The meta description tag is a place where you can give a quick description of what is on your webpage. This isn’t a place to just pack in some keywords, but it is a great spot for you to write one or two sentences that really describe your page. It can also be thought of as a way of selling users on coming to your site. The reason for this is that sometimes, your description will show up in search engine results, right below the title tag here. So as you can see, this little blurb here reads “At Lefties Only, left handed golf clubs are our speciality.” If I were to click to go to this site, and then view the source code, we can see that that blurb actually came straight from the meta description. This isn’t always the case, but you have seen first hand how important it is to have a great description.
Again, it’s very easy to include your meta description in Sandvox. The box right below where we typed in our title tag is where we will type in our Meta description. You’ll want to try and limit the description to about 150 characters.
Google has gone on record to state that the accuracy of your meta description will not affect your rankings. The main purpose of the meta description is to try and improve click-through rates. Google also highly recommends that you avoid using identical, or very similar descriptions on every page of your site.
The title tag is one of the most important SEO elements, and it’s been that way for a while. The title tag consists of the keywords and phrases found at the top of your web browser when you are visiting a site. In search engine results, the title tag shows up as the clickable link to take you to that webpage. This means that you’ll want to try and include phrases that are catchy so that you inspire clicks.
Conveniently for Sandvox users, editing title tags is extremely easy to do. To edit a title tag, highlight the page that you want to edit, and bring your mouse over to the text box that says Window Title at the bottom of the application. Here is where you will type in your Title Tag.
When typing in your title tag, I want you to keep a few things in mind. First, make sure that the title tag relates to the content on the page. You should also be including some of the phrases you had written down when you did your keyword research. Lastly, include your most important words and phrases at the beginning of your title. This is because search engines such as Google, begin cutting off the title tag in search results at around 70 characters. You’ll notice as you type in your title tag in Sandvox, there is a number in the top right corner that tells you how many characters you are at. After 65 characters, the number will turn red, which will indicate to you that your title tag is getting too long. Ideally, you should create a unique title for every page on your website.
What’s really great about Sandvox, is that if you were to leave the title tag box blank, an auto-generated title tag will be created using a combination of your page name, and your site name.
In HTML, header tags are used by webmasters to display the headings on their pages. There are six types of header tags that can be used. What Sandvox users to need to know regarding header tags, is that there are 2 headers placed on each page. The first header is an h1, and is generally used for the title of the website. This header tag will remain constant from page to page on your website.
Another header tag, which is an h2 tag, is used as the title of the page and is located where the main part of the page begins. This is a great place for you to include a keyphrase that really illustrates what this particular page is about.
So for example, instead of having a header that reads something generic such as News, or Site Updates, take advantage of the header and give it a good keyword rich descriptive name. If this particular page is about Left Handed Golf Clubs, that is a phrase that might make a good header.
On a side note, an H3 tag is used when you are indexing content, so for example, the page title of a blog post, or photo page will show up with an H3 tag, so be sure to make keyword rich titles for those items.
In our social networking world, having a Facebook page for your business can be extremely important. In this video, we’re going to show you how you can add a Facebook ‘like’ button to your site in iWeb.
To add a Facebook Like, button to your iWeb website, first go to the Facebook Developers Like Button page. You can pause the video here and type in this URL, or you can do a search for the phrase Facebook Like Button and click on the result for the Facebook Developers Like Button page.
In the Step 1 – Get Like Button Code form, first enter the URL for your Facebook page. If you are unsure of what this URL is, you can visit your Facebook page, and copy and paste the URL into this field.
If you would like to include this Send button, you can leave this box checked, otherwise, you can remove it.
For Layout Style, go through each option and choose the one that you like best.
You can leave the width at 450, or you can change it if you’d like.
You can also choose to show the faces of people who have liked your page. That option looks like this on a webpage.
And lastly, you can pick your font and colour scheme that you would like to use.
When you are done, press the Get Code button, and highlight the code that pops up in the window.
Now let’s open up iWeb, and drag an HTML snippet onto our page. Paste the code that we just copied into this HTML Snippet. You should be able to see your Facebook Like or Recommend button, and you can resize it and move it to a location on your site that fits best.
And that is how you add a Facebook Like button to an iWeb website. Be sure to check out our other helpful iWeb tips and tricks videos which are located in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial or our iWeb SEO blog
Alternative image text, also known as alt tags or alt text, is an HTML attribute that is used to describe images. This attribute exists because an image may not always load in a browser, so in its place, the alt text will appear, letting the user know what should have shown up.
This attribute also gives us a good way of describing pictures to search engines, so that they can properly place them in image searches. In Sandvox, any image you place will automatically be given alternative text identical to the image file name. This is a great feature because it can save you a lot of time if you publish a lot of pictures and don’t feel like giving them all alt tags.
If you do, however, wish to make your alt text differ from the file name, click on the image and then press the Inspector button. Then press the Media tab which is the last tab all the way on the right. Here you can see the name of the image, which is something we spoke about in the Image Names video, and you can also see the field that says Alternate Text. Here is where you will type in your few words that describe the photo. You don’t need to worry about separating your words with dashes for this feature.
