Mac SEO Blog

Update: The SEO for RapidWeaver Walkthrough Video Tutorial has been released. The tutorial will walk you through the entire process for optimizing your RapidWeaver website. The tutorial will be a huge time saver as it will teach you about the SEO methods, while also showing you how to accomplish them very quickly.

Optimizing a RapidWeaver website for search engines can be challenging, but can also be fairly easy when you know what to do, how to do it, and where it can be done.

Whether you are a beginner to RapidWeaver, or you’ve been using it for a long time, search engine optimization (SEO) can be a brand new subject to many webmasters. This article is meant to push you in the right direction for making your RapidWeaver website more search engine friendly. Read each step carefully, and follow the tips and advice accordingly.

Page Titles

Page titles (also known as ‘Title Tags’) are one of the most important SEO elements. They can really give search engines a great understanding of what a website is about. Page titles are found at the top of your web browser. A good page title is keyword rich and accurately depicts the content of each web page.

Changing your page titles in RapidWeaver is very easy to do. Simply highlight the page that you wish to update, and click on the Page Info button in the top right corner of RapidWeaver.

Under the General tab, locate the Browser Title field box, and enter your title tag. Remember to repeat this process for all of the pages on your website.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when making your title tags:

1. Do not make your title tags excessively long
2. Make sure your title tag is relevant to the actual page
3. Each page should have a unique title tag

Did you know?

Your title tag is not only important for search engine optimization, but it is also very important for getting users to click on your website in the search results? The title tag also appears as the clickable link in the search results, making it an important factor for encouraging visitors to go to your site. An uninteresting title tag will certainly turn away potential visitors, while an attractive, and relevant title tag will surely increase your traffic.

Page Description

The page description, much like the title tag, can be a very important factor for getting visitors to click on your website in the search results. A large majority of the snippets you see beneath the title tag in the search results come from the page description.  Because of this, it is very important for us to create exceptional page descriptions that are keyword rich and are convincing to people who are viewing them in the search results.

To change your page description in RapidWeaver, highlight the page that you wish to update, and click on the Page Info button. Ensure that the Header tab is selected. The next thing you are going to do is press the ‘Plus’ button which is located on the right hand side of the window, almost half way down.

In the name field, type the word ‘description.’

In the content field, type in your desired page description. Remember to make the description enticing enough for visitors to be interested in going to your website and learning more.  Since every page on your website is unique, so should each page’s description. Keywords are bolded in the search engine snippet when they match up with the users search query, so make sure to use good keywords in your description.

Anchor Text

The text we use to link to other pages on our website (or to external sites) can play an important role for search engine optimization. You have probably seen many websites use the phrase “click here” when linking to one of their pages.

Using “click here” for the anchor is wasted opportunity. Whenever linking to pages within your website, it is best to use keyword rich anchor text. Search engines rely on anchor text to identify what a page may be about.

For example, let’s assume a website sells left handed golf clubs. There are many different websites linking to this website using the anchor text “Left handed golf clubs.” Search engines now know to relate this website to left handed golf clubs. The end result will be better rankings for this website for that exact phrase.

Alternative Text For Images

Image search engines have become increasingly popular over the years. While it may be difficult for search engines to understand what a picture is about, there are ways that we can help. Utilizing an images alt attribute can help us accomplish this. The benefit of this optimization is two-fold: Gaining more traffic from image searches, and being useful to users who are using browsers that do not support images.

In RapidWeaver, select an image, and then press the Media Inspector button. In the Alt Image field, type in your Alternative Text for your image. Remember to be descriptive, while not keyword stuffing. Avoid making your alt text misleading in any way.

Meta Keywords

While many people are aware that meta keywords are not important to Google, there still may be some search engines that do take this attribute into consideration. Because of this, it is always a good idea to add some keywords to every page of our website.

This process is going to be very similar to the page description process. Press the Page Info button, and make sure you are on the header tab. Press the ‘Plus’ button, and under the Name heading, type in ‘Keywords.’

In the content section, type in your keywords. Remember to separate each keyword or phrase with a comma. Do not add keywords or phrases which are irrelevant to your page. Keep this section to a minimum. Adding a bunch of keywords and phrases will not help your efforts. As an example, if this page was about left handed golf clubs, it wouldn’t make sense to add the phrase ‘Right handed golf clubs’ in the meta keywords. It would be more appropriate to save that phrase for your right handed golf clubs page.

Header Tags

In HTML, there are 6 header tags;

• H1
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5
• H6

H1 is the “highest” and H6 is the “lowest.”

In search engine optimization, text within an H1 tag lets search engines know that the webmaster considers that text to be important. This gives a good indication to search engines as to what the page may be about.

