Mac SEO Blog

Often we get customers who have no idea where to begin when it comes to search engine optimization. So today we are going to go over the very basics of SEO and what you can do right now to improve your search engine rankings today.

First and foremost we need to clear up some confusion about what it means to rank high in search engines. We get a lot of customers who say their website does not appear in Google or they are not coming up for broad keywords like “design shop” or “printing company”. So lets clarify what it means to have top rankings in search engines.

It isn’t very difficult to get your website into Google or other major search engines. It takes an XML Sitemap and a link or two from a third party website and within a few days you’ll be able to see your website listed in most major search engines when you do a search for your website domain name.

But how valuable is that really? How many of your customers are typing your domain name into Google? Certainly not new customers who have never heard of you. They will most likely be customers who have already heard of you from some other source. What you really want is to appear at the top of search engines for the keywords your customers are searching for. This usually is not a very easy task and can take lots of time before you actually start appearing on the first page for your targeted keywords. Hopefully after reading this article, you will have a better understanding of what you need to do.

There is no secret to search engine optimization. No special technique that you can employ to become the top ranking website. If there was, well, every site would try it and since there is only room for one top result, the strategy would never hold. The only thing you can do is apply techniques to your website that will put you in the best possible position to rank high in search engines. So here it is, everything a beginner needs to know about search engine optimization;

1. Choosing the right keywords

Determine the keywords you want to rank high for in search engines. Now keep in mind, this is not easy and its a never end task. You always want to be on the look out for more keywords that your customers may be searching for. To get started, download our free keyword research tool and enter your website URL. You will get some keyword suggestions. After selecting any of the keyword suggestions, you will get a list of related keywords that are actually being searched for right now in search engines. So you know that if you are ranking high for these keywords, you are guaranteed to get lots of traffic to your website. But how do you rank high for these keywords? We’ll get to that in just a second. For now, here are some strategies for choosing the right keywords;

• Avoid broad terms like “printing” or “graphic design”. Instead try to get as specific as possible by thinking about specific niche services that you provide or anything that may differentiate you from competitors. It is much easier to rank high for specific keywords than it is for broad keywords. Plus, with specific keywords you know your visitors will be more targeted and a better position to buy from your website.
• Think about targeting your keywords to your specific geographic location. Many potential visitors want local products or services and will actual type their current location when searching for these products.

RAGE SEKeyword, our free keyword research tool, will actually provide both specific keyword suggestions and suggestions based on geographic locations.

2. Put the keywords in the right places

Your next step is to make sure your website contains the keywords and keyword phrases you have come up with. keep in mind a few things;

• Your title tag, the text that appears in your browser’s title bar when you visit your website, is the most important place that your keywords should appear. Keep your title tag between 60 and 120 characters and include 2-3 important keywords and keyword phrases.
• Your anchor text, that is the text used to link between pages, is also a really important place to include your keywords. See our post on anchor text for more tips on how to properly use them.
• Other places to include your keywords is in your actual web page copy. Make sure you include your text as actual text and not pictures. Search engines can not read text within pictures. This is a common mistake made by iWeb based websites.

The goal here is to make your website an information resource. Even if you are focusing on selling a product, always make sure customers can return to your website to find important information related to the products or services your provide.

3. Make friends online

Your last, and most important strategy, is to get third party websites to link to your website. Every time another website links to yours, it is as if they are voting for your website and search engines use these votes to help determine where to rank your site. The more links you can obtain, the better it looks in the eyes of search engines.

Keep in mind that not all links, or votes, are created equal. A popular and established website in itself that links to your website will carry more credibility with their vote, than a new and relatively unknown website. There are many factors that determine a popular website and they can all easily be found for any website using RAGE Domainer. Not only that, but with RAGE Domainer you can even see who is linking to your website or your competitors websites. A good strategy is to try and get links from the websites that link to your competitors to link your website. RAGE Domainer makes it really easy to find these websites and discover which ones will provide the most credibility when they link to you.

Now remember, these tips will almost certainly improve your search engine rankings if you are just starting out. But remember, high search engine rankings takes time and there are no secrets, no matter what someone may have told you.

So good luck with your website and your search engine optimization. If you have not already done so, download RAGE SERank to see where your website currently ranks in over 50 search engines. Once you apply the strategies discussed above, wait a few weeks and check them again. See how you have improved and feel free to ask specific questions about your search engine rankings on the RAGE SEO Discussion Forum.

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.

In our last post we talked about anchor text, and how to use it effectively to help increase your search engine rankings. Today we will talk about how to evaluate the effectiveness of your anchor text and what Googlebot knows about your website.

If you don’t already have one, your will need an XML Sitemap file published and submitted to Google’s Webmaster Tools. You can use RAGE Sitemap Automator to quickly and easily create your XML Sitemap file.

Now that you have your XML Sitemap file published to your website and submitted to Google, login to your Google’s Webmaster Tools account. Click ‘Statistics’ on the left hand side and the click ‘What Googlebot Sees’. Here you will get a whole list of the most predominant anchor text used to link to your website. Click any of the anchor text keywords to see some slight variations used by the various websites that link to yours.

