These will appear as headers inside your website’s source code. If you decide not to give them unique names they will be automatically identified as ‘Page 1’, ‘Page 2’ etc.

Google Update. The Google crawler uses many different parameters to rank a website. The meta tags and headers are one of those parameters but keyword meta tags are not one of those. In a recent post in their official Google webmaster blog they confirmed that they have not been using the keyword Meta tag for ranking purposes for some time. This is due to severe spamming of the keyword meta tag. Google has a Google Search Appliance that is capable of matching meta tags and will use the keyword meta tag for this purpose, but this is NOT related to the main web search.

Still, Google is only one search engine, so I recommend you continue to update relevant keywords into your website.

Stay tuned for the next installment of source code information. Have a good day.

Iframes and 301 Redirect

As part of our grand plan to lead you through the various aspects of optimizing your new Wix website we noticed some of you have showed an interest in various aspects of domain forwarding and iframe. Our support team received lots of questions on why their new Flash website isn’t listed in Google and other search engines and when we checked we discovered several cases in which iframes were being used. For this reason, we decided to explain iframes and shed some light on the issue.

Iframes Yes or No

Iframes (or inline frames) allow you to display content from one domain, under a different domain. For example, you’ve built a free website with Wix all about photography and you have another new domain called photography.com. You want all the content you’ve uploaded onto the Wix website to appear under your new ‘photography’ domain. What you do is, you add an iframe into the source of your photography domain and place your Wix website into the iframe. None of the content will appear in your photography domain. Your new domain will appear to have zero content, no fresh content, no links, no updates, nothing. You can add the basic Meta tags, such as title, description and keywords into your photography domain, but that will be the only thing the search engine crawler will see, and as you can read in our previous blog post 7 Super Tips to Getting Google to Crawl Your Site Faster, where there is no content there is no crawler, no indexing and no ranking. Content is Google’s king, bread and butter. In fact, if you visit Google SEO sites you’ll discover that they strongly advise against using frames and iframes in general, as it places you in quite a disadvantage.

Redirecting 301 & Domain Forwarding

The 301 redirect code is an HTTP status code used for redirection. The 301 status code indicates that a resource has been permanently moved to a new location, specified by the ‘location’ header that follows (in the source). What this means is, that the old URL is obsolete and that the crawler should replace any references to the old URL with the newly indicated URL.

What will actually happen is that as you load the web page in the browser you will automatically be redirected to the new location specified in the ‘location’ header. This is a permanent redirect, so when you press the back button, your browser won’t send you back to the original page. Using the 301 redirect also tells search engines that all link equities from the original URL should be credited to the new one. In theory, this also means that the new page will inherit the rankings from the original page.

Let’s take a look and see what happens to your ‘photography’ domain in this case. In practice, your ‘photography’ domain is considered the ‘original’ domain, because that’s where you’re sending your visitors. As they attempt to visit your ‘photography’ site, they are automatically redirected to your Wix Flash website. This means that your Wix website will continue to gain strength, as all the content and links are ascribed to it now, and the original URL, (using the example of the ‘photography’ URL) will lose its ranking.

Summary

After taking a quick glance at the ways in which you have been using iframes and the redirect option for your Flash website, it appears that they are usually used to create an individual domain name.

By using the iframe you lose your page ranking and undermine every optimization effort you’ve made.
By using the 301 domain forwarding you are strengthening the Wix URL instead of your new URL.

Getting your own domain name with Wix is cheap, starting from about $5 a month. Is it really worth the hassle, the trouble and the loss of your page ranking?

7 Super Tips to Getting Google to Crawl Your Site Faster

Search engine crawlers will index your new website, but it may take them anywhere from 1 month to 3 months. Three months is a long time and I know that I for one really don’t have that kind of patience. So for those of you who are like me, here’s some information on your Wix website’s indexing process and what you can do to help.

Can Google Index My Flash Website?

There’s been a lot of discussion on whether the search engines can actually crawl and read Flash websites. As of today, at least Google and Yahoo are able to index texts compiled into SWF and any HTML automatically generated by Flash. Even though SWF itself isn’t particularly searchable, any content (texts) inside a SWF can still be visible and indexed easily using the right techniques. In short, don’t despair – your Wix can and will definitely be indexed. Wix was designed especially to suit Google and the other search engines. Also, we are always developing Wix to remain on the cutting edge with SEO updates from Google and different online sources.

Just look at the picture below. Wix’s website is created using the Wix editor, and there it is ranked right at the top of the first page. Try a few other relevant keywords and see what happens.

Now let’s approach other tactics.

1. Make Sure You’ve Checked the Settings Boxes

First of all, make sure you’ve checked the ‘List in Search Engines’ box in the Wix editor’s settings menu. If you haven’t done so thus far, visit the editor and do so now.

2. Titles, Descriptions and Keywords

Make sure to update titles, descriptions and keywords in the Wix editor’s settings menu.

The title and description appear in search engine results so even though you can’t see the description on your site, it is one of the most important marketing elements, both in terms of the search engines and towards generating traffic.

A good title: This should include your website’s name, and be up to about 10 words long (70 characters).

A description: Should include relevant keywords and be about 30-35 words long (or up to 190 characters).

Keywords: Add about 5-7 keywords to the Wix editor settings menu. Make sure to use keywords that are relevant and actually appear in your general content. Use as many of your keywords as possible in your description, title and headers to strengthen their relevancy. For more information on the Settings check out the Wixpedia.

3. Words, Words, Words

Make sure you have enough good and relevant content. Textual content is Google’s bread and butter. You need to have at least 400 words on your Home Page and 250 words on each of your website’s other pages. If you don’t already have that, start thinking creatively on what kind of written content you can add and where to place it. Also keep in mind that Google (and the other search engines) like relevant sites. It’s not a great mystery that if your site is a business website, it may be slightly confusing if you give it an Arts and Crafts title. Your keywords and texts should be organic, relevant and natural.

If you really don’t want text on your page you can add it as a small footer at the bottom of the page for example.

4. The Chain of Links

Get as many incoming links as you can onto your web page! Google finds new sites through incoming links. As it crawls a familiar site, it follows links from that site to other websites. If you don’t have any incoming links to your website, it just won’t be discovered. Wix automatically creates two links for you when you a build a website using one of Wix’s templates. One is from the directory and one from an XML site map. This helps Google crawl your site but there are many other things which you can do. If you’re having trouble finding someone to send links your way (and you don’t have another website that’s already indexed for example), try link exchanges. People are always grateful when you send traffic their way, and let’s face it; nobody is going to stay in your website forever. So you might as well make friends. Add the links organically into the text. For example, if I want you to read more about Flash templates, I’ll anchor the link into the text.

5. Get Quality Links

Get good, quality links. Google crawls an average site once a month. On the other hand, it crawls the big sites, such as Dig, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia every day, so if you add an incoming link to your website from your facebook account, you raise the chances that your website will be indexed fast.

6. Submit Your URL to Major Search Engines

Submit your website directly to the major search engines. Once you’ve done that and read our previous blog about texts and how Google loves them, try submitting your URL to Google . This may make the process a little faster. Submit your website to the other major directories: Google, Yahoo , MSN , Ask etc.

7. Connecting Your Domain

Index your new domain to Google. If you plan on upgrading your Wix account to use your own domain, we highly recommend you do so before submitting the original freebie account. The reason being, that when you index the Wix URL, it takes Google about a month to index it. Once you connect and submit your new domain, the entire process begins from scratch, thus taking double the time it would to submit the final URL from the start.

To dig deeper into the world of SEO, visit Google’s webmaster’s site.