SEO For Wix Websites: Myths and Best Practices

This question highlights the overall purpose of SEO — to bring traffic, conversions, eyeballs, whatever the goal — as you can't bring traffic if the site is down!

Security is extremely important. SEO Rankings can be acquired for your properties and DA leveraged on hacked pages. Having the ability to troubleshoot this is advanced, but highly important and necessary.

Providing a great user experience through cyber SEO is less direct than things like quality content or backlinks, but is just as important.

The lack of security measures can hinder your efforts to build a site that complies with Google's guidelines.

You should stay updated with the latest security patches.

Disable unnecessarily Web Server functions, disable all unnecessary plugins and implement a WAF. These are the first things that come to my mind :)

Thus, I don't think it will be a problem if the plugin, theme, and core updates are not neglected.

Security I see as a tiered system. How high it needs to depend on the niche and its related budget requirement. The security theater, what's around the systems, is at least as important as the site environment system, but underestimated & purposely ignored.

If your CMS is like Fort Knox, but you put unhappy staff/temps on work stations & service lines, or if your office uses unmanned entryways, or an unsafe network, or if your partner has an unguarded facility, etc., your site and data STILL won't be secure.

If the environment around a system isn't secure, the system isn't secure. The question is: HOW secure does everything need to be for us — in our niche? What are the rules around that? What do we need to spend on it? 100% safe is impossible. It's a tier system.

I’ve seen what happens if your CMS isn’t secure. You get hacked and discover spam articles and links. Security is critical.

I use these reports to check the homework assignment I give the bots. Not likely to happen at Wix, but a few weeks ago I needed evidence of a poorly functioning measure triggered at the host by Google bots, (these ignore the delay time you set). Log intel is handy in SEO & PPC.

Our agency doesn't use Wix sites, but we do like looking at log files and analyzing them for things that GA or GSC doesn't find. You can see security attacks in there sometimes when they weren't seen by other tools.

I think CMS opens up all sorts of doors for experts to write content — as in some content agency out in Kansas is not an expert on a topic by literally going to Google and copying (but slightly better) what's already out there. A biz owner is a topical expert.

A CMS has the potential to allow these biz owners to create content and be able to rank it. VERY important to Google IMHO because it solves the gap in quality content that exists today.

I'll say it's not enough for a CMS to improve for SEO — they have to help educate their user base to better understand how to write content for the web — literally one of the focus points of my work at @Wix. It's one of the best parts of the job, to be honest.

In my point of view, success depends on how quickly new important SEO features are implemented to a CMS.

At the same time, the question is, "Will website builders replace web developers?" Everything is possible, let's see :)

The mission of SEO is to make the web better. Right now the web looks like a third-world country in terms of technology, content, and UX. When these people get better, the web gets better. It's all about optimizing the web, not just getting rankings.

We're moving more and more to no-code, like it or not. Is it better for SEO? Well, you have to innovate with the market, if you want to win at competing. If the interest in a platform declines, the investment stops, improvements stop, and eventually it'll lag.

I like the idea that it can/will reduce tech SEO knowledge requirements. Thereby enabling topic experts to focus on producing their content, and being able to compete, without expertise in tech.

Google and Wix have a partnership that instantly indexes your homepage when you connect to GSC via Wix. I'm pretty sure that it leads Google to crawl other pages on the site more quickly.

In a recent round of resubmissions in GSC of unindexed pages, after a few were picked up, dozens more were picked up by Gbot in the process.

The process of the crawl schedule is dynamic, which means that it can be manipulated. Otherwise, prioritization would be random & serve no point. Does Wix get dibs? Well, it happens in multiple visits ...

I would define SEO-friendly CMS in 3 ways:

1. Does it take care of all the various kinds of site owners.
2. Does it allow SEOs to do their thing.
3. Does it care to constantly improve because there is no end of the road that is "ultimate SEO friendliness."

SEO-friendly CMS should have the following features:

• SSL security certification
• XML sitemaps
• 301 redirect capability
• Customizable page elements
• URL settings
• Blogging and internal linking tools
• Taxonomy and tagging features
• Responsive themes
• Analytics reporting

It needs to strike a healthy balance between what the target user can do, versus what the platform can offer — as it relates to who or what needs to be able to use and understand the website, in order to make it an SEO success.