Mac SEO Blog

MailShoot, our powerful newsletter and email management application has been updated to version 2.2.

MailShoot makes it extremely easy to create online subscription forms that lets your website visitors automatically sign up to your mailing list. Then you can send out personalized emails to each users at the click of a button. MailShoot lets you easily manage multiple mailing lists and send out targeted offers to the right customers.

MailShoot 2.2 makes it easier to create styled text and HTML newsletters. This means your emails look more professional and can attract more attention when your customers read your newsletter.

Download the free demo to try it out, or upgrade your registered version for free.

This video will demonstrate how you can check to see if you have correctly published your XML Sitemap using Sitemap Automator.

To check to see if your Sitemap has published correctly, first open your website in your web browser.

If your site shows up as yourdomain.com, then type in sitemap.xml beside the domain, similar to how I am doing it. If the sitemap shows up, then you have published it correctly.

If your site was made in iWeb, it might look something like this. Just replace pagename.html with sitemap.xml.

If your iWeb website’s URL contains the Site Name in the middle here, then you can replace these two items with sitemap.xml

If that doesn’t work, you can also try seeing if your Sitemap is located inside of the site folder by just replacing pagename.html with sitemap.xml like this.

If none of these options worked for you, then you most likely did not publish your Sitemap correctly, and you must try it again.

This quick video tutorial will show you an easy way of backing up your iWeb SEO Tool data so that you can use it on another computer.

If you want to back up your data in iWeb SEO Tool, you will need to follow these simple steps.

First, open the finder window and click on your username, then Library, then Preferences, and located the file called com.ragesw.iwebseotool.xml

You can then copy this file and then paste it where you want to store the backup files.

You will then need to go to Username, then library then Application Support and find the folder called iWeb SEO Tool and also copy and paste that in the location where you are storing the backup files.

You can then put these files back in the same location if you want to use it on a different computer, or for whatever reason, and your old data should re-appear when you load in your site and press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button.

Get ready to begin doing your optimizations by doing a competitive analysis of your top ranked competitors in SEIntelligence.

Video Transcript:

Now that we have a good understanding of the way the on-page optimization window works, let’s begin our own optimization process by first analyzing our top ranking competitors.

If you remember from an earlier video, I mentioned that when you click on one of your website’s pages, your meta keywords will show up under the Keywords heading. If no keywords show up for you, it most likely means that your site does not contain any meta keywords. If you want to change, or if you want to add some keywords, you can do so by clicking the plus sign at the bottom of the window.

We’ll now be using these keywords to find the top ranked websites to compare our sites to. To do this, press the Get Competitors button. Select some, or all of the keywords that you want to search, and then select the search engines that you want to see the rankings for.

It can take several minutes for the application to retrieve the search results, so I will just fast forward through this process.

When you have the search results, you will notice that the information at the bottom will tell you detailed information about your site, and then give you recommendations on what you should do to keep up with your competition.

You will notice that if you have the Results tab selected, you will see all of the information about your site, and your competitors, while if you click on each section, you will only see the information for those particular sections.

We will touch upon what each of these sections are, the purpose they serve, and what you will need to do with them, in another video.

Before we jump into optimizing our sites right away, it is best to first take a tour of the on-page optimization window in SEIntelligence, and become familiar with the functions of each section.

Video Transcript:

After you’ve loaded your website into SEIntelligence, you will see a window that looks similar to this. This is where we will be doing all of our on-page optimizations.

Let’s quickly familiarize ourselves with all the aspects of this on-page optimization window.

On the far left, you will see all of the files that are contained in the website folder that you loaded into the application.

Clicking on one of the HTML files will show the meta keywords under the Keyword heading. You can add, or delete these keywords by clicking the plus sign, or minus sign at the bottom of the window.

This section is where you will find all of the on-page recommendations for your site. We will discuss this section in greater detail in another video.

The Suggest Keywords button will allow you find more keywords that are related to the keywords that you currently have on your website.

The Get Competitors button will give you the search results for your top 10 competitors for the keywords you have chosen. We’ll also talk about this more in depth in another video, but here is what the results look like.

The site settings button will allow you to do certain things such a specifying your domain preferences, as well as your Sitemap location, and adding analytical codes such as Google Analytics and Statcounter. The publish button will allow you to publish your site along with its changes, to your server. We will also dicsuss these two buttons more in depth in another video.

SEIntelligence is our most powerful SEO software to date. With SEIntelligence, you are able to load in your website, and compare it to your top ranking competitors. You can then modify your site to be more like your competition. The tutorial below will introduce you to SEIntelligence, and tell you how to load your website into the tool.