If you scroll down a little further, you will see the most predominant keywords, as determined by Google, on your website as well as the most predominant keywords used to link to your website from third party websites.

Use this information to;

1. Determine what keywords other websites are using to link to your website
2. Brainstorm additional keywords for your website

Open up a new browser window and do a quick Google search for the term ‘Click here’. Notice that the first page that appears is Adobe Reader’s website. If you click that link, you will see that nowhere on that page do the terms ‘click’ or ‘here’ appear. Why in the world would Google rank a website that doesn’t even contain the keywords we are searching for at the very top of their results?

The reason is because of how Google’s algorithm works. Google looks at the Anchor text, that is the text used to link to other webpages, to try and determine what a webpage is all about. Google figures that if other websites, or your other internal webpages, are linking to a specific page, they must be providing a description to their visitors about what to expect on the next page.

For example, a real estate website may link to their condo listing page by saying, Click here for our condo listings. In this case, they have effectively told their visitors, and Google, what the next page is all about.

Keep this in mind when linking between pages on your website, and getting links from other websites. You want to make sure that your anchor text contains the keywords you want to rank high for in search engines. Keep this techniques in mind;

1. Use descriptive anchor text when linking between pages on your website
2. Use your keywords in your anchor text that you want to rank high for
3. Try to keep your anchor text consistent when linking to the same page
4. Avoid generic terms such as ‘click here’ or ‘download’ or ‘more information
5. If you are using images to link to other pages, make sure you are using the ALT attribute to specify alternative text for your image. This is never seen by your visitors (unless they are using a text only web browser or your image does not load), but is used by search engines
6. Include your keywords in your web page file names, separated by hyphens (-) and NOT underscores (_)

The last point provides two benefits. The first being that you now have your keywords in your urls which may help with your search engine rankings. The second is that if a third party website decides to link to your website and simply uses your URL as the anchor text, you are assured that your keywords are being used in their anchor text.

Today we are proud to announce a set of three add-ons for the Xsilva LightSpeed Web Store that will help Web Store users get more visitors to there store through search engines.

The three add-ons include;

1) RAGE SEO Add-on
Makes sure your Web Store is properly optimized for search engines by creating dynamic title and meta tags for your product pages.

2) RAGE Google Base Add-on
Gets your products listed in Google’s Product search engine so customers will see your inventory listed in Google’s search index within 48 hours along with a detailed description and price information.

3) RAGE Google Analytics Add-on
Links your e-commerce web store with Google Analytics so you can see where your customers are coming from, how they use your website, and who your most profitable customers are.

More information on the add-ons can be found on the LightSpeed SEO Add-on page.

Now that you have your blog set up with lots of great content related to your company, you can promote your blog using both Blog Search Engines and Blog Networks to get more exposure and drive more readers.

Blog Search Engines

Much like the Google search engine which searches the entire web, there are many search engines related purely to online blogs. That is, they will only search blog posts. With the rising popularity of blogs and blog search engines, leveraging these resources can offer a large amount of targeted web visitors to your web site’s blog. Some of the biggest blog search engines include;

• Technorati
• Google Blog Search

Getting your blog listed in Technorati can help provide extra exposure and important stats including how many other blogs are linking to your blog and your Blog Authority which, like Google’s PageRank, is measured by how many quality blogs link back to yours.

Once you have set up your online blog it is extremely important to set up your Technorati profile. Then, add your online blog to your profile and you can start tracking your blog’s popularity. As you add posts to your blog, they can appear on Technorati’s web site if you follow the notification descriptions below.

Blog Networks

On step above blog search engines are blog networks. Blog networks usually focus on a particular subject and allow only high quality, related blogs, to join their networks. They may be community driven, in that you must submit your blog to the network and other may vote on its relevance, or there may be a panel of judges that will determine whether or not your blog meets the standards of the network.

One of the more popular, and exclusive blog networks is 9rules (Update 2019: Link no longer available). A few times a year 9rules will open their network to submissions by bloggers, providing an opportunity for them to have their blog evaluated, and possibly included in their network.

Interested visitors will often visit blog networks in search of content related to their interests. In turn, this helps push new traffic to your web site. Other members of your same blog network may also discover your blog and provide links back to your web site. Blog networks are a great way to build your blog’s brand recognition, create a perception of quality and increase traffic and blog exposure.

There are many blog networks around and reading other blogs in your industry, or doing a simple Google search will return the vast amounts of opportunities available to you. Some of the more popular blog networks include;

b5media (Update 2019: Link no longer available)
Smash.vc
Web2.0 Workgroup

For a long listing, and ranking scheme of the most influential blog networks, see The Blog Network List (Update: website no longer exists).

Automatically Notifying Blog Search Engines About Updates

The great thing about blogs is the ability to automatically let blog search engines, such as Technorati, know when you have posted a new blog article. This can happen instantly without you having to do anything but write your blog post and submit it to your web site. Technorati provides step by step instructions on how to PING (a fancy word for notify), their search engine when you write a new blog post. You can read the step by step instructions on the Technorati help pages (Update 2019: Link no longer works).

