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

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

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!

We’ve received a few stories from users about sites suddenly disappearing from Google. If you type in the URL of your website (www.yoursite.com) to a search, your site should come up first.  If this was the case in the past, but now all of a sudden you do not see your site at all OR it’s in a much lower place than it was before, there’s a few things you can check. This series of posts will examine these issues. First thing’s first:

Is Your <Title> Tag Optimized?

Read this post on how to add a <Title> tag to your Wix if you aren’t sure what a Title tag is or how to add one to your Wix.

Character Limit

Titles should be no longer than 70 characters – including spaces. You can copy/paste your Title text into Microsoft Word and use the Word Count tool which tells you how many words and characters entered text contains. Or, just count the number of words, spaces between words, and any other characters you have in your title, and keep it below 70.

If your title is too long OR too short, Google might not process it. This could result in your site being pushed down in search results, or being removed entirely from Google’s index. Your site’s Title is the # 1 thing Google uses for determining what your site is about. So if it’s too short, or too long and wordy it is difficult both for Google, and your visitors, to quickly understand what your site is about.

Word Selection

Your title should include a few words describing your website, company, business, organization, etc. Be descriptive and concise. If you include nothing but an acronym, a made-up word (like, Wix, for example) or a brand name for your Title, it won’t make any sense to Google. Remember – you have to do this in less than 70 characters. You can use dividers to make your titles more readable, like:

Keyword | Brand Name or Brand Name | Keyword

A Wix Without an Optimized Title:

(the actual URL has been removed from the picture to save face for the user)

The Wix.com link actually points to the user’s Wix.  The user wrote to Wix Support, and our team peeked inside the site’s source code.  Sure enough, the <Title> tag was not optimized.  It consisted of only the word “The” and the 5-letter name of the company.

Sites with Optimized Titles

Wix

Do a search in Google for www.wix.com. The very first result is in fact wix.com (as you can see in the green URL), but the hyper-text link (blue or purple underlined text) is Free Website With Free Flash Website Builder at Wix.com. These 56 characters describe Wix.  Google can tell what is on the Wix site, and knows what keywords should be found inside the site’s content as well.

Nike

The same can be observed with Nike. Do a search for www.nike.com in Google. The first search result is – as you’d expect – the Nike URL. But the Title of the link is Nike.com – Official Site for Nike Shoes, Clothing & Gear. The folks over at Nike knew that to SEO their website, they needed to include a few more words than just “Nike” into the site’s title, in order to be indexed properly and remain on top of their game.

Read more about best practices for Title tags on this SEOMoz post.  To optimize your title, click on your account in the free website builder, go into your site, click on Settings and update your Title. Be sure to click SAVE once you’ve made your changes. Then you’ll have to wait until Google recrawls your site in order to see the changes reflected in Google. This can take anywhere from a week to a month, especially if you have no backlinks pointing at your site.

Stay tuned for more SEOMyWix posts on Wixes Behaving Badly – and quick ways to fix them!

This is the #1 most important thing you should do for your website, in terms of SEO. Yet we’ve noticed many Wix users overlooking this step – including premium users. Thankfully, it’s an easy problem to fix.

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.

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

How Google Reads Text

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

Heading Tags in Wix

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

Tips on Title Use

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resizing Titles

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

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

PageRank is one of the factors Google uses when it decides how high a website will appear in the results of a Google search. It is probably the most well-known of these factors, and many website owners become fixated on the PageRank meter, which many of you might be familiar with, if you have the Google Toolbar installed. The green rating bar is Google’s way of quickly telling us if a page comes from a high-quality site worth checking out. When you are on  your Wix website, the more green you see, the higher your page’s PageRank.

Links = Votes for PageRank

PageRank indicates the relevant importance of a web page, compared to all other pages on the internet.  A Google patented algorithm is used to assign each web page’s PageRank, the details of which are protected by Google to minimize the manipulation of PageRank by webmasters.  What we do know, is that Google takes into account both the amount of links there are pointing to a page, and the quality of those links, when determining that page’s PageRank.

