In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can verify your website with Pinterest, using Sitemap Automator.
One thing I want everyone to keep in mind is that sites such as Pinterest are constantly changing their user interfaces, so if you are watching this video and some things you see here are not matching up with what you see in your web browser, don’t worry, the same principles will apply even if things are in different locations.
So the first thing you will need to do is sign up for a Pinterest account. We’re going to skip over that part as that is something you will be able to do on your own.
Once logged in, click on your username in the top right corner, and select settings. Next, scroll down a bit to where it says Website. Make sure your website URL has been entered, and the spelling is correct. Then click on Verify Website.
Step one says to Download the verification file. Click on the download link to download the file. Make sure you only download this file one time. Some users tend to download it multiple times by accident. When doing this, you will end up with multiple files of the same name in the Downloads folder, and the file will get renamed causing this process to not work. So I will just repeat, do not download this verification file more than once.
Next, launch Sitemap Automator. Click on File and select Publish Verification File.
Click on the Select Verification File button to locate your verification file. Highlight the verification file and then click on the Open button. Quickly just double check to make sure that your verification file name matches up the file name on the Pinterest page.
Now we can proceed by clicking on the Publish to FTP button. Next, enter all your FTP login information. Just to make sure our login information is correct, let’s click on the Browse button. No error message appears and I am able to see some files and folders for my server, so I will proceed by closing this window and clicking on the Upload button.
Once the upload is complete, I will return to that Pinterest page and click on the Click here to complete the process button. My verification file has been accepted and I can see here that my site has been vitrified with Pinterest.
A recent hot topic of discussion involves ‘back links’ and how they might affect your website’s rankings. Most of you who are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) know that back links are an important part of your SEO efforts. Search engines, especially Google, use back links to influence how sites get ranked in their results.
This Google change can be somewhat confusing for some users. Determining what constitutes a low quality back link is up for interpretation. Should users stop trying to get back links, or should users do things differently when trying to get back links? These types of questions and more will be addressed in this Do’s and Don’ts of back links.
Don’t
Don’t use software, or pay someone else to use software to automatically get your site a large amount of back links. These methods are unethical techniques and can result in your site being subjected to Google’s new update, which could lead to a decrease in rankings.
Don’t focus on one key term for every anchor text used. Anchor text is the text in the clickable link that users can click on to be taken to the linked page. A variety of anchor text is a more natural way for a site to obtain links.
Don’t focus on the quantity of links. High quality links can go much further than obtaining many links from low quality sources. It can also look a bit suspicious if one day you have 25 back links and the next day you have 25,000. Google has ways of recognizing these things. These methods can result in a site’s rankings to drop.
Do
Do continue contributing on forums and other social networking sites (including Facebook, Twitter, blog comments etc.). If you have something valuable to add to any conversation, including a link to your site, continue participating and placing your link. While some forums may be considered low quality by some search engine’s standards, it is still a good idea to communicate with your community and drive traffic to your site. Your rankings will not be harmed by this.
Continue communicating with other web masters who might benefit from a link swap with you. If both of your sites have something good to offer, then it is always a good idea to continue exchanging links. Just be careful not to exchange links with sites that might not be helpful for you. Do research on a site before agreeing to link to it.
Try to spread your links across several domains. In other words, don’t just keep getting links from the same website.
Continue writing high quality articles with keywords linking back to your site. Just make sure that the site(s) you are posting the articles to are high quality sites. The same rule applies for press releases.
To summarize, the important thing to keep in mind is to always use common sense when determining if a linking technique might harm your site. If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is. Focus on making your website have great content and the links will naturally roll in.
So you have a mailing list sign up form set up on your website, but are you getting enough users to notice it and willingly give you their email addresses?
A very good way of collecting user’s email addresses is to offer them something in return for signing up to your mailing list. This popular strategy is widely used across many sites on the web.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you a way of setting up your mailing list created using MailShoot to automatically deliver the free item when the user confirms their subscription.
This tutorial will assume you already have your mailing list set up. If you do not have your mailing list set up, or you are new to MailShoot and want to learn how to do everything from start to finish, visit this page to view our other training tutorials.
The first thing you will need is to have your free gift handy. Since we are dealing with the internet and computers, we will need to have our gift be in digital form. For my example, the gift I am offering is this PDF that I have here on my desktop.
Now, I will open up my web browser to ge.tt which is a website that allows users to upload files to share with others. All I will do is drag and drop my PDF onto the screen here. This might be different depending on which web browser you are using.