RapidWeaver does not offer the most flexible way for putting unique H1 tags on every page. Instead, we are able to add one H1 tag, and one H2 tag that is constant across all pages on our website.

Click on the Setup button.

On the General tab, the Title is where our H1 tag goes, and the Slogan is where our H2 tag goes.

There are ways around this header situation, however, they are beyond the scope of this tutorial. For the time being, place any keywords you feel are appropriate for a header consistent throughout your entire site. If a business name is most appropriate, then that is what you should put as the header.

Have you ever wanted to use your iWeb site to sell products or services? Maybe you want to start your own business and don’t know how to get started selling products online.

It’s actually very easy to set up an e-commerce store with iWeb and Paypal. The benefit of using Paypal is that you don’t need to worry about having a secure server, setting up a merchant account, fraud, chargebacks and everything else that comes along with accepting payments online.

Even if your customers don’t have paypal accounts, although many do, they can still use their credit cards to make a purchase online. You are notified instantly once the payment is added to your account.

We have posted a step by step video explaining how to add Paypal to your iWeb site so you can start selling online.

Building Trust Online

There are still many people who are nervous to purchase something online. Another benefit of using Paypal is people know they can trust them. But how can you let them know that they can trust you? Here are some tips for building trust online;

• Have a real domain name and avoid using your web.mac.com name if you are using MobileMe. Domain names are cheap, they only cost a few dollars a year, and they show you are serious about your online business. You can get a business domain name here.
• If you are using MobileMe to host your website, be aware that it is not meant for business websites, just personal sites. Consider a real web host for faster servers, the ability to handle an increasing number of visitors and more options with what you can do with your website (see for example our URL shortening video for iWeb sites.
• Include a privacy policy so your customers know what information you collect from them and how you use their information.
• Include your address and an easy way for customers to contact you.
• If possible, provide some kind of money back guarantee. If your products are good, you shouldn’t expect many people to want a refund.
• Remember that search engines are always the best way to at attract new and targeted customers to your website. Check out our step by step SEO for iWeb instructional course which provides a complete walkthrough on how to optimize your website.

Introduction

1. Becoming familiar with the MailShoot interface

Mailing Lists

1. How to setup your first mailing list in MailShoot

2. Learning about the mailing list window

3. Creating a subscribe page

4. Embedding a sign up form on an iWeb site
4.1 Embedding a sign up form on a RapidWeaver site
4.2 Embedding a sign up form on a Sandvox site

5. Importing subscribers who signed up on your subscribe page

Compose

1. How to compose a message in MailShoot

Send Mail

Filtering subscribers to only send mail to certain users

A More Powerful MailShoot

Effortlessly Increase Mailing List Sign Ups By 300%

Google has just announced that they will include Twitter updates in their search results.

This means you can now get up to the minute tweets in when doing a search in Google. So when you search for a current event, you can get the latest tweets from twitter users.

This also means, that if you have not yet done so, now is a good time to set up your twitter account and start tweeting about your business, products and website. Don’t forget to follow ragesw on twitter for more search engine tips and tricks.

We get many of the same error reports for iWeb SEO Tool. You may have received these error messages after getting a message saying you don’t have permission to copy files to your Applications folder when trying to copy iWeb SEO Tool to your Applications folder.

Once you try and launch iWeb SEO Tool, you will continue to get a dialog box asking you to report an issue to us.

The reason this happens is because you are trying to copy a new version of iWeb SEO Tool to your Applications folder while your current version is still running.

Before installing a new version of iWeb SEO Tool, quit any open version you have first and then copy the new version to your Applications folder. If you do not do this, you will receive continuous error messages.

Yesterday we updated our forums and support systems as well as our server software. If you had trouble accessing our forums or our support pages, this is the reason.

If you tried to email us you may have received a PHP error or a bounced email. Both of these issues have now been fixed. If you do not receive a reply from us, please feel free to email us again or post to our discussion forums as some emails may have been lost.

We are catching up on support issues now.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. With the new updates, hopefully this will never happen again.

Earlier this month, Google launched their redesigned Google Local Business Center making it extremely easy for businesses to advertise, for free, in Google.

Google Local Business Center makes it extremely easy for small businesses to get their website into Google’s search results, along with specific and important information about their business. For example, you can specify your hour of operations, your exact location which provides searchers with driving directions, contact information and even customized coupons.

With the all new Google Business Center you now get a wealth of information about your potential customers. You can

1. Find our the exact search term they used to find you
2. Find out where they are located at how far they travelled to you
3. Find out how often your business listing appeared in Google’s search results
4. Find out how many times a customer clicked through to your website for more information on your business

All this information is provided for you on the new Google Business Center dashboard, complete with daily activity for your listings.

Daily summary of activity for your Google Business Center listing

Total Stats for your Business Listing

Check out this promotional video to see how Google Local Business Center can help your business grow.

