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.

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.

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

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.

The three add-ons include;

1) RAGE SEO Add-on
Makes sure your Web Store is properly optimized for search engines by creating dynamic title and meta tags for your product pages.

2) RAGE Google Base Add-on
Gets your products listed in Google’s Product search engine so customers will see your inventory listed in Google’s search index within 48 hours along with a detailed description and price information.

3) RAGE Google Analytics Add-on
Links your e-commerce web store with Google Analytics so you can see where your customers are coming from, how they use your website, and who your most profitable customers are.

More information on the add-ons can be found on the LightSpeed SEO Add-on page.

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.

iWeb websites are not made to be search engine friendly. In fact, almost all iWeb based websites that we get are really hurting their search engine rankings. If you follow these few simple instructions, you will see some significant improvements.

1) iWeb Page Titles

As of iWeb 08, most built in templates have a large header caption at the top of the page. Your website’s title tag will actually reflect what you enter here. Many users simply keep this as the default caption, not utilizing the most important on-page optimization you can use for search engines.

The trick is to give your page a title that includes both the keywords you want to appear for in search engines and that accurately describes your website content. Your web page title appears at the very top of your web browser, and in a search engines results page. Search engines use your title tag to get an idea of what they will find on your website.

For templates without these header captions, or if you remove the caption, iWeb will use your page file name as its title. Below is a screen shot of your iWeb Inspector window which lets you edit the file name of your selected web page. Give it a good title using the advice we provided above.

2) Navigation bars

One of the biggest problems with iWeb is the way it creates your navigation bars. Instead of using standard HTML which search engines can use to correctly find all files on your website, it uses Javascript which makes it extremely hard for search engines to scan and index your website properly.

Fortunately there is a way you can work around this problem. Select your main page (or the first page that contains your navigation bar) and open the Inspector window. Click the Page Inspector tab (second tab) and deselect the option ‘Display Navigation Bar’ as shown in the following screen shot;

Now you’re going to create your own navigation bar with proper links to each of your pages. Create a new Text Box field and place it at the top of your page, while moving all your other content down. To quickly move all content down, go to Edit - Select All. Hold the shift key as you drag all your content down which will help insure you don’t accidentally move the content off center. Put the new Text Box at the top of your page and add captions for each of your pages separated using tabs or spaces so that they look like a proper navigation bar. Then select each caption and go to the ‘Link Inspector’ tab in the Inspector window. Select ‘Enable as a hyperlink’ and choose ‘One of My Pages’ from the ‘Link To’ drop down menu. Lastly select the page you want to link to from the ‘Page’ drop down menu.

Although you should do this for each of your pages for best results, insuring you do it on your main page only is extremely helpful for search engines.

This is the main reason why RAGE Sitemap Automator will not automatically find all web pages on your site. Once you do this, RAGE Sitemap Automator, as well as all search engines, will be able to properly find all pages on your website.

*Note: If you do not want to do this but want search engines to be able to find all of your webpages, add your web pages manually in RAGE Sitemap Automator and submit your XML sitemap to search engines. You only have to do this once.

3) The Right Content

One of the biggest issues I see with iWeb created websites is users choosing non-standard web fonts for their website. Just to provide some background information, there are a number of fonts that are considered safe for use on the web. These are fonts that are guaranteed to be installed on a users computer no matter what operating system or web browser they use. If a font is not installed on a users computer and you use it on your website, it will not display properly for them. iWeb works around this issue by turning your text into pictures if you use a non-standard font. This is why your webpage always looks the same no matter where you view it. Unfortunately, search engines can not ‘read’ text that is turned into pictures and this will severely impact your potential search engines rankings.

You must stick to the standard web fonts, which are listed below for you. This insures that your website has the best possible chance of ranking high for the keywords you are targeting.

Web safe fonts include;

• Arial
Courier New
• Georgia
• Times New Roman
• Verdana
• Trebuchet MS
• Helvetica

*Note: Some of the above fonts may not always be installed on a persons computer but will be easily replaced with a very similar looking alternative if they can not be found. That is why they have all been included in the above list.

You want to make sure that your website content contains the keywords you want to rank high for in search engines. It’s not good enough to “be in search engines”, you want to appear when a potential customer types in one of your keywords. Search Engines will not know what your webpage is about unless you include the proper keywords in your web page content.

4) iWeb Landing Pages

Lastly, something I see very often is users making a so called “landing page” as their home page. This is the type of page where it may simply show your company logo with a “Click here to enter link”. Basically anything that requires a user to take one more step in order to see your website is never a good thing.