Video Transcript:

When you first launch SEIntelligence, the Manager window will popup, giving you three different options. The options are for optimizing a local website, analyzing competitor’s backlinks, and watching video tutorials.

Let’s start by clicking on the button next to Optimize Local Website.

In this window, here is where we will be given the different options for opening our websites. The existing profiles section shows websites that have already been loaded into SEIntelligence. This means that if this is your first time using the application, this section should be blank, and if you have used it before, an existing profile, or existing profiles should be present.

To load a site into SEIntelligence, you can open a site from your local hard drive, download the site from your FTP server, or download the website from a URL.

If you choose to download the website from a URL, keep in mind this warning at the bottom which says that publishing a site back to an FTP server that was download from a URL is not recommended.

If you are opening a website from a local folder, select the first option, and press the Next button. Then type in your website’s URL, but remember NOT to include http or www. Then press the Choose button, and find your website folder, and press Choose again. Then press the Next button.

If you are downloading a website from an FTP server, select that option, and press Next. Type in your domain at the top of the window, and then enter your FTP login details. Then press the Download button. It can take several minutes for your website files to download.

If you are downloading a website from a URL, select that option and press Next. Type in your URL and press the Get button.

So those are the different ways of loading your site into SEIntelligence. Be sure to watch the other free videos to learn more about how to use SEIntelligence.

If you are unsure if you’re site has been published correctly using WebCrusher, this short video demonstration will show you how you can easily identify a properly published website.

Video Transcript

To check to see if you have properly published your site after using WebCrusher, simply open your website in your browser, go to View in the menu bar, and select View Source.

If your code looks like normal code with various spaces and line breaks like this, you have NOT published your site correctly with WebCrusher.

But if your code looks like this, with all of the code being tightly squeezed together, then you have published your site correctly with WebCrusher.

And that is the easiest way to determine if your site was published correctly with WebCrusher. If your site was not published correctly, go back to the Publish window in WebCrusher and make sure you have entered your FTP login details correctly, as well that you specified the correct Directory Path.

We have just posted an update to MailShoot, our email marketing and management tool. This version adds the following changes;

[NEW] You can not specify a sending limit per hour incase your ISP limits the number of emails that can be sent out per hour
[FIX] Characters such as &<> now work properly when used in the online subscription form
[FIX] Can now properly retrieve subscribe page details with your list id and password
[FIX] Custom Mail tags can now be entered into a message even if your sent list has not yet been specified

MailShoot is a fantastic application for small business owners to quickly and easily set up an online newsletter for their website. With MailShoot you can instantly create and online subscription form that your visitors can use to subscribe to your newsletter. Then you can easily import your new subscribers to your mailing list and keep them updated on your latest news and announcements.

Download the free demo of MailShoot and try it out on your website.

Back in February of 2011, we made a post with a video tutorial showing you how to create a custom Facebook page for your business using MapDesign. Not too long after, Facebook discontinued the use of FBML which was vital to the creation of the custom Facebook pages. In this new video tutorial, we will teach you the new and updated way of creating your custom Facebook page using MapDesign. This method is actually a bit easier than the last video as we are able to use a Facebook App called iFramed. So without further ado, here is the new tutorial:

Video Transcript

As of March 2011, there was a change to the way we add our image maps to our fan pages on Facebook. If you’ve added your image map in the past, you most likely did it by using the Facebook Markup Language. FBML has since been discontinued, and there is now a new method for getting our image maps on Facebook.

In our tutorial, we covered how to sign up for a Facebook fan page. We will do the same here, however it will not be as extensive as last time. If you need assistance signing up for Facebook and then creating a page, you can refer to the old tutorial, but I will warn you that there have been some interface changes so things may look a bit different.

So let’s get right to it. What you’ve been seeing here is a Facebook profile. Like mentioned earlier, you must have one of these in order to create a page. From here, I am going to go to the address bar and type in pages, so that my destination is facebook.com/pages.

Next, I will click on the Create Page button which is located in the top right corner.

Choose the type of page you are making, and fill out the required fields.

Now that the Facebook fan page has been created, I’m going to prepare my image. Remember that this can be any image you want, but for this tutorial, I am showing how to make your image a picture of your website since that seems to be the most popular request. So I will go to the page on my site that I want to be shown in my image, and I will take a screen shot by holding down Command, shift, and 3.

Next, you can see your screen shot on your desktop. Let’s open up our screenshot so that we can crop out any unnecessary parts of the image. Basically we want to crop out as much as we can as we’re going to be trying to fit a pretty large image into a pretty small area. Now I’m just going to copy what I have highlighted and then I will select New From Clipboard.