The site menu consists of all of these links, usually located at the top of each web page. The site menu is another good place for you to include some of your keyterms. So instead of having our menu links have text such as Home, Photos, or Links for example, we can make them more descriptive and include our keyterms in them.
To change the text of the site menu, you will need to change each page individually. Simply double click on the page name, and type in the term that you want to show in the site menu. You’ll be able to see the change take place immediately when you look at your site menu. Repeat this process for all of the pages included in your menu.
Some of the principles for the Page Names apply when you are naming the titles in your site menu. Do not make them too long. If you make the titles too long, it will not look very nice, and you risk having some of your page titles not fit in the menu. Try to use keyterms that are only one or two words in length.
Make sure that whatever you choose actually relates to the page it takes the user to, and that it is not a word that might confuse or mislead any of your visitors. Remember, in some cases, it might not be necessary to have a keyterm in the site menu. A link to a Contact Us page wouldn’t need to be any more descriptive than it already is, even though it’s a very generic term.
Check out the SEO For Sandvox Video Course to watch the entire course in a very easy-to-follow manner.
If you already have pages with poor filenames but are actually successful with search engines, do not change the filename as this will ruin your ranking. Just be sure to apply this optimization tip in the future.
When we begin adding different pages for our sites in Sandvox, they will show up in our site outline with names such as Photo, Untitled 1, Untilted 2. These page names are a great place for us to include our keyterms. To change your page name, you can highlight the page in the site outline, and then in the URL field at the bottom of the application, type in your new page name. A few tips when creating this page name. Don’t make it excessively long. You can only make it a maximum of 27 characters in Sandvox, which should be good for about 4 or 5 words, which seems like a good amount. Separate your words with dashes, as opposed to spaces or underscores. And finally, use a keyterm that is relevant to the content on the actual page.
Welcome to the SEO For Sandvox Video Course. This is the first of about 25 video tutorials in the SEO For Sandvox series. To view the entire video course in an easy-to-follow manner, please visit the SEO For Sandvox page.
Video Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the SEO For Sandvox video tutorial. My name is Jeremy, and over the next little while, I will be showing you how to properly optimize your Sandvox-made website so that you can have the best chance of ranking at the top of search engines.
This video is being provided to all Sandvox users for for free, courtesy of RAGE Software. We are providing this video to meet our goal to educate all owners of small businesses, so that they can have a better understanding of how to make their websites more visible to search engines and thus rank higher. In this video, I will be showing some of our software that will really help you during your optimization. You are not obligated to purchase the software, however, you will see how the applications can really make your life easier, and we encourage you to purchase anything you like, and help further support our goal.
So what is search engine optimization? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of attracting more visitors through search engines. You will notice how I do not define SEO as having a top ranked site. This is because even if you have a site that ranks at the top of all search engines, there is no guarantee that searchers are typing in the specific keywords you rank for and will even click your website in the search results. In this series of tutorials, we will cover the basics of how to discover highly searched key-terms and how to determine which ones are best to target.
These tutorials have been created to help you to understand the major optimizations, and how to implement them on your site. With so much information available on the web, search engine optimization can seem very confusing and time consuming to learn. These tutorials are to-the-point, and allow you to visualize what needs to be done, so that you can have a better understanding at a much quicker pace than if you had to sift through a 400 page book.
Sandvox makes the process of optimizing our sites for search engines quite simple. If you are unsure of what the proper techniques for optimization are, then this tutorial will definitely help you. Having the background knowledge of what search engines recommend, is a must if we want to have our optimizations go smoothly.
SEO is a process that we must go through in order to achieve our desired results. It is not something you do once and just forget about. It’s a form of marketing and if you want to keep on improving your chances at success and growing your business it is something you will constantly evaluate. Remember, if SEO were an easy thing to do, every site would be number one in search engines which is simply impossible.
This video will be broken down into three stages. The first stage, called the Planning stage, will be the briefest. We will go over a couple of things that we should do before we even begin optmizing our website. The second stage will be the on-page optimization stage. This is where we will be looking at the different methods for making our actual site more search engine friendly. On-page optimizations are only a portion of the battle to gain more traffic, but they are essentially the building blocks for your SEO campaign. The third and final stage will be the off-page optimizations. Off-page optimizations are an extremely important part of our attempt at gaining a positive reputation for our sites, as well as a means for gaining additional traffic from other places on the web.
The video will be shown in step-by-step format. This does not mean that you must follow this plan perfectly, but it is setup that way so that those who require this type of instruction still have that opportunity.
Remember, if you have any questions or do not understand one or more of the concepts, you can start a thread in our SEO forums, or submit a ticket through our support system.
In our effort to ensure all website owners are given the opportunity to learn search engine optimization (SEO) and how to apply it to their website correctly, these video courses will now give Sandvox and RapidWeaver users the ability to learn at their own pace, and have a much better understanding of ways of driving more traffic to their websites.
The SEO Video Courses will train users on the basics of search engine optimization, and give them step-by-step instructions on how to apply it to their site, taking away all of the guess work. Our instructions are based on Google’s recommendations for making a more search engine friendly website.
The courses go above and beyond, giving users additional how-to tips, as well as introducing RAGE Software applications, and showing users the benefits of using these applications to make your optimization process a lot smoother.
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