Building a Wix site with Velo? Here are some tips for improving your site's visibility in search engines and avoiding SEO pitfalls when coding with Velo. Make Sure Search Engines Can Crawl Your Content One of the first steps to ensuring effective SEO is making sure search engines can crawl and index your site content. If you're working with Velo, some of your site content may be dynamic. How can you make sure that search bots can view your content? Search Bots Like HTML Wix sites are built using Wix editor components that are rendered into HTML. With Velo you can also customize the content and layout of your site by adding JavaScript code using the . Velo JavaScript APIs Search bots access your page content by sending an HTTP request to your page and reading the HTML content generated from the initial page rendering. At a later date, some search bots also render the page themselves and run any JavaScript code. Since not all search bots run JavaScript code, you should make sure the code returning the content you want to be indexed runs before your page is initially rendered. Content not included in the initial HTML output may be indexed after a long delay, indexed incorrectly, or not at all. For this reason, and also to increase the performance of your site, Wix uses server-side rendering (SSR) to render your page's components on the server and return them to the browser as HTML. How can you make sure your content is included in the SSR version of your page? Inside the onReady() Function For Velo sites, anything that occurs in the function is rendered on the server, returned as HTML, and seen by search engines. onReady() For most use cases, it's enough to just call the function in . For asynchronous functions and functions that run following a delay, the promise may resolve before the function's promise has a chance to resolve. onReady() onReady() In such cases, if you need the returned content to be indexed, you can block the from resolving until your function's promise resolves. You can indicate to the server that it should wait by returning the promise in . onReady() onReady() For example, let's say you have a repeater on your page that is populated with data queried from a database collection: wixData ;

$w.onReady( {
    $w( ).onItemReady( {
         $item( ).text = itemData.title;
         $item( ).src = itemData.image;
    });
    
    wixData.query( )
        .find()
        .then( {
            $w( ).data = results.items;
        });
}); import from 'wix-data' ( ) function "#myRepeater" ( ) => $item, itemData, index "#text" "#image" "MyCollection" ( ) => results '#myRepeater' In this example, the asynchronous query's promise may not resolve before the promise resolves, and the SSR version of your page may not include the queried repeater content. To ensure that the query resolves before , we can return the query in . onReady() onReady() onReady() See the change to Line 9: wixData ;

