SEO for Your Free Website

1. Making Friends with Robots

Before you even begin to entertain dreams of grandeur for your website, make sure your website is built with a format that is readable by search engine "crawlers", also called "robots". For most HTML-based sites this is a given. Traditionally, this is not a given with Flash. But Wix changed the game by creating its unique free website builder, a platform that creates an HTML mirror of Flash web content, which is then fed to the search engines. Your human website visitors won't see this code, but search engines will gobble it up. So if you are thinking of using Flash - dynamic visuals being great for humans - Wix may be the solution for you.

2. Using Keywords

“Keywords” are the words or groups of words that people type in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and such. Using keywords throughout your website is an effective way to connect people interested in your keywords, with your website. One way to come up with keywords is simply to think about popular terms related to what that goes on in your site. For instance, if you are offering salsa classes, you might choose the keywords salsa, dancing, dance classes, Latino dancing and so on. By including these words in your content, you can attract people that were searching for these terms on search engines.

Instead of coming up with a list of keywords off the top of your head, you can do a little bit of research and see which words are being searched for the most. There are plenty of online tools for keyword research, including Google's free Keyword Tool.

3. Two Types of Content

There's the regular content you include in your pages. Then there's your site's "meta" content, or the words you place inside your page's "page title", "description" and "keywords" section, in your website's code. No idea how to do this? If you're using Wix's website builder, just click on the Settings button, at the top of the page. Here, you can easily enter all 3 of these delicious morsels for search engines to devour. Page Title is the most important element for search engines to correctly categorize your website. It's also the title that appears at the top of the browser, when visitors view your website. Description is the text that people will read when they find your free website on search engines. These "snippets" of text are the two or three sentences that appear underneath a site's URL, in a search results list. Search engines will only publish 20-30 words of your site description, so it helps to keep your description short and sweet. The Keyword tags in your site's metadata don't matter as much as they used to, according to Google. But Wix still makes it easy to throw these tags in, just for good measure.

4. Submitting Your Free Website

When you have finished your website, it can also help to let search engines know you exist. If you are publishing your website on your own domain, you can submit your website to the 3 major search engines by using the links below:

http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

(Note: If you are publishing your website with Wix's hosting service, this will happen automatically.)

5. Relevant Inbound Links

“Content is king” is not the only SEO mantra. “Relevant links” is also key. From an SEO perspective, the more relevant inbound links your site has, the higher the ranking your website will receive on search engines. Here are a few simple ways to increase your inbound links (and help your site get promoted):

Add your site to Open source Web Directory Dmoz: (Note: It can take a long time for your request to be processed)
Create links from web directories that are relevant for your free website subject area.
Ask friends and clients with relevant websites to link from their websites to yours.