After building a Wix website – the very next question asked is “How do I best do Wix SEO?”
SEO WIX basics
The basics of SEO is to ensure that your content on your page is optimised. This means that it can be clearly understood and correctly indexed by search engines such as Google. Optimising the content on your website for SEO is known as On Page SEO.
If blogging and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a priority for your business – you could save yourself a lot of time by considering WordPress over Wix SEO.
This is due to a free WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. The below image is an example of the analysis undertaken on your website content.
Introducing Yoast SEO – a free plugin available through WordPress which assists with On Page SEO of WordPress websites. Yoast’s strength is that it can quickly and easily complete an SEO analysis for each page and blog on your website. It then ranks the quality of your content using a traffic light system. Showing a green, yellow or red light to indicate how well optimised it is.
Some of the SEO basics that Yoast checks for include:
- Checking the keyword appears in the URL of the page.
- Ensuring the keyword is used within the first paragraph of the text.
- Makes sure the keyword is used in sub-headings.
- Checks that the keyword is used within the meta title and meta descriptions.
If your website is built using a non-WordPress content management system (such as Wix) – you can manually complete most of the above checks yourself. Unfortunately, this is much more time consuming as the analysis needs to be completed manually.
Wix SEO – on page checks
If you wish to persevere with Wix SEO, below are some On Page SEO checks you can manually work through:
Stop Words (see Wikipedia – Stop Words) – Compile a list of stop words and then manually search for those words in the keywords and in the slug (URL). Ideally you want remove or limit the use of stop words.
Links – Count the number of outbound links. Ideally you should have 1 to 3 outbound links. Think of outbound links as references to what you are writing about. For example in the blog post we have 3 links – one to our previous blog on SEO basics, one link to the Yoast website and one link to Wikipedia explaining the term ‘stop word’.
Word Count – Copy would need to be pasted into Word etc. to complete a word count. For SEO purposes, a good blog will typically have a minimum of 300 words.
Keyword in Headings – Ensure the keywords you are targeting are included in sub-headings. You will need to manually check the HTML code to ensure that the keywords are within the H2, H3 HTML tags.
Images – Review the ALT attributes, filenames, and descriptions attached to uploaded images to ensure all of the descriptions are search engine ready. This can be manually checked in the HTML.
Keyword in First Paragraph – Check that the keywords are present in the first paragraph and that the HTML correctly identifies the first paragraph.
“Nice” length page title – The Title (what is shown in a Google Search Result) should be around 50 characters or 13 words. You should also include your target Keywords in this title.
Keyword in the URL – Ensure your target keywords are used in the URL of blog. E.g. …/Sydney-tax-deductions is a better URL than …/pageid=34
Meta Description – The text that is seen in Google Search Results. This text needs to be appealing so people click on it. It also needs to include your keywords as Google will bold the keywords that a user has searched for.
Previous use of keyword – Make your key words count! It is not ideal to overly use the same keyword. Each blog or page on your website should be targeted to one unique set of target keywords. You would need to manually keep a record of whether you have targeted a page for certain keywords previously.
As you can see, without WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin – a lot of quite quick and simple tasks require significant manual effort. If blogging and SEO work is a priority for your business, off-course it would be more efficient in the long term to make the switch to a WordPress website rather than trying to complete Wix SEO.
