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Now that you have built a website, you may be wondering how the sites appears in search engines. The answer is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Although one option is to pay to have you site appear at the top of search results, the other (cost effective) option is to have your site appear organically at the top of the search engine.
SEO is a broad term used to boost websites ranking of appearing in search engines in accordance to search algorithms. While it cannot guarantee that the website will appear at the top, using a few Editor X tools can increase the chances of appearing amongst the top search results.
SEO Basics
Defining you SEO basics can provide key information to potential site visitors to help them decide whether they will visit your page when it appears in search results. To update this, navigate to the Page icon in the secondary tool bar and select the 3-dot menu from the relevant page, then choose SEO Basics.
Select Go to SEO Wiz at the top of the SEO Basics tab to view a personalized SEO plan to help you boost your site's SEO. You can apply SEO settings across multiple pages on your site at the same type using SEO Patterns, for more information about this, click here.
The following information should be considered when completing SEO information:
- What's the last part (or slug) of the page URL? This text is the last part of your page's URL. You should only change this if it's necessary to reflect the content of your page. We recommend keeping it short and easy to read. A slug cannot contain spaces, there should be a hyphen wherever a space required, for example; contact-us.
- What's the page's title tag (title in search results)? Add a title tag that summarizes the content of the page. Enter your title tag as it is meant to appear on search engines results.
- What's the page's meta description (description in search results)? Add a short meta description of the content on the page. This description helps users decide if the page is relevant to them.
Activate (or deactivate) the Let search engines index this page toggle to set whether search engines can crawl and index your page or not:
- Enabled: Search engines will index your page. People can find your page when searching keywords and phrases in search engines.
- Disabled: Search engines will not index your page. People cannot find your page when searching keywords and phrases in search engines.
Note: Updating Social Share will enable an image related to the page to appear on social media platforms, for further information regarding this, click here. Whereas Advanced SEO will provide ability to format SEO settings, for information on this, click here.
News and Blogs
Another way to increase the chances of appearing in a search result is by creating Blog posts. Doing this will create additional pages to your website, further enhancing the quality of your website.
A news post and a blog post often get used interchangeably, however a News post is generally more official, while a blog post has a more personal tone.
To access this, select the Page icon in the secondary toolbar at the top left-hand side, then scroll down and select News. Once you arrive on the news page, click anywhere in the blog container and select Manage Posts from the floating toolbar.
You will then arrive at the Blog Overview within the site’s dashboard. Select + Create New Post or Edit an existing post.
The toolbar across the top, will enable you to customise the presentation of the content in the body of the blog such as text, while the toolbar on the left-hand side will allow you to update the blog’s page. Ensuring quality content and updated information here will be a key to increasing your website’s search results.
You can Add a range of various elements to the post such as images, videos, buttons and HTML code. While Settings will allow you to add an image which will appear on the News listings, as well as an author. Setting as feature post will bring the article to the top of the News listings on the home and news pages.
Similar to SEO basics, the SEO option will enable you to add information which will appear on search engines once the post has been published. Categories allow you to organize posts in a way which will allow potential readers of the post to determine what the content relates to.
Tags are one of the most important parts to increasing the website’s appearance in search results. Tags are key words which search engines identify and link to a performed search. These should be 1-2 words for each tag and should describe what the post and website relates, for example Netball Club, Altona.
The Monetize provides an option to add paywalls where potential readers are required to subscribe and pay to access the posts, while the Translate feature will translate the post into another language.
Add Backlinks
A backlink is a link from one website to a page of another website, this may be a club or an association’s page, or it could also be a page within your own website. Major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.
Backlinks are often included in the blog section; however, you may wish to add them throughout other pages as well. To add a link when writing a blog, highlight the word (or words) which you would like to link, then choose the link icon in the top toolbar.
A pop-up window will then appear. Enter the destination URL and select the relevant check boxes. You can also link to a section within the article such as a word, paragraph, or image. Once you are satisfied with this, select Save to confirm.
If you wish to add a link to another area of your website, you will need to navigate to the relevant page and select the area where the desire text is located until Edit Text appears in the floating toolbar (you may have to select this several times). Once this is selected, highlight the word (or words) to be linked and choose the link icon.
A pop-up will appear with more options that the blog post, select the relevant options (e.g. Web Address and paste URL), then choose Done to confirm.
While there are many ways to increase the chances of your website appearing in search results, the tips outlined above will assist these chances. Further information about SEO tips using Editor X, can be found here, while information using Wix can be found here and here.