Welcome to the Wix SEO Clinic. An examination of selected users’ Wix websites.

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!

Why isn’t my site listed in Google?

This is the most popular question that we get asked by you, in our Wix Forum and our Wixpedia Help Center.  Creating an attractive website is great, but it doesn’t matter if no one finds out about it.  For those of you who want your Wix website to do its work FOR you, there are a few things you’ll need to do on your end first.  The indexing process can be a tricky one to master, but our Wix team is here to help.

It is also worth noting, that while the debate continues over the SEO compatibility of Flash websites, Flash websites created with Wix are SEO searchable.  This is what makes Wix stand out.  Wix is the only website builder that enables search engines such as Google and Yahoo to read Flash websites.  Want proof?  Wix.com was created using Wix.  Do a search in Google for “free website design.”  Look who it is!  Wix.com – a Flash website created using Wix – proudly pops up as the #1 result according to Google.

As long as you do your part, and make sure your ducks are in order, your Wix Flash website can and will be indexed by Google.  Here’s how.

Tip #1    Check Your Settings

You know the feeling when you think your internet is messed up, but then you realize that the cable was not plugged in?  You should feel exactly this way if you have not made sure your Wix website has its “List in Search Engines” box ticked.  Without this step, all the rest is pointless.  Click on the Settings button at the top of your Wix editor menu, and make sure that box is checked.

Tip # 2   Take Advantage of Metadata

Metadata is text that describes what is on your website.  It is extremely important to search engine crawlers when they are indexing a new or updated site.  There are two types of metadata:  Title and Description.  Both are easily added through the Wix editor’s Settings menu.

Title: Include the name of your website/company/self.  Use no more than 70 characters, spaces included.
Description: Include relevant keywords. Do not exceed 190 characters, spaces included.

The keyword settings box is also provided, and you may enter 5-7 keywords here.  However, keyword metadata no longer carries the SEO juice it used to.  Still, it doesn’t hurt to use this feature.  Just make sure that your keywords actually appear in your website’s text.

There are a few other places you can insert content, and relevant keywords, in your Wix website.  Alt Text is text that describes images.  This text won’t appear on your website, but it is crawled by Google.  Add alt text to a photograph by clicking on the image and selecting Manage Photos.  You can also add page titles to your website’s pages by clicking Manage in the upper right-hand corner of your editor.  (Mini-page titles are the labels you used for your menu.)

Tip # 3    Build Solid Content

Search engine crawlers crawl on words – not images, music or intentions.  Include thoughtful, relevant and useful content.  There should be at least 400 words on your website’s homepage, and at least 250 words on every other page.  Where appropriate, use your keywords.  Google knows what spam is, so make sure your keywords fit organically into your text.
Headers hold more SEO juice than general text. In Wix, headers are known as Titles, and can be added from the Text button in your Wix editor.  Use Titles to introduce sections of text.  Your readers will digest your information much better, and Google will take note of your Titles.

Tip # 4    Link Up

Your Google ranking is partially determined by how many other sites contain links to your site.  The first rule of thumb for gaining another site’s vote of confidence in you by linking to your site is to create quality content.  Make your site a place where original and valuable information can be discovered.   The goal is to have someone visit your website, and appreciate your content so much that they want to share it with others, through a link. Blogs can be a fruitful source of back-linking.  Participate in discussions on blogs, earn the trust of others, and eventually work your way into a mention in that blog’s content.  Posting links to your website in comments on blogs is usually detected as spam, and will be deleted by that blog’s webmaster.

Filling your site with relevant content, and taking advantage of metadata and linking possibilities should secure you a ranking in Google.  But patience is required as well.  Google crawls sites according to an algorithm that is purposely unreleased to the public.  This protects the internet from becoming flooded with low-quality content manipulated by crafty webmasters.  So it may take anywhere between 1 and 3 months for Google to index a new website.
When those spiders come crawling, have your Wix website ready and waiting for them!

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.

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.

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