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!

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 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!

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!

This post is a practical response to questions many of you have been sending in. Wix offers an upgrade that allows you to direct the Wix website to your own domain. Once you upgrade to premium you must direct your website to your new domain. To find out how you can connect your own domain (URL) with the Wix Flash website visit our support. It may take up to 3 days before your new domain is updated by your domain registrar.  Once it is updated and running, you must get it indexed and ranked. You do this using the same techniques as the ones used for your free website. But what happens to the old free website?

Many will notice that there may be a short period when both websites are indexed until slowly the free website loses its position and disappears from the search engine rankings. Until now, when a Wix user upgraded his/her website, his free domain was automatically removed from the Wix.com xml sitemap. Once the Google bot re-crawls the sitemap it removes the missing website from its listings, as it no longer has any link pointing at it (assuming you’ve removed other links to that URL yourself).

Recently Wix has been implementing a few changes to speed this process and prevent overlaps between the two websites.

To improve this process and make sure it takes place faster, Wix is now also adding a no-index tag to all free websites that have been upgraded. This means that once the Google bot visits the website it will encounter this no-index tag and remove the website from the listings.

Of course, this doesn’t happen immediately. In order for the website’s listings to change, Google must crawl the website. The time frame of this process varies, and can take anywhere from a week or two to two months.

Meanwhile, there are many steps you can take to optimize your new website and get it ranked higher and better. Getting as many websites as possible to point at your website (link) is one thing. Another is submitting your website to Google directly.

Good Luck.

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!

If you’ve upgraded your Flash website to premium, you may be using Google analytics to study the trends and behavior of your website. Keeping a close eye on your website’s trends is a good idea as it helps you know what changes you can implement to improve the statistics, or what is already working.

Here are a few of the terms you’ll encounter in your Analytics account:

Bounce rate –

The bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who enter your site and leave after viewing only one page. If you have a blog that may not be so bad, but usually people prefer to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.

How do you keep the bounce rate as low as possible? Well, it depends on many different factors, but make sure your navigation is clear and legible, so visitors to your site understand where each button or link will lead them. Also, take a look at the sources of your traffic. Which keywords are leading them to your site? Perhaps you’ve been indexed in non-relevant keywords and you need to optimize your site to bring better traffic your way.

Unique visitors –

Unique visitors are first time visitors who have never before been to your website. How is this measured? As you visit a website for the first time, a cookie is planted on your computer. Don’t worry, it’s a harmless cookie and you won’t feel it any other way. Next time you visit that website, it will search and find this cookie on your computer and recognize you and register you in the visitor loyalty statistics.

Visitor Loyalty –

Visitor loyalty is measured by the number of repeat visits your website gets.

Page Views (vs. impressions) (vs. hits) -

A page view is registered when a visitor requests to view a ‘page’ type file. This should not be confused with impressions and/or hits.

Each page view may include many hits. Hits count the number of times a person requests to view a file on a certain page. There could be numerous files on each page and hundreds of hits for each page.

An impression refers to the number of times an advertisement is loaded onto a user’s screen. This is only relevant to those of you including banners and advertisements in your website. From the other direction – when you visit a website and see a banner, even if you ignore it – you’ve made an impression. Isn’t that nice for you?

% Exit –

The Exit rate is different for each page. It is the percentage of users who have exited from that page.

If you want to learn more about Analytics in general you can always visit the official Google Analytics blog and if you have more questions about how to connect your wix.com Flash website to Google visit our help center, the Wixipedia article on the subject. Remember, to use embed Google Analytics into your Wix website you need to upgrade, any of the packages will do. Following your website’s statistics is like collecting intelligence reports that allow you to adjust your website and improve its usability. This benefits both you and your visitors.

Have Fun!

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.