When the upload has completed, we will be given a link to access the item that was just uploaded. What you will need to do is now copy that URL.
Now, in MailShoot, open up your mailing list, or click on the Subscribe Page button. Then select the Messages tab. On this page, here is where you will paste the link that we just copied. You can write a message next to the link to let the user know that this link is where they will find the free gift that was promised. When you are done, click the Publish button.
Now when users sign up to your mailing list, and then confirm the subscription, they will see this Welcome message and will be able to download your free gift using that link.
For more website tips and tricks, please subscribe.
This video tutorial is going to show you the proper way to load an iWeb site in WebCrusher. This tutorial can be used with any version of iWeb.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This tutorial is going to show you how you can use WebCrusher with any version of iWeb.
The first thing you need to do is export your website from iWeb to a local folder on your hard drive.
If you are using the latest version of iWeb, which is iWeb 09, or iWeb 3 then you will publish your website by clicking on your site name in the top left corner, which will bring up the publish page. Then select Local Folder from the drop down menu.
Choose the location on your hard drive to publish your website to. For simplicity, I like to choose the Desktop. This also ensures that my URL will be a short URL and not a long URL.
Next, click on File in the menu bar, and select Publish Entire Site.
If you are using an older version of iWeb, then you will just click on File in the menu bar and select the option that says Publish to a Folder. You will also need to select the location on your hard drive where you want to publish to. Then you will need to enter your website’s URL and click choose.
Next, locate the folder that you just published from iWeb, and drag and drop it onto the WebCrusher window. Click the Go button, and let WebCrusher optimize your site.
One of our most popular video tutorials is shortening your iWeb URL. In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to shorten your iWeb URL, but also learn how to get rid of the home page site redirect. For an illustration of this, watch the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to never miss out on an important video.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how you can make your iWeb URL not forward to the site name and first page name.
To illustrate what I mean, here is what a typical iWeb URL looks like after typing in the domain name. Notice how ragesw.net turns into ragesw.net/jeremys_golf_shop/clubs.html
Where do each of these part of this URL come from? This part of the URL, the domain name, is the obvious one, as this is what the user selects and purchases when registering a domain. This second part is the Site Name, and it comes from this section of the iWeb publish page. You will also notice it right above the pages in the column on the left. This part of the domain, is the page name. It comes from the name you give to your page in the menu on the left hand side.
So to just give you a bit of background on the way all of this works, whenever you publish an iWeb site, you will see three things right away. The assets file, the site folder, which will have your site name and contain all of your website’s files, and an index.html file. When these items get published to your server, and you subsequently type in your domain name in your web browser, your server will default to the index.html file, which then has a line of code instructing the browser to forward to the first page of your website. That first page of your website is located within the other folder which is labeled with your site name.
Now that we know how all of it works, let’s change it so that our URLs are shorter, and the browser doesn’t forward when we type our domain name into a web browser. In other words, we’re going to change it so that when you type in your domain name in your web browser, all you will see is the domain. Then, when you click to go to a subsequent page on the site, you will only see the domain and the page name. This is the normal way the most websites operate.
I want to quickly mention that doing this will change the structure of your URL, so if your site ranks in search engines and is giving you traffic, then changing this might hurt those rankings.
The first thing we’re going to do is change the name of the first page of our website to index. Make sure you type it in just like I have done. You will notice how I used only lower case letters, and there are no extra characters or spaces. This is an extremely important step, so make sure you have followed the instructions as I just outlined.
There is one other drawback to this. When we change the page name to index, it will show up in our navigation menus. If you’ve watch some of our other tutorials, you will remember how I recommend users to disable the navigation menu that iWeb makes, and create your own. Once again, I will recommend doing this, but if you don’t want to, just make sure you at least take this main page out of the navigation menu by clicking on the Inspector button, clicking on the Page tab, and then un-tick the Include Page In Navigation Menu option. If you want your home page to still have a link in your menu bar, you can add it via a text link, or via an image linked to the homepage. This part is entirely up to you, but I recommend removing the word index from your navigation menu as it might confuse many of your visitors.
Our next step is to publish the site to a local folder on our hard drive. To make things as easy as possible, let’s publish the site directly to our desktops. When I say directly to the desktop, I don’t mean in a folder on the desktop, but rather directly on the desktop.
When we do this, we’re going to see those three items that I mentioned earlier; the assets file, the site folder, and the index.html file.