Next, and this is an extremely important step if you want the image to fit in the Facebook page, I’m going to select Tools in the menu bar, and then I am going to click on Adjust Size. Then I will change the value of the Width to 510 pixels. If you remember from the old tutorial, this number was 520px, but I am making it a bit smaller because I found 520 to be a bit too wide. I don’t have to change anything else as it is done automatically for me. Then I will save this image to my desktop.

Now we’ll launch MapDesign, and drag and drop this saved image, and it should appear in the application. As of now, this is just a screenshot of this webpage. It doesn’t do much, in the sense that I cannot click on any of the links. So for example, this navigation menu allows you to click on all of these links if you were browsing this page in your web browser. But as an image, this ability is gone. This is what we are going to change with the use of this application.

The first thing I’m going to do is choose the Rectangle option. Now I will be able to create the area that will have a live link. I’m going to do this for all of the text and images that I want to have links. I’m going to fast forward through this process since it can take a few minutes depending on how many areas you are going to link.

So now that all of my link options are set, you will notice that there are now a bunch of options in the Hotspots section, which is located on the left hand side of the application. These options are labeled Rectangle 1, 2, 3 and so on. Each of these represents each rectangle that I placed on the image. For example, you saw that the first rectangle I placed was around the area that says Home. This means that Rectangle 1 belongs to that area.

Beside each hotspot is an edit button. Selecting the edit button will allow us to set the URL to the destination we want to link each area to. So since this rectangle is surrounding the text that reads “Home,” I will link this area to the homepage. I will then need to link Rectangle 2 to the Store as that was the second hotspot that I created. We will need to repeat this process for the remaining hot spots on the image.

You will notice that for each link, I am including http:// and also selecting the option to open in a new window. You must do this as well or your image map may not function correctly.

When we are all done, we’re going to Export the image map by selecting File in the menu bar, and then pressing the Export button. I am going to export it to my desktop.

Next, I am going to create a new folder, and I am going to call it mapdesign. You can name it whatever you want, but make it something you can easily type because we’re going to be typing it in again. Then place the exported files into that folder. There should be one file named index, and one folder names images.

Now what we need to do with this folder is we need to publish it to our server. I am going to demonstrate publishing it to FTP. If you’re publishing to your MobileMe account, the process is going to be very similar.

So here I’ll just drag and drop the folder onto my server via CybderDuck.

Now I’ll head back to my Facebook page, and in the search field, I am going to type in iFramed. What iFramed is, is just an app we’re going to use to add our image map to our page. Doing it using iFramed versus installing iFrames manually will save us a lot of time, and it is much easier to do.

So we’ll click on Go To App, and then select one of the Tabs, and then choose the page that we want to add the application to. Then press the Add iFramed! button. This will take us back to our Page, and you will notice on the left, there is a new link that says Welcome. We’ll click on Welcome, and the iFramed app will load. Click the Start button.

Now we’ll need to type in the location of the folder that we just published. So if you published to the root of your server, you should type in your domain slash folder name. So for example, I will type in www.ragesw.com/mapdesign-facebook.   If you published the folder to your iDisk, you will type in web.me.com/username/foldername. It is very important that you know the precise location of where you published the folder to, otherwise the image map will not show up.

You will notice that there are two different places to put your URL for your image map. One is the fan view, one is the non-fan view. So that means if you want to show different image maps for people who have Liked your page versus people who haven’t, you can do that. For this example, I will just make both of them the same. Press the Save buttons, and then you can preview your image map, and test it and make sure everything works the way you wanted it to.

And that’s how you customize your Facebook page with iFrames and not FBML. Now your Facebook page can have the same look and feel as your website.

With many iWeb users e-mailing us, letting us know that their websites do not look good in Internet Explorer, we began investigating ways to help iWeb users make their sites become a lot more compatible with Internet Explorer. In the video below, we will discuss and demonstrate seven different ways to ensure your iWeb website has a better chance at being more compatible with Internet Explorer. The following is a summary of the seven steps, with the video tutorial below.

1. Text based navigation menu (Better for all web browsers and search engines)
2. Web-safe fonts (Always a good idea to use no matter what)
3. No shadows and reflections for text and images
4. YouTube for video, not QuickTime
5. No embedded images from third-party websites
6. WebCrusher’s ‘Improve Internet Explorer Compatibility’ option (plus makes your site faster too!)
7. Check compatibility in all web browsers

Although iWeb makes it extremely easy to build websites, there are still things you need to consider when designing your websites. This video goes over many of these guidelines. Because of the nature of the web, we do have a few limitations but we can still design beautiful and professional websites with iWeb.

iWeb and Internet Explorer Video Transcript

Many iWeb users have been reporting that their websites appear abnormal when viewed in Internet Explorer. In this video, we are going to go over several ways of making an iWeb site more compatible with Internet Explorer. This doesn’t mean that everyone’s website will look perfect in Internet Explorer, but an iWeb site’s appearance in Internet Explorer can be greatly improved by following these steps.

