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Need help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Simmy

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I know this is a weird place to ask, but I figured why not. Sometimes you find what you're looking for in the most unlikely of places.

So I've been building a few websites as of late with Wix (http://www.wix.com) including the website for my side business ImagiWorks (http://www.imagiworks.com.au). I've also built the website of my family business (and my place of full time employment) over here: http://www.visionone.com.au.

Particularly with the Vision One site, we had it originally built with an developer out here who used XCart for our online e-commerce side of things. This seemed to generate "clean URLs" and boosted our search engine ranking to the top of nearly all product listings.

I've gone with Ecwid for the new Wix site and while I've liked the control and ability to adjust certain elements with Ecwid, their SEO is horrible. URLs end up like this: http://www.visionone.com.au/#!av-au...cjiz/!/~/product/category=8725081&id=39429381 - When they should look like this: http://www.visionone.com.au/#!av-audio-visual-melbourne/product/samsung-ed-c-series-led.

Basically, our SEO is all over the place now. We're not ranking anywhere near where we were and as a result, we're dropped off in our web and phone leads. Obviously this is hardly the result we want.

Are there any IT/Web/SEO people on the board that can help me out with this one? Seems like there's either some super tricks to elevate SEO, or I need to leave Ecwid totally for another third party product (as Wix's built-in shopping page is rather poor, BUT does work with clean URLs). Does anyone else run an online website? Or is involved with getting their business online? How do you find your SEO? Are you ranking highly? And if so, what are you doing to achieve this?

Thanks to anyone that can help with this issue!
 
My girlfriend has worked on improving SEO, though I'm not sure she has dealt with these problems (she is by no means a developer or in IT, she's in marketing). I will run it by her tonight.

Edit #1, and RCF is a fantastic place to ask for all kinds of advice...relationship problems, real estate, why is it red, etc.

Edit #2, totally forgot about this last night after golf. Will try again tonight.
 
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My girlfriend has worked on improving SEO, though I'm not sure she has dealt with these problems (she is by no means a developer or in IT, she's in marketing). I will run it by her tonight.

Edit #1, and RCF is a fantastic place to ask for all kinds of advice...relationship problems, real estate, why is it red, etc.

Edit #2, totally forgot about this last night after golf. Will try again tonight.

Thank you, kindly. Would love to hear her thoughts.
 
You can do it yourself after lots of research and effort and time or you can pay someone who knows what they're doing. Our you can find other ways to generate leads.
 
Girlfriend had a bad combination of Chinese food + that-time-of-the-month last night. I mentioned it in passing this morning and she doesn't know about the URL situation (as expected). But she has SEO on her resume, she has done it before from a marketing perspective, she might be able to help you out by other means. Will try to find time this weekend, I'm closing on a house today so might be a busy weekend, we'll see...

Or you can hire her, she hates her job :)
 
I don't know anything about Wix, I hand code when working on websites. But Google has pretty much cracked down on the black hat "tricks". I'm sure there are things you can do that will boost you until they find out what you are doing, but then they can black list your site and it is finished.

The best ways to rank higher for a given keyword are to use that keyword throughout the page, but not excessively, use it in the title of the page, in the URL, and use it in links to the page. Then you have to have useful content and the page should be laid out in a proper manner so the spider crawling it can find the content. Links from other sites back to the page are helpful, but they have to be high quality links. If you just spam a message board with a link to the page, that would hurt you instead of help. Where I work I don't really worry about backlinks, because it doesn't really matter, the content and layout are what matters.

I wouldn't trust any third party solution to do a better job than I would, but if that is what you have to use, then you pretty much have to live with what they can do.
 
Girlfriend had a bad combination of Chinese food + that-time-of-the-month last night.

Oh man, I bet your girlfriend was shitting all over the place and it was mixing with period.
 
Pretty much yeah, sounded like she was in labor. Didn't go near the bathroom myself.
 
I don't know anything about Wix, I hand code when working on websites. But Google has pretty much cracked down on the black hat "tricks". I'm sure there are things you can do that will boost you until they find out what you are doing, but then they can black list your site and it is finished.

The best ways to rank higher for a given keyword are to use that keyword throughout the page, but not excessively, use it in the title of the page, in the URL, and use it in links to the page. Then you have to have useful content and the page should be laid out in a proper manner so the spider crawling it can find the content. Links from other sites back to the page are helpful, but they have to be high quality links. If you just spam a message board with a link to the page, that would hurt you instead of help. Where I work I don't really worry about backlinks, because it doesn't really matter, the content and layout are what matters.

I wouldn't trust any third party solution to do a better job than I would, but if that is what you have to use, then you pretty much have to live with what they can do.

I mean that's a start, but if you don't think the 40,000 other companies competing for your keywords are doing the same thing, then you'd be incorrect.

Simply placing the keywords throughout the page and as the /url title is nowhere near enough.
 
I mean that's a start, but if you don't think the 40,000 other companies competing for your keywords are doing the same thing, then you'd be incorrect.

Simply placing the keywords throughout the page and as the /url title is nowhere near enough.

Of course they are. That's why I said the content is the most important thing. As an example, for an e-commerce site if your product descriptions are just the same factory provided bullshit descriptions that everyone else has and uses, then your products will be buried in the rankings with everyone else.
 
Of course they are. That's why I said the content is the most important thing. As an example, for an e-commerce site if your product descriptions are just the same factory provided bullshit descriptions that everyone else has and uses, then your products will be buried in the rankings with everyone else.

What's interesting is that with our previous site (not built with Wix), product descriptions were copied from the manufacturers website. We literally ranked higher than the manufacturer when searching the product code and model number. Essentially, I'm not understanding what was present on the previous site that's not here on the current reincarnation. I did not do any SEO at all when I was adding products. And the entire website was just built for e-commerce - there were no additional pages with content as we have currently.

I'm just not sure what I'm doing wrong. And now I've realized that Google isn't detecting our sitelinks whatsoever. I was under the impression that Google would automatically generate sitelinks (for example, when we search Vision One Australia on google, none of our sub-links are present beneath) based on the navigation linking. It seems like Wix just isn't compatible with this whatsoever.

it's just extremely frusterating when I know how important this part of the business is - especially based on the fact that previously, we'd generate a lot of calls through Google and were at the top of our search rankings. Just can't quite work it out.
 
I feel like this thread should have been a bat signal for DougHeil to come out of the shadows. I'm disappointed that didn't happen.
 
So with all this in mind, I'm highly considering moving away from Wix.

What would you guys recommend as the best website builder for SEO, eCommerce, flexibility and overall ease of design implementation?

I'm leaning a little to WordPress at this point but still need some more info.
 

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