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Features, Limitations & Tips For Optimizing Your Site

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Features, Limitations & Tips For Optimizing Your Site

Weebly is a website builder you can use to create your site, blog, or even an online store. Founded in 2007, it was acquired by Square in 2018 and is now the basis for over 50 million websites worldwide.

Builders like Weebly are great for people who need a site but don’t have much (or any) knowledge about HTML, CSS, and other coding languages.

With drag-and-drop functionality, templates, and other useful tools, building websites with Weebly is user-friendly and doesn’t require any specialized knowledge.

But just having a website isn’t enough – it also needs to be found by visitors.

So just how useful is Weebly for SEO?

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Do you have control over where your website will rank in search listings?

Is it even possible to show up on the first page of Google with a Weebly domain?

In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at the advantages and limitations of Weebly sites, cover some of the concerns marketers have about using it for SEO and give you some tips and tricks to help you grow your traffic.

Screenshot from Weebly, February 2022

How Good Is Weebly For SEO?

The question isn’t “Can you use Weebly for SEO?” – Of course, you can.

The real question is “How well do SEO tactics and strategies work with Weebly sites?”

This, like most things SEO, is a bit more complex.

In short, if you’re wondering if a Weebly website can rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs), the answer is yes.

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It comes down to what you put into it.

Factors like keywords, site content, and links all play a role.

And among website platforms, Weebly is one of the better choices, as some SEO functionality is built right into the platform.

Read on to learn some strategies you can implement to optimize your Weebly site and drive more traffic.

Who Uses Weebly?

Many business owners like the do-it-yourself approach Weebly provides.

They can create a professional-looking website without spending thousands of dollars with a web development agency.

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It’s a budget-friendly way for small and medium-sized businesses to establish a presence on the internet.

For professionals like artists, graphic designers, and copywriters, who primarily use their website as a portfolio showcase or place to send visitors, it’s extremely useful.

If you’re seeking to use your site to attract new customers or sales and grow your business, it’s generally less effective than other platforms.

But that’s not to say it can’t be used for that purpose.

Weebly CMS for optimizing featuresScreenshot from Weebly, February 2022

How Do I Optimize My Weebly Site?

To understand what it takes to optimize SEO for your Weebly site, it’s first necessary to understand how search engines work.

Search engines determine rankings using four main factors:

  • Crawling and indexing.
  • Algorithms.
  • Machine learning.
  • User intent.

Crawling and indexing are performed by crawlers (also known as spiders), that follow links from one site to the next.

Algorithms are a set of detailed instructions search engines use to determine what content is useful, while machine learning helps fine-tune this process.

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Above all, the goal of search engines is to provide visitors with the information they’re seeking, which makes user intent paramount.

For a more in-depth explanation of how search engines work, this is a good place to start.

We’re also going to assume you’ve already set up a Google Analytics account to track web traffic.

If you don’t know how to do that, you can read more about it here.

With these basics out of the way, here are three steps you should take immediately to maximize the rankings of your Weebly site:

  • Optimize page titles – By far the easiest way to boost your Weebly SEO, updating your page titles with relevant keywords will help your site get found (and visited) by the right audience. Not sure what your keyword strategy should be? Keep reading, we’ll cover that a little later.
  • Update page descriptions – The page description, also known as the meta description, is the brief (155 character) blurb that shows up in SERPs describing the page’s content. Compelling descriptions will influence users to visit the link, thus raising your click-through rate.
  • Update your URL and submit your sitemap – Google can discover your site naturally, but this can be a slow process. Instead of waiting, use your Google Search Console account to add your sitemap URL. This will speed up the discovery process and make sure all your pages are indexed. You can read more about crawling and indexing here.

Now let’s dive deeper into how you can do this and discuss other ways you can secure a high ranking.

What SEO Settings Are Offered In Weebly?

One of the biggest benefits of using Weebly as a web platform for your business is its accessibility.

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You don’t need to know any coding at all to get started – and this is true for SEO optimization as well.

With a few clicks from the Pages tab, you can open advanced settings for each page.

Here you’ll be able to add Page Titles, Page Descriptions, and Meta Keywords.

How Do I Add SEO Keywords To My Weebly Website?

Let’s look closer at keywords and what it takes to develop a successful strategy.

It starts with research.

You need to determine which queries your target audience will be using, then use those terms as part of your overall content strategy.

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Your on-page content needs to use these keywords organically to establish your site’s usefulness.

Using your Google Analytics account or another reliable SEO tool, you can perform research to determine what keywords you should be using.

There are three main elements to consider for this:

  • Relevance – This is where the concept of intent comes in. High-ranking content offers the best fit when it comes to answering queries. The most valuable content will rank highest.
  • Authority – Google weights sources it deems more authoritative. For example, if your keywords are competing with NASA, it’s going to be more difficult to rank highly.
  • Volume – You want keywords people are actively searching for. Being ranked at the top for a term that gets three hits a month is not nearly as useful as being fifth for one that gets 5000.

Your goal is to find high-traffic, low competition keywords, though, with some terms, a high level of competition is inevitable.

For more information about performing keyword research, read this article.

Once you have performed your keyword research, add them into the page title, meta description, and URL structure.

