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.

We were extremely pleased to find RAGE Domainer chosen as a Staff Pick on Apple’s Mac OS X download pages. It joins RAGE Google Sitemap Automator and RAGE MapDesign on Apple’s Staff Pick list.

Check it out here: Domainer on Apple’s Staff Pick List.

We are extremely happy to finally release version 1.0 of Domainer, a new application for web site owners, marketers and investors to track and manage their domain names.

Domainer is the first, and as of this writing, the only tool for the Mac that gives an overview of a web site’s popularity using Google PageRank, AlexaRank, incoming back links and social tags. With Domainer, you can quickly, and easily, see all important domain details in one easy to use application.

Use RAGE Domainer to manage your domains, track and beat the success of your competitors, and find profitable web sites to buy and sell.

A free download of Domainer can be found here. Domainer is available for purchase immediately through the RAGE Software secure online store for just $39.95 USD.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Come discuss your thoughts, feature suggestions and any questions you may have for Domainer on the RAGE Discussion forum.

Here is a feature that many users may not know about in RAGE WebDesign. You can quickly add a table with any number of rows and columns without doing any typing or using any of the wizards.

First, go to the Preferences and select the ‘Toolbar’ tab. Scroll the list until you see Table Creator. Make sure it is selected and close the Preferences window.

Then, go to the window menu and and select ‘Toolbar…’ to show the WebDesign Toolbar. You will see the Table Creator button as shown below. Click it to reveal a popup window that makes it extremely easy to insert a table with the selected number of rows and columns.

After last weeks video showing how to integrate RAGE MapDesign with Rapidweaver, we got more requests asking how to integrate RAGE ButtonDesign with Rapidweaver. So we have just completed this video tutorial which explains step by step how to do this.

If you have any further questions, feel free to post them on the RAGE Discussion Forum.

For the past 8 years we have been providing software that makes it really easy for Mac users to design beautiful web sites. We started with RAGE WebDesign, the best Mac Web Development tool back in early 2000. Than we released RAGE ButtonDesign and RAGE MapDesign to make it really easy to add professional looking graphics and add some really cool effects to your web site. We even released 15 beautiful CSS based templates for users who need a little inspiration when designing their web sites.

Now we are entering a new segment in the web development arena. In 2005 we released RAGE Google Sitemap Automator to help web developers get their web site listed in major search engines. This was a huge hit with our customers as they loved the ability to not only get their sites listed in search engines really easily, but the added feedback provided by Google’s Webmaster Tools has enabled users to obtain an edge over their competition.

Today we are announcing beta versions of two awesome new web promotional tools. Never before has their been a native Mac application as robust and beautiful looking as our new Mac SEO Tools. So Today we are proud to announce the beta versions of;

Domainer - The only tool for Mac that lets you easily track and compare multiple web sites in one easy to use interface. Domainer provides important SEO details including Google PageRank, AlexaRank, Incoming Links and Number of Social tags in addition to key Domain details such as expiration and creation dates, domain owners, FTP details and hosting information.

RAGE SERank - Check your web site ranking in over 40 search engines. Now you can know exactly where your web site appears in search engines for the keywords you are targeting. Plus, you can easily see which one of your competitors ranks above you and easily track your search engine rankings over time. Built on a beautiful Mac interface, RAGE SERank is the first native search engine rank checker for the Mac.

You can sign up to beta test each application by creating a free beta testing account at the following URL;

Beta Test Here

Once logged in you will see the two applications listed. You can then request to beta test. Beta testers will receive a free license once the application is officially released.

We look forward to getting your feedback and hearing what you have to say.

So we have gotten a lot of emails asking whether or not RAGE MapDesign can easily be used with Rapidweaver. It definitely can be, and it is actually quite easy. We have created a short movie to show exactly how it is done.

The point where most users were have trouble was due to specifying the correct paths to your image files. The following tutorial will show how to add your interactive image maps to Rapidweaver. Although this shows how to add Effects based (CSS) image maps, adding purely HTML image maps can also be done easily. If you are having trouble with that, please feel free to contact support and we will be more than happy to walk you through it, and if necessary create an accompanying video.

Update: As of version 1.2 you no longer need to edit the files to rename the images directory to assets. Just go to the Preferences in RAGE MapDesign and select ‘Create Rapidweaver compatible image maps’. This will automatically use an assets folder instead of an images folder.

Recently Google updated their Webmaster Tools account with more data and a revamped Interface. Personally I find the new interface to be much easier to use.

The biggest addition is a web site feed subscriber stats section. You can see the subscriber stats from the Statistics tab.

The all new subscriber stats give you details about how many people subscribe to your web site feeds, such as RSS and atom feeds, through Google services. Although this won’t give you the total number of subscribers since not everyone is using Google tools to subscribe to your feeds, it does provide a nice overview and a gauge at how popular your feed actually is.

If you are unsure what a feed actually is, or you are interested in learning how to get more subscribers to your feeds through Google, there is a Google help page describing how to set up and track site feeds

If you don’t yet have a Google Webmaster Tools account, or have your XML sitemap up, do so now with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. XML Sitemaps help you get your web site indexed faster and more thoroughly, giving you much more control on how search engines find and index your web site.

Recently Yahoo performed a number of tests to determine what are the major factors to slow loading web pages and provides 13 useful tips to help improve your web page load time. Having fast loading web pages is important for a variety of reasons including;

1. It has been estimated that visitors will spend less than 8 seconds waiting for a page to load before going somewhere else

2. Search engine bots will be able to scan and index your web site faster

How does this relate to RAGE MapDesign? Well Yahoo found that the number one factor to speeding up page load time is too reduce the number of HTTP requests sent to your web server. A web browser sends a request to a web server for each image it must load according to your HTML code. Yahoo actually recommends creating one large image map instead of splitting up your images manually. And of course RAGE MapDesign is the faster and easiest way to create web site image maps.

This reduces the number of requests sent to your server and in return helps speed up your web page load time. You can read the 13 Tips To Faster Loading Web Pages at Yahoo’s developer web site.

Some tips get very creative so go through them to see what else you can do to help reduce the amount of time it takes web browsers to display your web site.