With a good backlink to your site from an important directory, your site is considered to be more important by Google. And when Google says “jump”, everyone on the internet asks “how high?”

Using DMoz to Charm Google

Submitting your Wix website to the Open Directory Project, also known as DMoz, can help in your quest to woo Google’s search engine crawlers. DMoz is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited web directory. It’s purpose is to provide a list of websites arranged by category. Unlike a search engine, this web directory does not rank or promote the sites it includes.  However, Google, AOL, Yahoo and other search portals definitely have search engine crawlers that prowl DMoz to learn about new, relevant and worthy websites. And then they duplicate this data in their own “clone” directories. Why?

The Humans

Websites listed in DMoz were approved by volunteer human editors, who are experts in their fields of interest. Sites listed under a certain category actually do contain information relevant to that category. In addition, it is free to submit sites to DMoz, and only DMoz. So, the websites of large corporations and small business owners (like many of you!) all get the same treatment in DMoz land. The individual attention given to each submitted site is why search engines like to look at DMoz’ data. So, while it’s entirely possible to perform well in Google without getting listing DMoz, it helps a lot to get listed.

Submitting Your Wix

• Make sure your Wix site is completed. At least make sure all your pages have content and all your links go somewhere. Incomplete sites with broken links or graphics get “Under Construction” notices and generally aren’t listed.
• Do a search in DMoz for your Wix website, to make sure that you are not already listed. This step could save you time.
• Select the most relevant category for your website
• Scroll down to make sure that category has a category editor, and not a “Volunteer to edit this category” link.  Submitting a website to a category without an editor decreases the likelihood of your site getting listed. Try the next most relevant category if your top choice has no editor.
• Click “Suggest URL” link on the top of your category’s page.  Some categories are too general to accept submissions, in which case you should find a more specific category.
• Carefully follow the directions on the submission form. Submit your site only once.

Here’s a short video on How to Submit Your Site to DMoz.

While You Wait
It can take some time before a site is included in this directory, but it is worth the wait. DMoz’s editors review each site to make sure that it is completed, and relevant to the category under which it was submitted. It can take two weeks to a few months to get approved. To see if your site was included, check back on DMoz’ homepage in a few weeks and do a search for your site. Be sure to only submit your URL to the Open Directory once, as multiple submissions can result in your site being automatically excluded.

Other Directories

You could also submit your site to specialized directories based on your site’s area of interest. There are many free website directories on the web, but the key is to find ones that will give you valuable links, from reputable sources. This means PageRank. Directories with low-level PageRank won’t do much for your site’s linkability. The paid directories will require payment over the phone, a personal e-mail and even a pitch as to why you should be included in their listings. The harder the directory is to get into, the more link value it probably has.

A few good general directories (some free, some paid) include: ProLinkDirectory, Directory-Free.com, WhitePages.com, HotvsNot and DataSoftSystem

Getting your site listed in directories such as DMoz won’t guarantee that your Google ranking will improve, but it definitely gives you a solid push in the right direction.

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.

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.

I want to use this post to address a prevalent misconception. Many people, as they begin to optimize their website, tend to perceive this process as somewhat contradictory with the rest of the work they’ve put in with the product and potential users in mind. In fact, the work they invest in their website is divided between work optimizing for users and work optimizing for Google – when in fact these two are almost one and the same.

Google and you have the same agenda

Google wants to know what your website is about – so do we. Think of your new free Flash website as a well written essay. You’d have to ask yourself first what the essay is about and if you can’t summarize this concept in a sentence, you aren’t doing your job well. What is your website about? Is it about selling t-shirts? Is it a business website for a dentist’s office? Is it your band’s fan page? Make sure this message is clear and comes across fast. There were over 183 million websites on the internet as of early 2009 and this number just keeps growing. If a visitor reaches your website and doesn’t know what it’s about he has no reason to stay. It takes a lot less time to click your mouse than it does to walk out of a store.

Google has the same agenda. It wants to be able to give the best search results and this depends very much on how you present your website. It uses algorithms that are meant to discover your website’s purpose and subject. That’s why it reads the titles and gives them precedence over other types of texts. That’s why the description is so important. That’s why it crawls the links leading to your website to understand what subjects are relevant to your website. If you’re website’s message is clear to Google, it will most likely be clear to an actual human visitor.

Define your website’s message clearly

Many people have searched and found ways to outmaneuver Google’s algorithms and get their website listed on the first page. However, Google continuously updates its algorithms and these websites don’t last very long. Spamming is basically a waste of time at the end of the day. You aren’t serving your users/visitors by offering them low-quality content, and you aren’t going to get very far with Google either. Playing the game however, may be a little harder and more complex, but it will improve the quality of your website and get you the right kind of traffic.

So make sure you define your message clearly. Notice our header: ‘Learn. Optimize. Get Your Wix Ranked’. Bing.  You know exactly what this blog is about. So does Google.

Are you being Google friendly?

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…

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?