Your on-page content should also be tailored with keyword-rich paragraphs.

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But don’t jam in terms where they don’t fit.

This practice can get you dinged by search engines for keyword stuffing which could result in your page being demoted in rankings or even removed from results altogether.

For more information on how to optimize your on-page content, we’ve provided a handy guide here.

Weebly website exampleScreenshot from Weebly, February 2022

Weebly SEO Pros

There’s a good reason why Weebly is used by 45 million users worldwide – it’s simple and affordable.

A free, albeit limited version is available, which lets you to use a Weebly subdomain (e.g., YourSite.Weebly.com) at no cost.

Premium versions are also very affordable, with plans starting as low as $6.00 per month, with available free custom domains.

Weebly allows both premium and free sites to be indexed.

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Weebly is also probably the easiest website builder.

Drag-and-drop visual tools let even the most technically deficient users create a good-looking site that’s responsive for mobile visitors.

Adding pages is easy, so you can create child pages that are more in-depth (and keyword-rich).

And the in-page meta data editor lets you optimize it for SEO purposes by easily editing title tags and meta descriptions.

It’s also easy to add a blog to your Weebly site.

Blogs are a great way to boost SEO quality, as they position you as an authority for answering your visitor’s questions.

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Quality content on your blog using a variety of on-page SEO tactics will make your site more appealing to visitors and give you more opportunities to rank in search engines.

If you’re a bit more technologically savvy, Weebly also now allows you to add schema to your website.

You can add custom tags to headers and footers and other structured data to help you rank higher.

There are several structured data generators available for free online to help you generate this code if you need it.

Embedding it on your site is as simple as cutting and pasting in the page editor.

Weebly SEO Cons

Now that we’ve covered the good things about Weebly, it’s only fair that we discuss its drawbacks.

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The first, and most obvious shortcoming is that it doesn’t allow you to go beyond H2 headers.

You may not be able to subdivide your content the way you want and your copy won’t be as scannable as you might like.

As you build, implement and optimize your website, the other issue you’ll encounter is control restrictions.

Even with a premium plan, Weebly doesn’t allow you to install any software on their site.

This means if you’re using Weebly to build a platform for your business, you can’t integrate content management services.

You may have to rethink your SEO content strategy and find a way to provide the same quality information, without using other services you may currently rely on.

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You may also find Weebly’s blog functionality is not up to your standards.

You can’t migrate blog content from another platform, and the layout is fixed.

The comment control and management system is very simple.

Forum options are also very limited.

The previously mentioned third-party restrictions mean you can’t use an element like Tal.ki on your Weebly site.

Weebly’s forum functionality limits sub-forums to five, with only the 15 most recent topics displayed and topics limited to a maximum of 200 replies.

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And because hosting communities on your website allows your visitors to organically create the type of relevant content search engines value, this could be a lost opportunity.

The way Weebly backs up sites is also potentially problematic.

You can download your entire site as a zip file, but if you lose your content or your site is deleted, you’ll be stuck rebuilding it from scratch, including your top-performing pages.

Other Weebly SEO FAQs

Should You Host Your Website On Weebly Or Pick An Alternative?

Still not sure if Weebly will work for your SEO needs?

At the end of the day, it comes down to your budget and resources.

If you’re looking for simple and affordable, or you’re a one-person marketing team, Weebly might be just the thing.

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You’ll be able to create a nice-looking website that can be optimized to attract web traffic, without spending a lot of time or money.

You can get started in Weebly for free and set up your site in just 60 seconds, even as a complete beginner.

On the other hand, if you have more time, some coding knowledge (or access to developers), WordPress offers a lot more in the way of customization.

Should You Hire A Weebly Expert?

If you don’t have the time to dedicate to building and optimizing your website, or you need it set up quickly, you can hire a professional.

But if you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and figuring things out on your own, Weebly is very easy-to-use.

How Much Does Weebly Cost?

Weebly offers four plans, ranging from a free basic plan to a $26 per month performance plan. You can learn more about what’s included in each tier by visiting Weebly’s site.

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How Can I Promote My Weebly Website?

There are many ways to promote your Weebly site and attract more visitors.

One of the best ones is also important for SEO purposes – backlinks.

Alongside on-page SEO and content optimization, this is one of the most important ranking factors.

Here’s a list of strategies you can use to build links that will improve traffic.

Another great promotional tactic is using social media.

Weebly also gives users the option to use Weebly Promote, a platform for social media ad creation and management.

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By integrating directly into your site, it allows you to connect your business’ Facebook page(s) so you can use social display networks for promotion.

Recommended ads are automatically generated, though you also have the option to create custom ads.

Conclusion

Like everything else, Weebly has its plusses and minuses.

Depending on your budget, it can be the perfect all-in-one website builder for your needs.

If you’re an experienced web professional, you may find it lacking, but it’s a great tool for new businesses or companies just launching websites.

There are a few less-than-ideal features, but overall, Weebly is a good platform for most people’s SEO needs.

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With a bit of elbow grease and the tips included here, it’s quite possible to have your site show up on the first page of Google.

But like all SEO, it takes work, patience, and determination to reach the top.

More resources:


Featured Image: Ashan Randika/Shutterstock




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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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