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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

This will be useful for those of you who are wondering whether Google has indexed your site, and what it looks like from the crawler’s POV.

The feature I’m talking about is the cache feature.
The technical definition for cache memory is ‘a fast storage buffer in the central processing unit of a computer’. Basically, cache is storage and what this means is that Google stores each website it crawls.

Google takes a snapshot of each of the crawled pages and stores (caches) this version. As you enter a search word, notice that practically every search result offers a regular link and a ‘cached’ link.

Why is this useful?

This is useful in cases of internet congestion (if you are unable to access the current page), if a website is very slow to upload or if the owner is working on the page and subsequently making it unavailable. Remember, when you view a cached web page you are viewing that web page as it appeared during the crawlers last visit. It may be quite different in the present.

Also, when you visit a cached version of a website from the Google search, you will see this page with your keywords highlighted in different colors. This can make it easier for you to find the content you were searching for.

So how does this affect You?

The good news is you can see Google’s stored snapshot of your website. This is a great solution for those of you who are wondering if Google has indexed your Flash website, and how exactly it sees it.

To see a cached version of your website, enter your website’s URL with the word cache: before it in the Google search. For example: cache:http://www.seomywix.com. If your website comes up, this means Google has already indexed it.

Another way to see the cached version of your website is to search for it in Google and choose the ‘cached’ link instead of the regular title link.

You can also download Google’s nifty tool bar, a very useful device in general, and cache the page you’re looking at.

At the top of the cached page is a header reminding you that you may not be viewing the current version of the website. It also gives you the date on which the crawler indexed this page. This is a good way for you to find out when and how often Google’s crawler indexes your website.

One last piece of information on cache. Google will cache the first 101kilobytes of text on your website, so if you have more than that (texts that is), don’t be surprised if you can’t retrieve it in the cached version of your website.

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?