Building an SEO-friendly website by using a website builder has been a tough nut to crack. Since Search Engine Optimization is the backbone of online marketing, webmasters had to spend many sleepless nights with developers to build a perfect website that ranks in the first page of search engines. Getting a website created from a developer and designer includes a lot of time, energy and money. This is where website builders have an edge, if they offer the best and convenient tools to their naive clients, who possess little knowledge of web development and website designing.
However, there is a remarkable distrust in website building platforms. After reading a lot of forum discussions, it seems that website builders help create sites that are not friendly to search engines. This is where Wix sets itself apart from its competitors. Wix religiously follows search engine guidelines while creating your websites. This practice ensures that your site content is recognized and indexed in search engines.
Wix enables search engines to find your website. During its easy-to-follow DIY site creating process, you can allow search engines to index your website in search results.
Wix SEO Features
Even I was apprehensive about Wix’s SEO features until I checked Google’s Webmaster Guidelines under the “Help Google Understand Your Pages” section:
This clearly establishes Wix as search engine friendly tool to create your website in a jiffy.
Let’s now explore On-Page SEO factors Wix covers in building a website for you.
SEO Titles, Descriptions & Keywords
Your website SEO begins with On-Page Optimization, which has three major components viz. SEO Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Keywords. Wix website building tool facilitates you to write SEO-friendly Titles and Meta Description for your website or web page in particular. As a result, your website or webpage gets better ranking in SERP.
Image Optimization
When search engine receives a keyword query, it shows images in the SERP, apart from links of related web pages. This means if images on website are optimized, there is good chance of ranking improvement for your website. Wix allows you to optimize images on your website by adding ALT Text in images. With the help of ALT Text, search engines get to know what the image is about. For example, if you have created a webpage for iPhone 7 Plus wallet cases, you can put the relevant ALT Text in image title. Search engines will be notified that the image is about iPhone 7 Plus wallet cases.
301 Redirects
301 Redirect is used to redirect your old webpages to new ones. By implementing 301 Redirect, you will not lose your old page rankings. Normally, 301 Redirect is done on the webpage which attracts more traffic or which is ranked in top position in search results.
If you are using any other website builder, you will have to write a code to redirect your old webpages; while Wix offers you an easy way to connect your old pages to the new ones.
First, connect your old domain by clicking on Connect Your Domain button. Next, paste the old page link (which you want to redirect to the new one) in Source Link box; and in the Page drop-down menu, select the new page where you want to redirect the old link. Finally, click on Add button. This will display your link in the text area below the Add button.
While following 301 Redirects, make sure that your new website should not be the copy of your old one. But the content of both pages should be similar. For example, you should not redirect the About Us page of old website to the Services page of the new one.
Customizable Heading Tags
Header tags actually determine what content your page carries. This facilitates Google spider to quickly identify the relevant content for which a visitor might have typed in the query. Moreover, Header tags play a vital role in search engine ranking. Your H1 tag should be unique as it is your site title. By using Wix website building tool, you can easily create tags from H1 to H6; this makes a complete search engine friendly page.
New URL Structure
According to search engine guidelines, your site URL should be short & memorable. Stop words like ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘of’, ‘the’ etc. should be avoided. Wix is working on site URL structure, where your site and page URL will be simpler, memorable and SEO-friendly URLs. Hence, while developing site with Wix tool, you can create URLs that will boost your site rankings in SERP.
One of the best advantages of Wix tool is that a single click will update all page URLs on your website. With updated URLs, your website visibility will be improved. Wix website builder will automatically remove stop words and punctuation characters.
Loading Time
If your website takes much time to load on mobile or desktop browsers, users would never come back. Hence, a quick load of site is a big plus for repeated visitors. Loading time also affects your website visibility and ranking on search engines. Overall, delay in site loading time is a major turn off for visitors.
Wix employs four ways to improve loading time of your website. Its Automatic Image Optimization resizes heavy images; but care should be taken that your image size should not be more than 15MB.
There are two ways JPEG images get loaded on a webpage: Baseline JPEG and Progressive JPEG Images. While Baseline JPEG images loaded from top to bottom (which obviously takes more time), Progressive JPEG images get displayed in low quality first and then loaded progressively. This certainly reduces your site’s loading time. Wix uses Progressive JPEG Images as they are supported in FireFox and Chrome.
Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network (CDN) globally divides your website content through proxy servers in different geographical locations. Today, websites and blogs use this service to load high quality images. Wix uses this network, which distributes content from the nearest cache server.
Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) is a major threat to websites, and when this happens, servers receive excessive data. Consequently, websites’ performance is affected and they run slowly. Thankfully, Wix minimizes the effect of such DDOS attacks.
Integration with Google Analytics
Integration of Google Analytics is crucial for any website owner. Analytics provides your important insights on consumer demography and psychography. At the end of the day, you get to know how many visitors visited your website; which page has got maximum visits; where (country, region) they came from; how much time they spent on your website; how many real time visitors your site has and more. You can easily integrate Google Analytics in your website with the help of Wix’s simple guide. Within a week, you will start receiving data on your site.
Mobile-Friendly Website
On April 21, 2015, Google released an important mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. As per this new algorithm, Google gives a significant boost to mobile-friendly web pages. Since Google enjoys a leadership position in search engine technology, webmasters thoroughly follow its guidelines. Wix helps you create a mobile-friendly website that ranks high in Google. Given the rising number of mobile users worldwide, it is only wise to create a mobile-friendly web page on Wix cloud-based development platform.
Now start your business with a spectacular website. Wix offers you everything you want to develop your site. Creating a website on Wix is not a rocket science; it’s just a drag-and-drop affair. Wix gives you more than 500 templates to create your website.
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