You can use Google’s Blog submission (Update 2019: link no longer available) service to submit your blog to Google’s Blog Search Engine. This works similar to the Technorati’s notification features described above.

Press releases are a great way to get your company name and product out to your customers. It is also a great way to obtain a large number of incoming links to your web site which can help improve your Google PageRank and in turn, your search engine rankings. A press release is a mock news story about any newsworthy information about your company, such as releasing a new product, acquiring a product from another company, or announcing significant company news.

There is a ton of information online that can teach you how to write press releases. For now, you can use the following guidelines to take into consideration when writing your press releases;

1. Make sure your press release relates to a newsworthy event
2. Don’t make your press release sound like a sales pitch. You are providing an unbiased news releases about a significant company event.
3. Always write your press release as if it were going out to people who have never heard of your company or product. Make sure you clearly define who you are and what you do each time a press release is sent out.
4. Always include an easy way for publications to get in contact with you if they have more questions.
5. Your first paragraph should concisely answer the questions, Who, What, Where, and When. Essentially a short summary of your entire release.
6. Try to keep your release to a page long and never exceed two pages.

There are a number of press release distributers. You can find ones that are more expensive but will get you a greater reach and have more credibility with publications, and you will also find some which are not too expensive and can still provide you with a number of media contacts and links back to your web site.

One of the most popular, and least expensive press release distribution web sites is PRWeb. You can send a release for as little as $0 to $80 $40 depending on who you want to reach. If you live in the UK, another popular newswire web site is http://www.sourcewire.com/.

Look around for other press release distributers, especially one that may be specific to the product or service your offer. For example, if you were a Mac Software developer you may want to use the services of PRMac which targets just Macintosh related web sites and publications.

Other press release distribution web sites that are more expensive but provide added credibility in the eyes of your target media include;

PR Newswire
Business Wire
CNW Group (Canadian)

Update: Changed the PRWeb pricing details as they have changed since this article was originally written. Thanks Mario!

Anchor text refers to the link captions you click when you travel from web page to web page and is commonly blue and underlined. Anchor text is an extremely important factor in your on-page optimization strategies.

Broadly speaking, search engines see anchor text as a description of the page they link too. So for example if you link to a web page using the anchor text “About Blue Widgets” search engines will use this information to help understand the content on the linked-to web page.

Do a Google search for “Click Here”. As the number 1 search result you will see a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page. This is because so many web sites will say something like: “You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here to download it”. Even though the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page does not contain the text”Click Here” anywhere on the web page, it still ranks highly for this search term because of the web sites that link to it.

Keep this in mind when you link to other pages on your web site as well as any third party web pages. Instead of using the caption “click here”, try being more descriptive about the content the user is about to see. Lets say you are linking to another page which shows off a software application that verifies web site links are working correctly;

Inefficient & Generic Anchor Text

“Click here”
“More Information”
“Click here for more information”

Better Anchor Text
“Easily Check For Broken Links”
“Download Marketing Success E-book”

You don’t want to overdue this technique and sometimes it is appropriate to use a non-descriptive caption such as “click here”. However, when you can, try to make your anchor text more descriptive so that not only search engines know more about the content on the next page, but your web site visitors will be better informed as well.

There is one more important reason to using descriptive anchor text. If you do a search for a popular term such as “Apple Computers”, you may notice the extra links underneath the top result in Google’s search index as shown below;

Google automatically determines whether or not to show these additional links based on a number of factors. It is not known exactly when these links will appear but since they are generated using a computer algorithm and with no human intervention at all, you must make sure your web site is properly optimized so that they have the potential of showing your most important pages in the supplemental links section of your search engine rankings.

If you want to have these additional links show up, make sure you use consistent and descriptive anchor text in your inbound links for your most important pages such as a product information page or an online store.

Recently, Google updated their Webmaster Tools to provide more flexibility and control with these supplemental links. If you have created your XML Sitemap with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator you should already have a Webmaster Tools account. You can use the Webmaster Tools admin area to set which links you would not want to appear as an additional link. This is a fairly new feature that lets you have a little more flexibility with your web site’s search engine listing.

We are extremely happy to finally release version 1.0 of Domainer, a new application for web site owners, marketers and investors to track and manage their domain names.

Domainer is the first, and as of this writing, the only tool for the Mac that gives an overview of a web site’s popularity using Google PageRank, AlexaRank, incoming back links and social tags. With Domainer, you can quickly, and easily, see all important domain details in one easy to use application.

Use RAGE Domainer to manage your domains, track and beat the success of your competitors, and find profitable web sites to buy and sell.

A free download of Domainer can be found here. Domainer is available for purchase immediately through the RAGE Software secure online store for just $39.95 USD.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Come discuss your thoughts, feature suggestions and any questions you may have for Domainer on the RAGE Discussion forum.