This applies to search engines as well. Your home page is considered your most important page by default so make sure you are taking full advantage of it. Link to other important pages directly from your home page and make sure it includes keyword rich content.

In the next post I will go over some iWeb misconceptions as well as some search engine misconceptions that can typically affect iWeb users.

Remember, search engines will not simply choose your site out of the billions out there and rank them at the top of their search index unless you give them good reason too. Getting high in search engines for the keywords your customers are searching for can be extremely profitable to you and will take some time to achieve. Don’t expect immediate results and keep learning about the strategies you can employ to get high rankings.

Download our Free Mac SEO Guide to learn how you can get higher rankings with your iWeb websites.

As we all know a search engine allows potential visitors to find your website amongst billions of others fighting for attention. Much like search engines, online directories provide another way for web searchers to find your Websites.

The following table summarizes the differences between search engines and online directories.

There are a countless number of online directories with one of the largest being DMOZ, a not-for-profit directory that relies on volunteer editors to determine whether or not a website should be added to the directory.

Directories can also be specific to certain subjects, for example there are directories that will focus only on Small Businesses, or directories like VFunk which specializes in listing dance music and urban lifestyle related websites.

Directories can provide a great way to get incoming links to your website, and some, like DMOZ can actually help your search engine rankings. Since directories review each web page before adding them, a well respected directory can help signify a high quality website to potential visitors and search engines.

The trick to getting links in directories is too find the directories that focus on your niche, and that would actually provide value to your link popularity. Many directories charge a one-time, monthly, or yearly fee to get listed so you have to make sure that they will actually provide enough value to justify the investment. Unfortunately, many of them will not. However, here are some indicators to find out whether or not they will actually be a valuable investment;

Page Rank: Don’t confuse Page Rank with search engine rank. Page Rank is a website popularity measure invented by Google that ranges by 1-10. It tries to measure the popularity of website based on how many people link to a website. A high PageRank signifies a more popular website with higher quality incoming links. If a directory has a high PageRank, this is one indication that they will provide value.

Incoming Links: Incoming links refers to how many other websites are linking to the directory. Combined with the above measure, the number of incoming links can provide a good indication of the quality of a directory. The more incoming links a directory has, the better indication that it will provide better value to you. Remember, that each incoming link counts as a vote for a website, so the more votes a directory has, the more value it will provide.

Domain Age & Expiration Dates: The longer a directory has been online for and the longer the directory domain name has been registered for is a good indication of its quality. Many people start online directories in the hopes of creating advertising and sign up revenue. Only a few will ever provide any kind of value for your website. A person’s commitment to their directory can be seen by how long they have paid to make it available.

You can quickly and easily find all the above information in seconds for dozens of directories at a time. Just enter each directory in RAGE Domainer to find all the above popularity statistics as well as other important information including;

• Who is tagging the directory on the social bookmarking website http://www.delicious.com
• How many blogs are linking back to the directory

With this information you can easily see which directories you should be listed in, and which directories will be a waste of time submitting too.

We started on Sunday with a presentation on search engine optimization at Xsilva’s Daycamp in front of around 60 Lightspeed resellers. We demoed some of our software and how it can help with search engine rankings and bringing in new website traffic.

The show went very well for us, with a lot of existing and new customers checking out our products. We released updates to RAGE Domainer and RAGE SERank with lots of great new features.

The feedback we received for our software was great! Customers were really blown away with some of the features they didn’t know were available to them. People really liked seeing the statistics in RAGE Domainer and got a few surprises when they entered in their website.

All in all I think it was an amazing show. We received a tremendous amount of feedback, made some great connections and got some very favorable media coverage. We doubled our booth size for next year (we are going 10 by 20) and can’t wait to do it again!

Now is your chance to give us your feedback in person. We will be providing free search engine rank reports and custom web site consulting. Just come by our booth with your web site and questions ready.

We will also be demoing new software updates and showing off what we have planned for 2008 and beyond.

We have been provided with a limited number of free Exhibit Hall passes. Join the MacWorld Expo community pages then join our RAGE Software group and I will personally send you a free Exhibit Hall pass. If you sign up, just post a message on my account that you would like the pass or send an email through our support department so I know you need one.

If you miss out on the above offer IDG has also provided us with $10 off the registration fee for an Exhibit Hall pass.

Judging from last year, MacWorld 2008 will be a tremendous success with new products, parties and mingling with other Mac users. We truly look forward to meeting with you and hearing how you have used our software. More details on the event can be found at: http://www.ragesw.com/ragesw-at-macworld-2008/

If you have any questions before the show, feel free to send an email to support.