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.

Yesterday we released an update to RAGE Sitemap Automator, the essential tool for getting your website listed in search engines.

The latest update adds full support for iWeb based websites. It can now properly scan and find all links on an iWeb created website as well as automatically publish your XML Sitemap file on your iDisk in the correct location. It also adds some other fixed and enhancements.

If you have an iWeb web site, make sure you have read our SEO for iWeb blog post so you can learn how to rank your iWeb site high in search engines.

Note: We released version 1.9.6 today which fixed a small bug that made incompatible sitemap files. So if you have downloaded version 1.9.5 please download the free 1.9.6 update.

We have just posted an update to RAGE WebDesign bringing it to version 2.9.6.

This free update for registered users adds the following new features and benefits;

[NEW] All new text engine provides better support for Unicode and many additional text editing improvements.
[NEW] Universal binary, now runs natively on Intel and PowerPC Macs.
[NEW] Support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
[NEW] Redesigned user interface.
[FIX] Can now properly insert styled text and have it automatically translated into HTML.
[FIX] Lots of small fixes and enhancements.

Download your free trial version of RAGE WebDesign.

RAGE WebDesign can be purchased for $29.95 USD from the RAGE Software online store.

Mac360 praises Domainer’s ability to track and manage your domain names and web sites.

Here is what Mac360 had to say about Domainer;

Managing domains and sites requires a special effort. Domainer is the tool that makes it easy, fun, timely, and efficient.

In typical Mac utility fashion, Domainer makes the complex simple to manage. Domain names can be entered into Domainer and tracked via creation date and expiration date.

Thanks Mac360 for the great software review!

About Mac360
Mac360 is a great resource to get high quality software reviews, updates on what’s going on in the Mac community and talk Mac on the Mac360 discussion forums.

This morning we finally released RAGE SERank 1.0, an all new application for Mac web site owners to track and manage their search engine rankings. With RAGE SERank you simply add the keywords you want to rank highly for and select from the over 40 search engines to check your search engine rankings.

RAGE SERank will automatically check your rankings and provide a detailed report of where your web site ranks in each search engine for all of the keywords you have entered. RAGE SERank can also be used to check the search engine rankings of your competitors to easily see what keywords they are targeting and ranking highly for. RAGE SERank will keep track of your rankings over time so you can graph changes or go back to any previous rank check.

With the professional version of RAGE SERank you can create customized PDF rank reports that you can use for personal use, or send to your clients or colleagues. The professional version also allows an unlimited number of web sites to be checked.

Download a free trial version of RAGE SERank or order your full standard or professional license.

A few days ago MSN’s Webmaster Tools officially came out of beta. Like Google’s Webmaster Tools, MSN’s tools let you quickly submit your sitemap.xml file that you have created with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. Once submitted you are provided with search engine feedback including;

• How many of your web pages are indexed in MSN’s search
• The date MSN’s search spiders last crawled your web site
• Which, if any, of your web pages could not be properly indexed
• Your web site’s most popular incoming links

Although you won’t find as many resources and tools that are provided by Google’s Webmaster Tools, you will get some interesting information about how your web site is performing in MSN’s search.

If you already have your sitemap.xml file published on your web site, all you have to do is create your free Windows Live account and follow the simple steps to submitting your sitemap.xml file. The next update to RAGE Google Sitemap Automator will feature an all new way to ensure that your sitemap.xml files are recognized by all major search engines including MSN.

RAGE Domainer 1.1 has just been released. This free update for registered users adds the following new features and enhancements;

[NEW] Full support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
[NEW] Support for additional top-level domains (.in,.cn,.cz,.se)
[NEW] Now remembers list column sizes
[NEW] Clicking AlexaRank loads Alexa.com’s web site
[FIX] Importing CSV domain lists
[FIX] Correctly assigns owner details

RAGE Domainer is the only web developer’s tools for Mac OS X that lets users easily track and manage their domain names while getting an overview of a domain’s popularity and value.

RAGE Domainer 1.1 can be downloaded from the Domainer download page.

RAGE Domainer can be purchased for just $39.95 from RAGE Software’s secure online store.

Anchor text refers to the link captions you click when you travel from web page to web page and is commonly blue and underlined. Anchor text is an extremely important factor in your on-page optimization strategies.

Broadly speaking, search engines see anchor text as a description of the page they link too. So for example if you link to a web page using the anchor text “About Blue Widgets” search engines will use this information to help understand the content on the linked-to web page.

Do a Google search for “Click Here”. As the number 1 search result you will see a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page. This is because so many web sites will say something like: “You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here to download it”. Even though the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page does not contain the text”Click Here” anywhere on the web page, it still ranks highly for this search term because of the web sites that link to it.

Keep this in mind when you link to other pages on your web site as well as any third party web pages. Instead of using the caption “click here”, try being more descriptive about the content the user is about to see. Lets say you are linking to another page which shows off a software application that verifies web site links are working correctly;

Inefficient & Generic Anchor Text

“Click here”
“More Information”
“Click here for more information”

Better Anchor Text
“Easily Check For Broken Links”
“Download Marketing Success E-book”

You don’t want to overdue this technique and sometimes it is appropriate to use a non-descriptive caption such as “click here”. However, when you can, try to make your anchor text more descriptive so that not only search engines know more about the content on the next page, but your web site visitors will be better informed as well.

There is one more important reason to using descriptive anchor text. If you do a search for a popular term such as “Apple Computers”, you may notice the extra links underneath the top result in Google’s search index as shown below;

Google automatically determines whether or not to show these additional links based on a number of factors. It is not known exactly when these links will appear but since they are generated using a computer algorithm and with no human intervention at all, you must make sure your web site is properly optimized so that they have the potential of showing your most important pages in the supplemental links section of your search engine rankings.

If you want to have these additional links show up, make sure you use consistent and descriptive anchor text in your inbound links for your most important pages such as a product information page or an online store.

Recently, Google updated their Webmaster Tools to provide more flexibility and control with these supplemental links. If you have created your XML Sitemap with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator you should already have a Webmaster Tools account. You can use the Webmaster Tools admin area to set which links you would not want to appear as an additional link. This is a fairly new feature that lets you have a little more flexibility with your web site’s search engine listing.

RAGE Domainer was reviewed on episode #130 on MacReviewCast.com.

“[Domainer], aimed at webmasters, provides a great way to see information about all of your domains all from within one interface. The UI is intuitive and extremely easy to use … The app shows various page ranking statistics as well as some basic stats about incoming links. This makes it useful if you want to quickly check performance of multiple domains.”

Check out MacReviewCast.com for more great software reviews, software discounts and the latest in Mac news.