Mac SEO Blog

Create Add-ons, Tutorials, & Resources For Third Party Products

The number one best strategy that you can employ in driving more traffic to your website is leveraging the success and visitors of other websites. A great way to do this is by creating add-ons, tutorials or third party products for an existing product or service. Before worrying about the How and For What, consider the benefits of going in this direction. Companies love when you extend or talk about their product or service for the same reason you would appreciate the gesture, free advertising. You single handily increase their exposure and the usefulness of their product or service.

With that being said, most companies would be more than willing to help promote your add-on and they may even have some insight into promotional areas you can leverage on your own. Taking a look at Apple’s online store we see a multitude of third party products that customers can purchase. The extra exposure these companies get by providing an Apple related product greatly enhances their product reputation and provides free advertising for their website. They can than leverage this extra exposure to help promote other product lines.

In another example, RAGE Software’s MapDesign provides a great way for website developers to easily add interactive media to their websites. Of course, there are dozens of software packages that users can use to design and build websites. One of the most popular for the Mac, RapidWeaver, was being used by many of our RAGE MapDesign customers. We leveraged the success of RapidWeaver by making it easy to use RAGE MapDesign along with it. We created an online video tutorial to show step by step how the two applications can integrate with each other and posted it to the RapidWeaver forums. Since we were the first to do this, we were able to attract a large portion of RapidWeaver users over to our product line. As we introduced more products, these customers kept coming back. In addition, we also increased our search engine rankings by branching off into new features that were searched often in many major search engines.

Now you may be wondering what you can do in order to leverage the traffic and success of other products and services, and in turn, gain new customers and higher search engine rankings. At the very least you can write articles pertaining to your area of expertise. However, by getting a little creative you can go further in leveraging the traffic of other websites.

First and foremost you must consider the industry you are in. Whether it be law, religion, technology, SEO, there is always creative options you can take advantage of. Very generically you can use special deal websites such as Red Flag Deals to announce your one time deals on products or services.

How To Brainstorm New Traffic Generating Ideas

Here are the steps involved in determining the websites to go after;

1. Make a list of all the ways your customers use your products or services. Get specific and creative here. Do a search for your product or service name to see if anyone has been talking about using your product in a way you may not have thought of yet.
2. Find other products or services that your products can be used with to help make those customers more productive.
3. Look for any communities that may already have been established around these products or services to see if their customers could benefit from your offerings and to find places you can promote your product/services.
4. Create your free add-on, tutorial or resource for these third party products. The important strategy here is to make this add-on free because it gives you more of an opportunity to promote and will lower the barriers required for new customers to come try it and discover what else you have to offer.
5. Evaluate the traffic and feedback you get from these new users to see if your promotional efforts have paid off and whether you should consider additional add-ons for this segment or move on to a new one.

We are pleased to announce that RAGE SERank 1.7 has been released and can now provide up to 1000 search results so you can easily see if you are making improvements in your search engine rankings. Plus it contains speed optimization options so you can ensure you are always running at peak performance.

This update is free for registered users and can be downloaded from the RAGE SERank Download page.

Tip: With this version we included a few optimization options to help improve speed. If you find RAGE SERank is starting to run a little slow, go to the File menu and select ‘Optimize Database…’. This dialog lets you remove a certain number of search results that you no longer care about. This will not remove the search result history for your website, just the cached search results for all other pages. Older versions of RAGE SERank would hold up to 100 search results for all keywords and search engines you checked. This can quickly add up to a lot of data that needs to be managed by RAGE SERank. Now you can remove older data that is no longer relevant for selected websites.

If you have any specific questions about your website or your search engine ranking, be sure to post your questions on the RAGE SEO Discussion Forum for Mac users.

In our last post we talked about anchor text, and how to use it effectively to help increase your search engine rankings. Today we will talk about how to evaluate the effectiveness of your anchor text and what Googlebot knows about your website.

If you don’t already have one, your will need an XML Sitemap file published and submitted to Google’s Webmaster Tools. You can use RAGE Sitemap Automator to quickly and easily create your XML Sitemap file.

Now that you have your XML Sitemap file published to your website and submitted to Google, login to your Google’s Webmaster Tools account. Click ‘Statistics’ on the left hand side and the click ‘What Googlebot Sees’. Here you will get a whole list of the most predominant anchor text used to link to your website. Click any of the anchor text keywords to see some slight variations used by the various websites that link to yours.

If you scroll down a little further, you will see the most predominant keywords, as determined by Google, on your website as well as the most predominant keywords used to link to your website from third party websites.

Use this information to;

1. Determine what keywords other websites are using to link to your website
2. Brainstorm additional keywords for your website

Open up a new browser window and do a quick Google search for the term ‘Click here’. Notice that the first page that appears is Adobe Reader’s website. If you click that link, you will see that nowhere on that page do the terms ‘click’ or ‘here’ appear. Why in the world would Google rank a website that doesn’t even contain the keywords we are searching for at the very top of their results?

The reason is because of how Google’s algorithm works. Google looks at the Anchor text, that is the text used to link to other webpages, to try and determine what a webpage is all about. Google figures that if other websites, or your other internal webpages, are linking to a specific page, they must be providing a description to their visitors about what to expect on the next page.

For example, a real estate website may link to their condo listing page by saying, Click here for our condo listings. In this case, they have effectively told their visitors, and Google, what the next page is all about.

Keep this in mind when linking between pages on your website, and getting links from other websites. You want to make sure that your anchor text contains the keywords you want to rank high for in search engines. Keep this techniques in mind;

1. Use descriptive anchor text when linking between pages on your website
2. Use your keywords in your anchor text that you want to rank high for
3. Try to keep your anchor text consistent when linking to the same page
4. Avoid generic terms such as ‘click here’ or ‘download’ or ‘more information
5. If you are using images to link to other pages, make sure you are using the ALT attribute to specify alternative text for your image. This is never seen by your visitors (unless they are using a text only web browser or your image does not load), but is used by search engines
6. Include your keywords in your web page file names, separated by hyphens (-) and NOT underscores (_)

The last point provides two benefits. The first being that you now have your keywords in your urls which may help with your search engine rankings. The second is that if a third party website decides to link to your website and simply uses your URL as the anchor text, you are assured that your keywords are being used in their anchor text.