Note: Google Local Business Center is only for US business right now but will be expanding to more countries shortly.

Nobody likes visiting a slow loading website. Websites that take a long time to load (more than 5 seconds) are losing out on potential visitors. Studies have shown that visitors will wait no more than 8 seconds on average for a page to load. But did you know that search engines won’t wait for pages to load either?

Google in particular does not like slow loading websites. In fact, if you are using adwords to promote your site, the speed of your website’s load time is used as a Quality Factor to help determine your cost-per-click and your ad position.

Even more important however, is that your website’s load time will effect how many of your pages Google will index. Take a look at the following graphs taken from Google Webmaster Tools. The bottom graph shows the time spent downloading a page while the middle graph shows the number of kilobytes downloaded per day and the top graph shows the number of pages crawled per day.

You can easily see that as the time spent downloading pages went up Google indexed LESS pages. There is a clear inverse relationship between download time and number of pages indexed.

How do you check your own site?

You can check this for your own site by creating an XML Sitemap file and checking the Crawl Stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

How do you fix this?

Fortunately there is a very easy way to fix this. You need to reduce the size of your website and you can easily do this with WebCrusher website optimizer. WebCrusher will instantly optimize your site by removing unneeded website code and compressing image files. Then it can automatically publish your site directly to your webserver whether your are using an actual web host or MobileMe/iDisk to host your site.

In just 5 minutes you can have a faster website, that loads as quickly as possible for your visitors and insures Google and other search engines can properly scan and index all of your webpage files.

You also want to make sure that you are using a fast web hosting service to host your site. If you are a MobileMe/iDisk user it may be time to change to a fast and reliable web hosting service.

Macworld was a tremendous success for RAGE Software this year. We had the opportunity to provide a presentation for Xsilva LightSpeed Resellers on how to apply search engine optimization strategies to their small business, talked with a record number of attendees and customers during the show, and had the opportunity to check out the San Francisco hot spots.

SEO Presentation at Xsilva’s Day Camp

Our week started with an in depth presentation on search engine optimization for Xsilva LightSpeed POS resellers and users. We provided specific search engine optimization strategies and demoed our LightSpeed Web Store SEO Add-ons. The Day Camp presentation took place at the Westin St-Francis hotel.

Exhibiting at Macworld 2009: New SEO Software for Mac OS X

Starting early Tuesday morning we got to speak with hundreds of new and existing customer’s interested in promoting their websites in search engines and learning about our web development software and all new web hosting services for Mac users.

We updated the following software for Macworld 2009:
Sitemap Automator 2.0 which includes a totally redesigned user interface, support for robots.txt file, the ability to report potential indexing errors on your site and the ability to remember the details you have set for each page after re-scanning your website for new content. Sitemap Automator is now the most complete, and fastest way to create and update your XML Sitemaps on any platform.

WebCrusher 1.4 which significantly improves optimizations of cascading style sheets, iWeb based websites and more. Watch for all new, feature packed updates coming soon!

SERank 1.9 includes improved reporting features, new exporting options for importing into Excel or Numbers and a number of bug fixes.

Check out some of the highlights from show;

Macworld After Parties and Sponsorships

Macworld isn’t complete without the after parties. This year, RAGE Software sponsored the popular MacMingle party at Jillian’s restaurant. The party was a tremendous success once again and we were happy to speak with customers and press outside of the busy show floor.

We are pleased to announce major updates to our search engine optimization software suite for Mac OS X. The updates include new versions of a number of our products including Sitemap Automator, WebCrusher and SERank.

Sitemap Automator
The only way to get your website recognized by all major search engines, Sitemap Automator 2.0 now lets you easily manage an unlimited number of websites. In addition, it can easily show you potential search engine crawling errors on your website, supports robot.txt files and offers improved support for iWeb built websites.

This 2.0 update is the first paid upgrade since the initial release back in 2005. If you purchased before May 1, 2008 you can purchase an update for just $19.95 USD. If you purchased after May 1, 2008 then you can get your free upgrade serial number from http://www.ragesw.com/getupdate.php

WebCrusher
Optimize your website so they load as fast as possible for your visitors. At the click of a button, WebCrusher can take any website and intelligently remove unneeded code and compress images making the website load as quickly as possible in any web browser. This free update to version 1.4 includes enhanced CSS optimizations and improved iWeb optimizations.

SERank
See exactly where your website ranks in over 60 search engines for your most popular keywords. Discover who ranks higher than you and how you can rise above them to get the number one spot on all major search engines. Version 1.9 adds enhanced reporting features, new exporting options with compatibility with Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers, as well as includes important bug fixes.

If you will be attending Macworld Expo 2009 please stop by our booth at #1744 and we would be happy to talk with your about our software and these updates.