Each link to a page is considered by Google to be a “vote” for that page, a concept explained in our blog post last week about gaining backlinks to your website. But it’s not just the amount of votes that matter – it’s who cast them.  Links from reputable, high-quality websites carry more SEO juice. Having only one link from The New York Times is worth more than having ten links from your best friend’s blog (unless your best friend blogs at The New York Times).

But watch out for B.O.!  Otherwise known as “Backlink Obsession”

There are several reasons why Google’s PageRank metric should not be something you spend an inordinate amount of attention on, when optimizing your Wix website.

“Toolbar” PageRank v. Actual PageRank

The PageRank scores that Google allows the world to see are only updated as often as Google takes a snapshot of that page’s PageRank. These snapshots occur 2-4 times a year, on an unpublished schedule. The last update occurred just a few weeks ago, on April 3^rd. This means if you have a newly created Wix website, your PageRank will be pretty low or nonexistent, as reported in the Google Toolbar. Yet, after a few weeks, you’ll likely have gained some internal PageRank as well as some more traffic to your site.  However, your old score will be shown, until Google takes its next snapshot.

Anchor Text as a Boost for Keywords

The anchor texts of your backlinks can be more important than the links themselves and whether they come from pages with high PageRanks.  This is because links pointing at your website that contain relevant keywords will help you rank better for those words. Links pointing at your website that mention you by name, will cause you to rank higher when a search is performed for your name.

For example, suppose your Wix website is for a bakery, “Granny’s Pies”.  Getting backlinks from high PR websites with anchortext “Granny’s Pie’s” will cause some of the PageRank importance to trickle over onto your site.  However, backlinks from lower PR websites that include one of your keywords in the anchortext can help you get ranked better for those keywords.  If a lower PR site links to “Granny’s Bakery”, it will help with your ranking for the keyword “bakery”.

It’s Not All About PR

Say you’re searching for “movies”.  Movies.com has a lower PageRank than Hulu.com, but the page with the lower PR actually comes up first in a search for “movies”. (Hulu actually ranks 7th in terms of relevance for the keyword “movies”, even though its PR is the highest!)

This data was found using the PageRank Search tool at SEO Chat. It proves that Google considers factors other than PR, when it delivers results for a search, like relevancy of keywords.

Scientific Proof!

A recent blog post at SEOmoz included results from a data-based study conducted on how well PageRank correlates to search engine rankings. Their study demonstrated that although the PageRank of a website is in fact correlated with that site’s listing in Google (as well as other search engines), other site metrics are much better indicators of a website’s ranking (i.e. the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool we outlined in last week’s SEOmywix post about gaining backlinks).

Key Points:

•    Older sites are favored by PageRank, since it is not regularly updated
•    PageRank is only one of 200 factors that determine your website’s SERP rank (listing on a web page).
•    The anchor text of your backlinks can be much more important than the providing page’s PageRank
•    To find good linking sources, don’t focus on PageRank, but rather search rank.  See which pages come up when you search for words you’d like your site to rank for.  The pages that come up are the ones you should seek links from.

Better Ways to Use Your Time:

•    Work on your keyword analysis
•    Add fresh content
•    Consider new “hooks” or ways to attract new visitors to your site
•    Focus on ways to improve conversion once visitors are in your site

Good Luck!

Why isn’t my site listed in Google?

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!

Well, we’ve been talking about SEO for a while, but it just may be that you’re not familiar with all the terms I’ve been using in this blog and others that may be helpful in understanding general SEO. Here is a compilation of basic SEO terminology:

Analytics: This is a type of software that enables you to track all sorts of information on your website, such as the traffic to your website, the sources, the keywords, the bounce rate and a useful comparison to the past, so you can assess your website’s growth, strengths and weaknesses.

Alt Tags: Short for alternate text. This text is associated with graphic elements and describes images so that search engine crawlers know how to index a specific image.

Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to a word or phrase used as a link. This is used by search engines in the ranking process.

Back Links: A synonym for incoming links. These are links in websites other than your own, pointing at your website.

Bounce Rate: The rate of visitors to your website who choose to leave your website after viewing only one page, and ‘bounce’ away.

Cache: Cache refers to copies of your website stored in the search engine’s database or on the user’s hard drive. This makes it possible for web pages to load faster when you hit the back button for example.

Directory: An online categorization and listing compiled by humans.

Google XML Sitemap: These are xml files that list the URL’s on a specific website.

Internet Promotion: Marketing done on the internet through emails, banners and other web based techniques.

Keyword: This is a word or a phrase (which could include even four words or more) that describes a product or service and is used recurrently.

Link Building: The process of obtaining quality incoming links or back links in an effort to encourage the search engines to trust your website and increase its ranking and importance.

Link Farm: A group of highly interlinked sites with an agenda of inflating the popularity (PR) of the websites. This is considered an illegitimate technique, spamming of the search engine index process.

Meta Tags: These are tags that are not visible to your website’s visitors but provide important information to the search engine crawlers. Some of these meta tags are visible in SERP pages.

Meta Keywords: These are the keywords that appear in the meta tag. In the Wix website builder, this tag is accessed through the settings box at the top of the builder. Customarily you would enter around 7 keywords. These keywords will only be seen by search engines or by viewing the source of your website.

Meta Description: A description, about to 200 characters long that is not visible on the actual website but appears when your website shows up in a SERP.

Meta Title: A short title – up to 70 characters long (when optimizing for Google) that can be viewed at the very top of your web page as well as any time your website shows up in a SERP.

Natural Listings/Organic Search Results: Non-paid listings in search engine result pages.

Optimization: The process of strategizing and tweaking your website so that the content and structure of the website is best suited for search engine crawlers with the objective of getting listed and ranked well by the search engines.

Out bound links: Links directing to external URL’s outside the website.

Page Rank (PR): This is a scale named after Larry Page (one of Google’s co-founders) which estimates the importance of a web page. This is estimated on a scale from 0-10.

Page Views (Impressions): The number of times a visitor views a certain page or a specific ad.

Redirect: A user who attempts to enter a certain URL is automatically taken to another page without clicking on anything. There are different types of redirects. Redirects are generally not good for page rank.

Search Engine Ranking: A measure of the popularity of a specific website based on its placement in the results page for a specific keyword.

SEM: Search engine marketing.

SERP: Search engine results page. A list of the pages that come up when searching for a specific keyword.

Spider: The search engine’s ‘crawler’ or ‘spider’ which scans your website pages in order to index it.

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 idea for promoting your websites 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.

Submit your website to Google’s Local Business Center listings. According to Google’s statistics 82% of searches for local business information go through Google. By submitting your website to this service you can control the way your business is listed in Google and its appearance in Google maps. This definitely gives you an advantage as you can also get information on the actual searches. The best news? It’s a free service so this is really a win-win situation.  Take a look at the short video they prepared explaining how to list your website. If you search ‘plumbers in New York for example, the first results will show the best results from Google’s local directory with a link to their website and a phone number alongside the Google map pin pointing their location. Putting it bluntly – this is good for business.

So What are the Advantages?

Getting your page listed is just the first advantage. With this listing, your traffic will increase, leading to an improved ranking for your website in general and the other keywords as well.

Also, you can get all sorts of information on your business you would not have had access to before, such as what type of keywords are being used to find you, what area of town your customers are coming from,  of  the type of traffic arriving at your site. Understanding trends amongst your clientele will allow you to cater to these specific needs.

If you have a restaurant for example, you may discover that 40% of the people reaching your website are searching for seafood or are coming from a specific area of town where you may want to open a second branch.

Knowing which keywords are working for you can give you a better idea of how to optimize your website textually, which words to emphasize and which words are just not working for you.

In short this is a win-win situation allowing you to get more from the search engine and putting your business on the map.

Good Luck!