All we are going to do, is publish just the contents of the site folder. You can do this by dragging and dropping all of these files into your favourite FTP client.
I will show you how to do this using iWeb SEO Tool since I know a lot of users’ next step would be to load their site in iWeb SEO Tool.
So all I will do is drag and drop this folder onto iWeb SEO Tool’s local sites column. Now you can optimize your site for search engines, or press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button to get your old tags back, and publish your website.
When you are done, type your domain name into your web browser, and you will notice that the URL does not change. It will only change when you click on a link to be taken to a different page on your site.
If you are having problems making this work correctly, the first thing I want you to do is make sure that you have correctly typed in the first page of your site as index. If that was not done correctly then this will not work. Also, unless you publish the site folder contents correctly, this method will not work.
Before assuming that you did it incorrectly, try restarting your computer, and checking again. You can also check the website on your phone to see if it works there. Sometimes it can take several minutes to several hours for some users to see the changes. If you are still having trouble, please send us an email.
SEIntelligence’s user base consists of many RapidWeaver users. While making SEIntelligence’s recommended changes within SEIntelligence is always an option, we recommend RapidWeaver users to make the changes within the RapidWeaver application.
The reason for this is because over time, as you update your website, you will be able to publish your site straight from RapidWeaver, rather than add an extra step of re-loading your site in SEIntelligence, and then publishing from SEIntelligence.
You will still use SEIntelligence to analyze your website and learn how to make it more search engine efficient, but the changes will be made in RapidWeaver. The video below illustrates the easy process to accomplish this task. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this tutorial, which will cover the Site Settings section of SEIntelligence, and how to modify those for a RapidWeaver built website.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
If you are a RapidWeaver user, here is how to most efficiently use SEIntelligence on your website.
The first thing you need to do, is make sure the pages on your site have keywords listed in the meta keywords section. To do this, select the page on the left hand side, and then click on the Page Info page. Then click on the Header tab. Next, click the Plus button for the Meta tags box. Under the Name category, type in keywords. Under the Content category, type in the key-terms that you want to be associated with this particular page. Key-terms, can be as many words in length as you want. Just remember to separate each of the key-terms with commas. Repeat this process for the rest of the pages on your site.
Your next step is to export your website from RapidWeaver to a location on your hard drive. For simplicity, I like to export the website directly to my desktop, so I suggest you do the same.
When the site has been exported is on your hard drive, launch SEIntelligence and choose the first option which is to optimize website for search engines.
Select the first option which says Open local website folder. Type in your website’s domain without http or www, and then select the Choose button. Highlight your website folder and click Open. Then click on the Next button.
Your website will now load in SEIntelligence. Now, we’ll perform the competitive analysis so that we can compare our website’s to the website’s we compete with. We’ll do this one page at a time, so click on one of your pages in the left hand side. You should notice your keywords appear in the keywords column.
Next, click on the Get Competitors button. When the search is complete, you will see the results in this section here.
Just below these results, you will see the recommendations and suggestions for your website. SEIntelligence does have the ability for users to make these changes right from within the application, however, for a RapidWeaver use, what we suggest is to read over the suggestions, and then make the changes to your site in RapidWeaver itself. If you are not sure how or where to make these changes in RapidWeaver, make sure to check out our free SEO For RapidWeaver video course. In that video course, you will find where to make all of these changes. So for example, if you wanted to know how to change your title tags, you would click on this video called “Title tags: the most important optimization technique”
When you are all done making your changes to your site in RapidWeaver, what you can then do is once again, export your website from RapidWeaver to that very same location as when you first exported the site.
Now you can re-launch SEIntelligence, and select your website from the Existing Projects column to load the newly exported site.
Now, once again, click on the page name, and then select Get Competitors. Once again, search for your competitors. When the search is complete, read over the recommendations at the bottom to ensure that you have made that changes correctly. If your changes have been made correctly, you will see messages with happy faces beside them. Repeat this process until you are satisfied with your website’s optimizations.
We’ve just updated SEIntelligence to version 2.7 and added a bunch of great new additions. We updated the user interface an also added support for retina Macs.
In addition, SEIntelligence can now get more back links for your website and your competitors. It also supports HTML 5 now.
SEIntelligence is the most powerful, native SEO software for Mac OS X. It uses statistical analysis to compare your website to the current top ranking websites in all major search engines. It will tell you exactly what you need to change on your site to rank higher and get more website visitors.
