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 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.

Previously I touched the subject of hyperlinks or links and their role in search engine optimization. Search engine crawlers use natural links to identify the subject, relevance and importance of a page. When an important page (as defined by the page rank) sends a link to your website it improves your page ranking. There are different types of link structures and links may carry different attributes with them, affecting the way the search engine crawler identifies the link source and target.

So for starters, what is a natural link? A natural link refers to a link that was created with the user in mind. Supposing you have a paragraph on elephants in your website but you don’t plan on expanding on the subject much yourself. Instead you insert a link into the paragraph sending the user to a website with loads of information on elephants with anchor text that says ‘elephant’. That would be considered natural. An artificial link on the other hand is a link created solely for the purpose of promoting the source or target website in the search engines. This type of link gives value to the site owner or to a third party. The target page is irrelevant to the source and the average user/surfer who clicks on it will probably hit the back button as soon as he can or disappear forever.

Each link has two ends called anchors and a direction. Each link starts at the ’source’ anchor and ends at the ‘destination’ anchor.

The simplest link is created by opening a tag and using the ‘href‘ attribute which specifies the location of a web resource or document, the URL, the ‘anchor text’  and a closing tag, in the following manner:

<a href= “http://www.wix.com“> Wix </a>

The link above is a simple html link to the wix.com website, using the word Wix as anchor text. The anchor text in a natural link gives the Google bots more information on the subject and topic of your website, as well as the target website. If you have links pointing at your site with an anchor text that says ‘free cameras’, Google’s crawlers will assume that your website, or at least the page linked to deals with free cameras. If the site sending you the link is a strong site, with a high page rank, it will be considered a more reliable source. The more ‘link juice’ your homepage gets, for example, the more this ‘juice’ trickles down to your other pages – as long as they are linked to the homepage.

Internal Linking

Up till now, we’ve only been discussing links from and to external websites, but links inside your website, connecting the pages, are also very important. A good internal linking structure can:

1. Make sure your entire website gets crawled properly, as discussed in previous posts about sitemaps and links.
2. Strengthen the relevancy of a specific page for a specific keyword, by using anchor texts as well as other practices.
3. Increase the page rank of an inner page.

Using inner pages to consolidate keywords is particularly useful when you have a large site and/or you want to get ranked for a large number of keywords. In this case, it is a good idea to create specific pages targeting a specific keyword.  If your inner page is targeting the keyword ’round swimming pools’ you would make sure that all links using ’round swimming pools’ as anchor text will be directed to this specific page.

Increasing the Inner Page PageRank

As I mentioned before, link juice trickles down from the homepage to the pages connected to it. The closer a page is, in clicks, to the homepage, the more link juice it gets and as a result, the pagerank increases.

This doesn’t mean that all your pages should be linked from the homepage. Creating too many links from the homepage will diffuse the weight of each separate link. Create solid pages for the phrases (keywords) you are targeting and link to those specific pages. A good navigational structure could use:

-           A footer text with good, organic anchor text links. Keep the footer clean looking, don’t spam it with hundreds of links. For one thing, this could be flagged by the search engines, another reason is that you are diffusing the value of each individual link, so what’s the point?

-          Text link navigation, which is basically a menu with texts. Make sure to use the keyword you are optimizing. This doesn’t mean that every link to that page has to be crammed with the keyword. Try every other link, or one of three. Keep in mind that the page should not natural and appealing to users (you know, those people for whom you’re building your website).

-          You can also use internal text links, which are links that appear organically within the text of your website. They are given extra weight because it is assumed that their relevancy to the content is superior.

Doing all this doesn’t mean your website will automatically be launched into the first spot of the Google search results, but it will improve your standing in terms of SEO. Moreover, you are identifying specific inner pages with specific content or subjects and increasing their individual importance. This will help your entire site get crawled and promote it in Google and the other search engines making the effort worthwhile.

Good Luck!

So what have you already learned about SEO? Think you’ve figured it out? Here are a few questions that’ll help give you an idea of how much information you still have to learn, and how much SEO you already know. You can take the entire test at the seomoz website.

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.

Answers: [1=4] [2=5] [3=3] [4=5] [5=4] [6=2] [7=5] [8=3] [9=3] [10=2] [11=2] [12=1] [13=1] [14=4] [15=3]

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…