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!

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.

5 Ways to Get Your Keywords Noticed:

Many users want to know how to get search engines to recognize specific keywords that they’d like associated with their website.  The goal is to attract potential customers who don’t know you, through organic Google searches.  Follow these steps to have your targeted keywords correctly inserted into your pages.

1.  Make a List of Keywords

Stay organized and focused. Study your competition. Make a list of keywords that are relevant to your business. Start with the obvious ones. For example, if you were creating a website for Lisa’s pancake house you may write the generic word “pancakes” down first, then perhaps “best pancakes”  and then you might get even more specific and choose a local keyword, such as “San Francisco pancakes” or “strawberry pancakes in San Francisco”. You may be able to get indexed for each of these keywords, but the greater question is how well you can get ranked. Even if you get indexed in the 100^th page for pancakes, it probably benefit your business much. Each keyword has different levels of competition which you can see by the number of results and by undertaking some research to find out how many people search for that keyword. Software is available to help such as WordTracker or Google AdWord.

Consider the size and amount of traffic you are likely to generate to your website. If you’re creating a 10-20 or even 50 page website, I don’t recommend trying to compete with the Apple website, for example.

2. Remember Content is King

This cliché survives because it holds a world of truth.  Your website must contain quality, relevant content in order for its keywords to be caught.  Writing the same key phrases over and over again will be recognized as spam by the search engines. If you’ve chosen good and relevant keywords you should have no problem inserting them into your text naturally and organically.   Insert your keywords throughout your text.  Spread them out evenly and discretely without making it obvious.

Aim for your homepage to contain 400 words.  A footer is a good place to add text if you prefer an image-based homepage.  Aim for 250 words on all other pages. For the best results, you should aim for you keyword to appear about 3 times for every 250 words. This includes your titles, headers and regular text.

Google loves headers. More emphasis is placed on any text that appears in your headers, so make sure you word and phrase your headers wisely. In the Wix website editor, select the Text button from your menu, and choose Title. The text you write here is what will be interpreted as a header tag – it’s that simple. The larger your header text, the higher it will rank.

The more text you have, the more opportunity to insert a keyword. Having trouble finding room for more content? For Lisa’s Pancake House, an “About” page or a ‘Reviews’ page may be good places to add some content.

3. Use Your Meta-Tags

Search engines rely on 2 types of Meta tags to discern the subject of a web page or website.

.  These are both found in the Settings section of your Editor, in the SEO Settings box.

Title Tag: The most important part of your page, in terms of SEO.  The title appears on the very top left-hand corner of your browser when you are viewing your Flash website. Make sure your title contains relevant keywords.  Also note that keywords found at the beginning of a title are much stronger than those placed toward the end.  Titles should not be longer than 70 characters, including spaces.

Description Tag: The description tag is another great opportunity to use your keywords. The description cannot be viewed from within the site, but it is the text that will appear alongside the link to your website in search results. This is an important text. Try to keep this text between 150-160 words.  Use at least two of your keywords in the description.  Keep it to the point, be direct and catchy.

You may also add up to 7 keyword tags in this same section of the Editor. Make sure you’re adding keywords or phrases that actually appear in your content.

Alt Texts: You can add “Alt Text” to your images that will be read by search engine crawlers, and cannot be seen by users.  Take this opportunity to use the keyword you are promoting one more time. In the Wix editor, you can add Alt Texts to your gallery pictures through the Manage Photos option.

4. Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to the navigation within your website and the infrastructure of links pointing from one page to another within your Flash website. Since your homepage (or landing page) is usually the page that gets the most traffic and the most links pointing at it, it is usually the most important page in your website.  Use text links to point at the different pages of your website to make sure that the search engine knows what that page is about.

For example, all links within Jack’s New York Pizzeria website pointing at the website’s homepage can use the ‘anchor text’ “Jack’s New York pizzeria” instead of the generic ‘Homepage’. An inner page in Jack’s website might deal exclusively with pepperoni pizzas, so the link to that page can use the anchor text “Jack’s pepperoni pizza”.

Pages with more links pointing at them will be considered as having more importance and relevancy from the point of view of the search engine crawler. The more often a link is used, the more relevancy and importance it is allocated.

5. External Linking

The same principles of internal linking are applied to links from the outside. Get as many backlinks to your site as possible and make sure your links are properly anchored in relevant text – keywords.

You can optimize specific pages for specific keywords by dedicating specific keywords to specific pages. For example, all links using the anchor text: “Jack’s anchovy pizza” to point at a page that has lots of text on the subject of anchovy pizza. Use all the links with the anchor text “Jack’s New York Pizzeria” to point at the home page that has that specific keyword inserted into it repeatedly.

Links will have greater potency when they come from a powerful website. Powerful websites are websites with a high page rank and a lot of traffic. A web page that simply has a long list of links from it (also known as a link farm) won’t have the same effect on your website as a link in a popular pizza review magazine, pointing at your website from an article raving about your great pizza.

