Mac SEO Blog

WebCrusher 1.3 has just been released and we are pleased to announce that it is now the most powerful website optimizer for Mac OS X. In less than 6 months, WebCrusher has outpaced its competition by being able to optimize a website more than any other tool available for Mac OS X.

We used the sample website our competitor created to show the true of power of WebCrusher. See the side by side comparison of WebCrusher and its competition using the sample website our competitor created.

If you use iWeb to create your website, this update is for you. You will see significant file size reductions with this version which means much faster website loading for all of your visitors.

We’ve also added one great benefit for all registered users. You can now get up to 4 months FREE when you sign up to our web hosting. Now you can have all of your website needs under one roof with RAGE Software.

Today, WebCrusher 1.2 has been released with an all new Reports feature that details exactly where optimizations were made and where improvements to your website have been made.

This free update also includes important fixes for HTML tags with embedded PHP code in them. We have also eased some of the trial restrictions so that you can now view your entire website in your web browser. Please note however that random letters are still flipped around in optimized websites so do not use optimized websites from the trial version as your live website.

WebCrusher can be purchased safely and securely from our the RAGE Online Web Store.

Domainer 1.8 has been released with lots of new features and some critical fixes for 1.7 users.

We’ve added the highly request labels feature which allows you to categorize domains by label colors, just as you would with files in the Finder. You can also now see the IP address that each domain resolves to. In addition to these new features you can also create smart groups based on labels and IP addresses.

This version also fixes critical issues with version 1.7 after protocol changes by some third party websites and the way some details are sent to Domainer. With version 1.8 you can now get incoming links and delicious social tags again.

This update is free for registered users.

So you’ve created your website in iWeb, using Apple’s easy to use webpage builder. Its published online ready for the world to see. The only problem, nobody knows about it.

We get hundreds of requests from iWeb users who have created business and even personal websites, trying to figure out how to get traffic to their site. Most users know that search engines provide the number one source of targeted traffic to a website. So how do you get your website to the top of search engines and start getting new visitors and customers?

Today we have made this difficult task much easier for you iWeb users with iWeb SEO Tool. Combined with our suite of Mac SEO Software, iWeb users can now enjoy the same search engine benefits and fairly compete for top search engine rankings.

Here are your steps to high search engine rankings for iWeb based websites. Keep in mind, the following strategies are not instant, but over time will help you get the top spots on all search engines.

1. Research the keywords your visitors are searching for in major search engines. To find out exactly what keywords are being searched for, download RAGE SEKeyword, the free keyword research tool from RAGE Software.
2. Make sure these keywords are placed in the right places on your website. That means in your title tag, meta tags, alternative image text and your actual webpage content. This is where iWeb SEO Tool comes in handy. Use iWeb SEO Tool to add your keywords to your title tags, meta tags and alternative image text. This step is known as on-page search engine optimization since they are strategies you apply directly to your website.
3. Publish your website to your server, which can all be done through iWeb SEO Tool, whether you use MobileMe or your own hosting provider.
4. Submit your website to all major search engines the proper way with XML based Sitemaps. Create your XML Sitemaps with Sitemap Automator, the only tool built specifically for iWeb based websites.
5. Get third party websites to link to your website with the keywords you researched in step one. The more links you have to your website, the better chance you have of ranking high for these keywords. This step is known as off-page optimizations and combined with on-page optimizations, puts your website in the best possible chance of ranking at the top of search engines. To find high quality link partners try Domainer the domain management and SEO tool. It will give you important search engine statistics about your website and any another website online.
6. Continually repeat step 5 in order to climb to the top of search engines. Remember, be patient as top search engine rankings do not happen over night. They take time as search engines update their indexes and algorithms.
7. Check your search engine rankings with RAGE SERank, the number one search engine rank checker for Mac OS X to see exactly where your website ranks for your most important keywords. Plus, you can see where your competitors rank too!
8. For more secrets to high search engine rankings see the SEO for iWeb article on the RAGE Software SEO Blog.

Have you ever visited a website, waited a while for it to fully load in your browser but get too frustrated after it took so long and just hit the back button or closed your browser window?

Studies have shown that on average, a visitor will wait no more than 8 seconds for a website to load before they close the window and go to a competitor’s website. Shockingly, the average website takes over 14 seconds to fully load.

That’s almost double your customer’s wait time!!

Even more important, as of April of this year, Google has begun using the speed of your website’s load time as an indication of its quality.

Fortunately, for the last few months we have been working on the most advanced website code optimizer for Mac OS X. We have done test after test and added over 10 years of website building experience to intelligently find all the bottlenecks in a website’s design and remove them to help speed up your website.

From optimizing HTML code, CSS, Javascript, PHP, ASP and more, in addition to JPEGs and PNG image files, RAGE WebCrusher is by far the most advanced website code optimizer for Mac OS X.

Download RAGE WebCrusher 1.0 today and instantly reduce your customer’s wait time.

RAGE WebDesign 2.9.8.2 is now available and comes with essential fixes for Mac OS X 10.5.

With this new release you can now save files with any extension, many redraw issues have been addressed as well as a bug with document modes duplicating randomly at launch.

We highly recommend this update for all users. It is free for registered users and comes with a 21 launch trial period for non-registered users.

Create Add-ons, Tutorials, & Resources For Third Party Products

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.

We are pleased to announce that RAGE SERank 1.7 has been released and can now provide up to 1000 search results so you can easily see if you are making improvements in your search engine rankings. Plus it contains speed optimization options so you can ensure you are always running at peak performance.

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.

Yesterday we released an update to RAGE Sitemap Automator, the essential tool for getting your website listed in search engines.

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.

Update: The SEO for iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial has been released. It walks you through the entire process of optimizing your iWeb website for search engines, explaining everything step by step.

We always get questions from iWeb users asking how they can improve their website rankings. We also get comments that say RAGE Sitemap Automator doesn’t find all web pages on an iWeb site. Well there are a few reasons for this that we will discuss here.

UPDATE: As of version 2.0 of Sitemap Automator it will properly scan iWeb based websites, making it one of the only tools that is able to do this properly. However, the following tips are still essential for success with search engines. See our step by step video guide on creating an XML Sitemap file.

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 (and now iWeb 09), 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.

Update: With iWeb SEO Tool you can now edit your web page titles, meta tags and alternative image text after you publish your site. You no longer have to worry about how iWeb gets your title tag.

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.

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.