In addition to comparing your website to your top competitors, it also includes a powerful back link checker. It can find every websites linking to both your site and your competitors. It gets important details about these backlinks such as Google PageRank, Facebook Likes, Google+ Likes, and much more.
SEIntelligence works great with any website builder including; iWeb, RapidWeaver, Sandvox, Flux, Dreamweaver and even works with content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more.
If you want to speed up your publish time when uploading through iWeb SEO Tool, you can publish only your modified files in iWeb. The tutorial below will illustrate exactly what you need to do;
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
If you use iWeb 09, here is how you can publish only your modified files using iWeb SEO Tool.
First, when you make a change to one of your pages in iWeb, you will notice how the page icon turns from blue to red. Red indicates that a change has been made and that this page and all of its files must be republished. When you are finished making changes, make sure that you are publishing to a local folder on your hard drive, and then click on this Publish Site button in the lower left corner of the application. This will only publish the pages and files associated with those red icons.
Next, load the site in iWeb SEO Tool. Click on the Re-Apply Saved tags button. Make any changes you want if any, and then click on the Publish button. On this publish window, ensure that the option for Publish Entire Site is not checked. You can now upload only your changes. This will be the fastest way to publish your site through iWeb SEO Tool. If you were to publish your entire site each time, if would take longer to complete.
Remember, only use this method when you have made changes to your site. If this is your first time publishing with iWeb SEO Tool, you will want to make sure that the entire site is being published. After that initial publish, you can begin using this method.
The new Retina Macbook Pro’s are simply beautiful. If you haven’t gotten a chance to try one, I highly recommend it.
We are working very heard to get all of our software updated for Retina displays starting with WebCrusher 2.3.
WebCrusher 2.3 includes support for Retina displays as well as a whole bunch of other fixes. You’ll find the software works a lot smoother as we made a lot of optimizations within the software.
WebCrusher is our website optimization tool that speeds up your website’s load time for your visitors in just a few second. Simply open your website in WebCrusher and let it do the rest. WebCrusher will work with any web building tool including; iWeb, RapidWeaver, Sandvox, Dreamweaver, WebDesign, MacFlux and more…
This update is free for registered users or you can download the free demo to try it out.
If you are keeping up with the world of SEO, you are probably aware of Google’s recent algorithm change known as ‘Penguin’ change which has affected the rankings of many websites. The update targeted websites whose back-links were not considered ‘natural’.
As we have mentioned in many of our tutorials, back-links should come naturally. Natural back-links typically occur when a website has something unique or interesting to offer, causing users to talk about it and place links to it in various places on the internet. Google’s ‘Penguin’ update now better determines the links that point to your website that Google finds to be unnatural.
So how do you tell if you have any of these unnatural back-links, and what can you do to correct it?
The first thing to do is a back-link check to see a nice list of the websites linking to your site. This can easily be done in SEIntelligence. Here is a screenshot of the results for 200 back-links to one particular page.
One of the things I want you to take note of is the Page Rank for that particular page that is linking to this site. For those of you not familiar with Page Rank, it is a score given to a web-page by Google. The score ranges from one to ten with ten being the highest. Pages obtain page rank when other websites link to them. For example, let’s say Page A on Site A has a page rank of 6. If Page A on Site A links to Page A on Site B, it is essentially giving a ‘vote’ to Page A on Site B. This in turn will give Page A on Site B some page rank. This is because Page A on Site B is a trusted source, and that trusted source is essentially saying that this page is good enough (or bad enough) to link to.
What you want to do, is make sure that the pages pointing to your site are from trusted sources. Page Rank is a great way to tell this. If all the pages linking to your page have zero page rank, it might look a bit suspicious, so just make sure you are getting links from a variety of pages, including pages with high page rank. Don’t just consider the Domain’s page rank, but pay close attention to the URL Page Rank as highlighted in the screenshot.
Another area of focus that users should pay attention to is the anchor text used by sites linking to your site. The anchor text is the exact text used in a link for users to click on to be taken to the linked-to website.
What you want to look out for is having the anchor text be the same for a large majority of the links pointing to your site. When the anchor text is the same, it might indicate that the user has added these links manually, which is not considered to be a natural way of link building. As a result, it could lead to loss of rankings.
So be sure to check out SEIntelligence and do a back-link check on your website. Ensure the sites linking to your site are considered ‘important’ with higher page ranks. Don’t forget to make sure that there is a good variety of anchor text from the websites linking to your site.
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