When you start working on your website, the #1 question everyone has is: how would my website be found on Google?
Since we all know that our potential clients are out there looking for us on search engines every day (3.5 Billion of them daily) it’s super important that they will be able to find us, and more importantly - that they would find us in the first search results page! Cause let’s face it - we’re all too lazy to look for information we need pass the first few results we get, unless it’s really something that we think might be better the in the first page.
I’ve wrote this short tip about how to avoid penalties with Google, which I think you should read. But before we move on to the things I would like to show you, it’s important to understand that working on your site’s SEO is an ongoing process that takes a while to build.
Building your trust with search engines - is much like building your trust with human beings, when you meet someone you don’t know, it would take a while to build a friendship with that person, if you would like to hire a service - you will probably go for someone that you got a recommendation from a friend you trust, word of mouth works best for us. Well - it’s quite the same with search engines, you need to build your reputation, and it takes a while!
#1 - CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT!
When we think of what our site visitors/potential clients encounter when they first get to our website, it’s our content - our texts, images, video, sounds etc.
We need our content to be attractive so that our site visitors would stay and consume it, the longer they will stay in our site and the more they move around different pages on our site - search engines will get the feeling that our site is relevant.
But what is an attractive content?
I want to say first that your content should have no spelling mistakes and that it would sound coherent when someone reads it. You should make sure your content will be reviewed by someone you trust to make sure it’s in a good standard. That should be your main concern but next I’m going to go into some more technicalities inside Wix editor.
#2 GET YOUR HTML TAGS IN ORDER
When we write text for our website, we don’t think of how google actually reads it, since we are not programmers and we don’t know any HTML code, it might be good for you to know that when search engines read our website’s content, they read it like we read a newspaper, first the main title, then the secondary title, the paragraph text and the image description, and it’s our job to make sure that everything is in order so that the search engine will think our site is also good for him to display.
How do we do that you might ask?
With Wix, they’ve placed the HTML tags in the text theme. You can see for instance that Site Title has this <h1> underneath the theme, Page Title has <h2> and so on.
Make sure that you have all the right order when you build your website, first <h1> then on other title <h2> and use only paragraph theme for paragraphs. <p> the size of the font doesn’t really matter, just that the order and the right HTML tag is there.
#3 UPDATE YOUR METADATA
One of the important places to plan your content strategy properly is on our Metadata.
Metadata is the text that gets displayed on the search engine’s results page, like in here:
When you conduct your research on your competitors and the keywords you want to promote on your site, analyze how does that information is displayed and what content is there!
Write the best title for your business - a great thing might also be your location if you are a local business, you can also add your business phone number - though most SEO experts might say it’s wrong, you can read more about the pros and cons here.
Other then that, you should carefully write the up to 160 characters text that is that short grey paragraph that is below the link. Make sure that that text is well written and not just spammy keyword stuffing, since google really doesn’t like it.
Here’s where you do it: Pages Menu > click the 3 dots > go to SEO tab
#4 GET YOUR LINKS RIGHT
There are two main type of links you should think about: on site and off site.
On site links are all the links you use inside your site, whether they are on a button or image, or if they are links inside your text that leads to another page on your site. All that you need to think about when your build your site, is to help your site visitor to easily navigate on your site, and in general to keep him inside your site as long as he’s interested. This would help your site get rank higher with google.
On the other hand - if your content is not interesting and your links are broken, the chance that a site visitor would leave fast, your rank would go low (that’s what we call, bounce rate).
Off site links, are external links that leads to your site. For instance, if you wrote a blog post or an article in a big internet magazine or any big portal, and from that article (that has your name and business name) there’s a link to your website, that helps your rank very much! As I’ve said at the beginning of this tip, google - like human beings, is very social, if someone he trusts (a well known blog, an internet magazine etc.) he will know that you are really who you say you are. Just make sure you don’t buy any external links since you will get penalized for that!
#5 MAKE SURE TO USE ALT TEXT
Images are a great way to promote your site also. When people are looking on website search results most chances they will not pass the first page, but with image search there’s not first page, it’s just a long scroll. So when you add images to your website, after making sure that they look good, add the right alt text (alternative text) which helps search engines understand what’s on your images. Make sure that your alt text makes sense and might also have your business name to help connect it to your business.
This is how you do it on images: Click Image Settings > Image Text
On galleries: Manage Media > Click on one of the pictures > Title
* TIP: make sure you don’t have anything left on your image tool tip, since it might not look professional - you wouldn’t want your site visitor to see: IMG_6679 when they hover over your image, right?