Bottom line: the more anchor links pointing at your website – the better. Make sure these links are active.

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.

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.

1. Where is it LEAST important to include keywords?

1. title
2. body text
3. Meta Keywords
4. Headers

2. What is the best way to maximize the frequency with which your website/web page is crawled by he search engines?

1. Insert a “crawl delay” parameter into the robots.txt file.
2. Submit your site directly to the search engines through submission forms
3. Visit Google’s Webmaster Central and increase your “crawl frequency”
4. Search for your website more frequently in the major search engines
5. Add new content frequently

3. How can description Meta tags help with the search engine optimization?

1. This is a trick question! – Meta descriptions are not important
2. They’re an important ranking factor in search algorithms
3. They’re the texts that entice searchers to choose and click your listing
4. They help inform search engines which keywords are most important on your page

4. Which of these sources is considered the best source for competitive link data?

1. Ask.com
2. MSN
3. Alexa
4. Google
5. Yahoo

5. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

1. There is no difference, they are synonymous
2. SEO refers to organic/natural listings while SEM deals with PPC or paid searches
3. SEM implies association with traditional marketing companies, while SEO is usually independent or uaffiliated with traditional marketing
4. SEO focuses on organic/natural search ranking, SEM encompasses all aspects of search marketing
5. SEO is what they call SEM on the West coast

6. Which of the following is NOT considered to be a highly important factor in ranking a particular search term?

1. Temporal relevancy – the number and quality of links pointing at a certain page over a given time
2. An HTML validation (according to W3C standards) of a page
3. The quality and quantity of all external links to the page
4. The link popularity of a specific page within the domain
5. Keyword usage in the title tag of the page

7. When creating “flat architecture” for a site, what are you attempting to minimize?

1. The KB size/weight of pages targeting search engines
2. The total amount of scrolling necessary for the website’s navigation
3. Colors used in the design
4. The number of tabs/windows that open during normal navigation
5. How many links a search engine must go though in order to reach content pages

8. Which of the following is NOT the best method for creating quality title tags?

1. Writing great copy that encourages users to “click” on your listing
2. Making sure each page has a unique title
3. Including an exhaustive list of keywords
4. Limiting the title tag to about 65 characters, including spaces

9. Which character limitation is the best in regards to the title tags (assuming you want your title tag to be fully displayed in search engines)?

1. 108
2. 20
3. 65
4. 45
5. 85

10. The ‘PageRank’ was dubbed just so because it was created by Larry Page and not because it happens to rank pages.

1. False
2. True

11. Creating a ‘sitemap’ with links to other pages in your domain is important because…

1. Most web users outside theUS prefer this navigational method
2. It can help search engine crawlers access many pages on your website easily
3. A site map reduces the rate at which spiders crawl your pages
4. It’s a mandatory requirement for submission to most of the important search engines

12. Why are absolute (http://www.mysite.com/my-category) URLs better than relative (“/my-category”) URLs for on-page internal linking?

1. Absolute URLs provide a link back to the original website after they are scraped and copied onto other domains
2. They provide more keyword context for search engines
3. These URLs provide greater keyword weight
4. Absolute URLs are filled with vodka – duh!
5. Search engines can’t crawl relative URLs

13. How should you avoid duplicate content issues that are often present in temporal pagination issues (where content moves from page to page, as can be seen in article lists, multi-page articles and blogs)?

1. Use a Meta robot “noindex, follow” tag to the paginated pages
2. Each page should be displayed in a new tab/window
3. Link the paginated pages with a rel=”nofollow” in the link tag
4. Pagination does not have any duplicate content problems associated with it

14. What should you do with old URLs after updating your site’s URL structure to build new versions of your pages?

1. Nothing
2. Move the old links to a sub-domain
3. Create 404 landing pages for the old URLs so search engines & visitors understand that the content is no longer there
4. Use a 301 to redirect them to the new URLs
5. Request their removal via webmaster central and site explorer in Yahoo!

15. When multiple pages on your website are targeting the same keywords, which is the best way to avoid keyword cannibalization?

1. Restrict search engines from crawling/indexing less important pages
2. Remove duplicate keywords from the Meta keywords tag on secondary pages
3. Add links on all the secondary pages directing back to the page you want ranked for the term/phrase, using primary keywords as anchor texts
4. Increase keyword density on the main page and make sure its denser than that of the other pages

Did better than you thought? Not as good?

Here are a few good SEO websites/blogs you might enjoy reading for more information:

• Matt Cutts has been working for Google since 2000. His blog is an easy read and always a great place to find updates on Google.
• The SEOBOOK is also a good read with handy information and links to a good training center.
• Another place to read up on SEO tricks and tools is SEOCHAT.
• One of the best places to get updates is search engine land.

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PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…