$w.onReady( {
    $w( ).onItemReady( {
         $item( ).text = itemData.title;
         $item( ).src = itemData.image;
    }); wixData.query( )
        .find()
        .then( {
            $w( ).data = results.items;
        });
}); import from 'wix-data' ( ) function "#myRepeater" ( ) => $item, itemData, index "#text" "#image" return "MyCollection" ( ) => results '#myRepeater' Note that returning a promise in the onReady() function may affect the of your site, as all the data will load before the page is rendered. Since there is a tradeoff between SEO and performance, you might want to wait for the main content that is important for indexing, and let auxiliary content such as the time or weather information load later. performance Database content that is loaded into page elements via a dataset (instead of code) is included in the SSR version of your page and will be seen by search engines. Note: Test Your Site How can you check if a search bot can view your page content? You can emulate a search bot by setting your browser's user agent to a specific bot. For example, you can emulate a Google bot and check which site content Google bots will initially crawl. Show me how To emulate a Google bot in the Google Chrome browser: 1. Navigate to your published site. 2. Open . Developer Tools 3. Click the 3-dots menu at the top right. 4. Select > . More tools Network conditions 5. In the User Agent section, clear the checkbox. Select automatically 6. Select . Googlebot 7. Reload your site. Now you're viewing the page content Google bots will initially crawl and index. Links and SEO Search engines learn a lot about your site from internal site links. Since internal links impact your site's SEO, it's important to know how to set up and manage links on your site. Crawlable Links Google bots only crawl links with an HTML tag with an attribute. There are several ways to add crawlable links to your Wix site: <a> href href Add a to your site. site menu Add a to your text. hyperlink Use the link button to add a link to a clickable element such as a button or image. Use a dataset to from a database collection to clickable elements such as a buttons or images. connect URLs Other methods of adding links to your site are not guaranteed to generate links. You can add non-crawlable links to your site, but you should make sure that every page of your site is reachable from at least one crawlable link. href Use Page Query Parameters for Pagination There are different ways to handle loading more page content when the content is too long to fit on a single page. One method is to use a numbered menu that loads a specific number of items for each numbered button that is clicked. If you are using a numbered menu for pagination and you want search engines to crawl and index each batch of content as an independent page, add a page query parameter to the link for each numbered button: . Google views URLs with numbered page query parameters as links to independent pages. ?page=<pageNumber> For example, let's say you have a numbered menu with several buttons: Google indexes the following as 2 separate pages: URL: https://www.wix.com/velo/examples?page=2 #button2 URL: https://www.wix.com/velo/examples?page=3 #button3 For the link to the first page, don't set the query param to since you'll have 2 URLs pointing to the same page. Instead you can link to the main page. Note: ?page=1 Does URL Case Matter? Google treats URLs as case sensitive. For example, Google views each of these URLs as unique: www.mysite.com/page.html www.mysite.com/PAGE.html Google recommends exposing either the uppercase or lowercase version of a URL, and not both. Even if you've set both URLs to point to the same page so that a site visitor will reach the same destination regardless, you may not want both versions out there on the web pointing to your page. When multiple URLs point to the same page, Google will choose only one to represent the content on your page, and will highlight only that URL in search results. And it might not be the URL you prefer. So which case should you choose, uppercase or lowercase? Lowercase is recommended, since it's more common and you can assume that at least some people will use the lowercase URL to link to your site. Images and SEO Site images play a significant role in determining your site's SEO. But how do search engines "read" your images? They check the image's alternative text (alt text), a short but meaningful description you can assign to your image. You can to an image via the Wix Editor, but if you are displaying multiple images from a database collection, you can dynamically assign alternate text to your images with code using the image property, or by connecting to alternative text stored in a database collection via a dataset. add alt text alt Dynamic Pages and Routers and are different than regular pages in that they contain dynamic data. SEO information for a dynamic or router page must be set dynamically, so that it reflects the real content the pages will hold when they are viewed. Dynamic pages router pages You can for your dynamic pages in the Wix Editor. define SEO information You can dynamically for your router pages: define the following SEO information : Help search engines learn about your pages. Meta tags : Help search engines find your pages. Sitemap Build a Great Site Structure Site structure refers to how you organize content on your site. For example, how do pages with your main content link to pages with subtopics? How many pages will a site visitor have to navigate to reach the content they want? Is the connection between pages with related content organized or random? Planning and mapping out an organized site structure will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. Google awards , additional links that appear beneath the main URL in a Google search, to sites with great site structures.You can use features such as , , and to improve and organize your site structure. Consider the following factors when planning your site: sitelinks Wix Data database collections dynamic pages index pages Make sure the connection between pages on your site isn't random. Your site hierarchy should be organized and fairly shallow (not too many levels). 1. Organized hierarchy: This is easy to accomplish using dynamic pages, where you can automatically generate multiple pages with similar structure and different content all relating to a main index page. The structure of your URLs should mirror your navigation hierarchy. Each level of your site should be represented by a section of your URL containing an appropriate keyword. 2. URL structure: For example, if you've got a recipe site divided by cuisine type and then by course, a site visitor who selects Italian cuisine and then appetizer recipes should see a URL that reflects the site hierarchy: You can automatically generate for your pages using dynamic category and item pages. structured URLs Search engines use internal links to crawl the pages of your site. In general, the more internal links the better, but minimally every page on your website should have a link to and from another page on your site. 3. Internal links: You can create an index page or a dynamic category page to easily link to and from dynamic item pages on your site. for dynamic pages are different than SEO settings for regular site pages. Note: SEO settings Set SEO Data with the SEO API You can use the Velo to get and set SEO information for your site pages: SEO API Gets and sets the clickable heading that appears in search result pages. Title tag: Gets and sets link relation attributes for multiple URLs that point to your page. For example, rel canonical lets search engines know which URL represents the master copy of your page. Link tags: Gets and sets metadata, additional information about your page. For example, you could use meta tags to control what content appears when your page is shared on Facebook, or to prevent search engines from indexing your page. Meta tags: Gets and sets additional information about your page in a standardized format that can be read by search engines. Search engines use this information to classify your page content and possibly display the search result for your page as a . For example, you can use structured data to let search engines know your page content is a recipe or contact information for an organization. Structured data: rich snippet To ensure the SEO data you set will be read by search engines, make sure to set such data in the event handler. Note: onReady ( ) Track Your Site Events You can connect a 3rd-party such as Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel to your Wix site and collect valuable information about your visitors' behavior. Wix helps you track specific visitor events such as page views and purchases and report them to your integrated marketing tool. You can then use this information to optimize your site. marketing tool If you want to track additional visitor actions not included in the default tracking events available via Wix marketing integrations, you can use the Velo . For example, you can to a ownload button and report to a 3rd-party tool every time a visitor downloads a document. Track Event API add tracking code What's Next? SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. Check out the following resources to keep your site up to date with SEO best practices: : A step-by-step plan designed to help you improve your site's SEO. Wix SEO Wiz : Everything you need to know to set up your website's SEO and get found online. Wix SEO Guide : Don't forget to carefully check Google's SEO guidelines. If you are experiencing SEO issues with your site, it's worthwhile to review Google's guidelines again and make sure you aren't inadvertently missing any important details. Google SEO Guidelines Previously published at https://support.wix.com/en/article/velo-seo-best-practices

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