Make sure to listen to each step carefully, and not leave any of them out. Especially one of the last steps we will talk about, which involves our application called WebCrusher, which most of you are familiar with. For those not familiar with WebCrusher, it’s an application that reduces the size of your site so that it loads faster in your users browsers. We have released an update to it, that specifically targets this issue with Internet Explorer.

The first way of making an iWeb site more compatible with Internet Explorer is to make a text based navigation menu. This is because, for security reasons, Internet Explorer may not have javascript enabled, which is what is needed to show the iWeb navigation menu. For both Internet Explorer compatibility, and SEO benefits, change your navigation menu to a text based navigation menu. So to change your navigation menu in iWeb you will first need to disable the current navigation menu. To do this click on a page of your website, open the Inspector window, select the page tab, and then deselect the option that says Include Page In Navigation Menu. Repeat this process for all pages on your site.

When this is complete, you will no longer have any links in your navigation menu. Now you will need to create a custom navigation menu using text links. Simply click on the Text Box button, type in your anchor text, resize the box, and move it to where you want it to be on your navigation menu. Then highlight the text, and press the inspector button. Then go to the link tab which is a blue circle with an arrow in it. Check the option to Enable As Hyperlink, and type in the URL or select the page from the drop down menu. Repeat this process for the remaining links. When you are all done, select all text boxes by holding down command and clicking on each text box. Then copy what you have selected. Now you will need to go to each page on your site and press the paste button. And your navigation menu will now be text as opposed to javascript.

The second step is very easy to do. Using a font that is considered web safe, will give iWeb users a much better chance at having their website load correctly in Internet Explorer. To find a web safe font, just press the Fonts button, and click where it says Web. Here is a list of about 10 different fonts that you should choose from to use on your site. These fonts should be used everywhere on your site that contains text. Using web safe fonts will increase the compatibility of your website with Internet Explorer.

The third step is also an easy one. Much like how we want to avoid using fonts that are not considered web safe, we also want to avoid altering our text and images by using shadows and reflections. Doing so will also increase our chances at having our sites load normally in Internet Explorer. So how can you check to see if your text and images have shadows or reflections? Simply click on the text or image, press the inspector button, click on the Graphics tab and see if Shadow, or Reflection are checked. If they are, you may want to consider unchecking them so that your site can be viewed better in Internet Explorer.

By default, iWeb uses QuickTime, which is installed by default on all Mac computers. This isn’t the case for Windows users, however. Instead of putting your videos on your site directly, it is a better idea to upload them to YouTube, and then embed them on your site using the YouTube Widget. This will ensure the best compatibility for users who might not have QuickTime installed on their computer.

To avoid Internet Explorer giving your users security warnings, do not include HTML Snippets that embed images from other websites. This might sound a bit technical, but basically to avoid any security popups for Internet Explorer users, only use image and media files from your local computer.

An example of something that would provide a security warning for Internet Explorer users is this;

What this does is tell the web browser to load an image from a third party website which it may interpret as a security risk.

This next step is the most important one, as I mentioned earlier in the video. In this step, we are going to be using WebCrusher. The version of WebCrusher I am using in this tutorial is 1.9. Make sure you have this version or later. It is always a good idea to make sure you are using the most recent version of any software. Visit our website at ragesw.com to make sure you have the latest version.

The first thing you will need to do is open the Preferences by clicking on WebCrusher in the menu bar, and selecting Preferences. Next, under the Tag Optimizations heading, look for an option that says Improve Internet Explorer Compatibility, and make sure it is selected. Close the preferences window, and drag and drop your website folder onto WebCrusher like you normally would.

In the bottom left corner, there is a button that says Options. Click on that button, and make sure that Only Optimized Modified Files is not checked. The reason for this is because we want to make sure we apply the Improve Internet Explorer Compatibility option to every page on our site. Then, you can press Go and optimize your site and publish it like you normally would.

Since every website is built differently, it is still very important to check your site’s compatibility by visiting your site in as many browsers as you can. The most important thing to understand is that your site will not be perfect in many browsers, especially older ones such as Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Following the above steps, especially the step involving WebCrusher will make your site look much better in Internet Explorer 8 and higher. It is important to note that you should not expect perfection, but combining all of these methods should result in your site looking very good.