Mac SEO Blog

The first video in our RapidWeaver SEO Video Course outlines what this course is about and what you can expect from all of the tutorials in the course. Remember to get visit the video course page, which will have all the tutorials outline in a very organized manner.

Video Transcript

Hello, my name is Jeremy and over the next little while, I will be showing you how to properly optimize your RapidWeaver web sites so that you can have the best possible chance of ranking at the top of search engines.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of attracting more visitors through search engines. You will notice how I do not define SEO as having a top ranked site. This is because even if you have a site that ranks at the top of all search engines, there is no guarantee that searchers are typing in the specific keywords you rank for, and will even click your website in the search results. In this series of tutorials, we will cover the basics of how to discover highly searched key-terms and how to determine which ones are best to target.

These tutorials have been created to help you to understand the major optimizations, and how to implement them on your site. With so much information available on the web, search engine optimization can seem very confusing and time consuming to learn. These tutorials are to-the-point, and allow you to visualize what needs to be done, so that you can have a better understanding at a much quicker pace than if you had to sift through a 400 page book.

SEO is a process that we must go through in order to achieve our desired results. It’s not something you do once and just forget about. It’s a form of marketing and if you want to keep on improving your chances at success and growing your business it is something you will constantly evaluate. Remember, if SEO were an easy thing to do, every site would be number one in search engines, which is simply impossible.

This video will be broken down into three stages. The first stage, called the Planning stage, will be the briefest. We will go over a couple of things that we should do before we even begin optmizing our website. The second stage will be the on-page optimization stage. This is where we will be looking at the different methods for making our actual site more search engine friendly. The third and final stage will be the off-page optimizations, where we go over different methods of getting our RapidWeaver website noticed by search engines.

The video will be shown in step-by-step format. This does not mean that you must follow this plan perfectly, but it is setup that way so that those who require this type of instruction still have that opportunity.

I want to make a note that the applications I use in this video are available to purchase or download for free at www.ragesw.com. You are not obligated to purchase any of these applications. The work can be done by hand. That is, you can still complete the tasks without the applications, however, using the applications will make your life a lot easier.

Remember, if you have any questions or do not understand one or more of the concepts, you can start a thread in our SEO forums, or submit a ticket through our support system.

Keeping track of your website visitors is a very important way of analyzing users behavior on your website. It is also an important way of learning about the different search engines, and websites that refer users to your site. This tutorial is going to show you how you can add a Statcounter code to your website made in RapidWeaver 5. Remember to check out the SEO For RapidWeaver Video Course to learn how to make your RapidWeaver site start ranking higher in search engines.

Video Transcript

In this quick video tutorial, we are going to add a Statcounter.com code to a website made in RapidWeaver 5.

The first thing we will do, is open up our browser to www.statcounter.com. If you do not have an account with statcounter, click on the register button on the top left part of the navigation menu. Fill out all the required information and register your account. After you have registered, login with your username and password. Once you are logged in, you will need to create a new project in order to get your code. Click on the Add New Project button.

In the following form, you will need to enter a title for your website, your website URL, a category for your website, and your time zone. You also have the option of having the statcounter not count your visits to the site by blocking your IP. If you don’t care for this feature, just leave it blank.

After you click the “Next” button, you will then need to click on the Configure and Install Code button. You have a few options for which type of statcounter you want. It is recommend that you use the Invisible statcounter, that way, you are the only one who knows how many hits your site gets. Then click on the next button. The drop down menu should show have Default Installation Guide selected. If not, please make sure it is. Then press the Next button. Now we are given our Statcounter code. Again, we must highlight this code, and copy it.

In RapidWeaver, there will be a heading on the left part of the application that says STATS. Below that, is the Configure option. Click on Configure. In the text box that says Google Analytics, paste the code that we just copied.

If you already have a Google Analytics code in this same box, make sure that you are not replacing the Analytics code with the Statcounter code, but placing them both in the same text box.

To learn how to get your RapidWeaver website ranking higher in search engines, be sure to check out the SEO For RapidWeaver Video Course at ragesw.com

When you have a website and you have visitors, how do you ensure that they come back to your website? An email newsletter is a great way for you to keep in touch with your website visitors and make sure they are kept up to date with all your latest news and announcements.

MailShoot, our fully featured newsletter and mailing list manager, can help you instantly set up an online sign up form on your website. In just a few clicks you can start collecting email addresses as well as any other information that you choose on your website.

Once you have the email addresses, you can use MailShoot to send out periodic emails to your entire list, or a segment of your list that match a certain criteria. Check out this preview of MailShoot or download the free MailShoot demo and try it out for yourself.

One of the things that many webmaster don’t realize is how vulnerable their website becomes when they start using social networking scripts such as forums and blogs to help build communities around their website. Although it is a very good idea to integrate these scripts on your site, when doing so you can potentially give your visitors access to sensitive parts of your website that they would normally not have

Since many blogs and forums are open source, malicious users have full access to the source code and can find vulnerabilities or take advantage of how a system works in order to gain access to protected pages on your site, spam your site, or use your site to help get your visitors to their site.

Google Webmaster Tools has always been a great way to find out if your website has been hacked by looking at the outgoing links or most common keywords. Now, Google Webmaster Tools can notify you on your dashboard if your website has been compromised. It can tell you;

1. New versions of your installed blogs, forums and other software
2. Spammy or abused user-generated content
3. Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
4. Suspected hacking

This is very important to keep track of because if your site has been hacked Google will either remove your website completely from their search index or warn users every time they click your site in their search results. This can dramatically affect your reputation and prevent users from visiting your site.

A Google Webmaster Tools account is free to set up. You should submit your XML Sitemap file in order to get your website listed in Google and help Google’s crawler access the important pages on your website.

Over the past few years, iWeb users have used our software to help with their search engine rankings. iWeb SEO Tool has been extremely popular with iWeb users since it lets you easily optimize your iWeb site for search engines.

Over the years we have had numerous requests to provide a more step by step approach to the entire SEO approach. A lot of things about search engine optimization can be overwhelming for people just starting out.

So today we are happy to announce the iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial. This step by step video will explain everything you need to know about search engines and iWeb. It will walk you through the entire process making sure you understand what is happening and exactly what needs to be done to get more visitors to your site through search engines.

The iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial costs just $69.95 and can be purchased safely and securely through our online store.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. If you have any additional questions, please let us know. We are always looking for feedback on improving the video.

Google recently updated Google Webmaster Tools with an all new keyword tool. Just like before, you get a list of your most prevalent keywords on your site except now you get additional information like the significants of the keywords and where the top 10 pages that the keyword can be found on.

Just click the Keywords link under “Your web site on the web” in your Google Webmaster Tools account. You will see a list of keywords just as before, except now a new significance column is also displayed. Click any of your keywords to see how many times they occur on your entire site and the top ten pages they occur on.

One great use of this feature is to help find out if your website has been hacked, and if so, where the affected pages are.

Usually when a spammer hacks your website they will load your site up with random keywords related to what they are trying to sell. Then they will link to the hacked pages from other pages on other websites they have hacked. With this new keyword tool you can not only discover whether or not your site has been hacked (loaded with spam keywords), but you can now see exactly which pages have been affected.

The above method is used commonly on sites with community driven resources such as forums, blogs, or other social networking scripts. Always make sure this has not happened with your site with this new Keywords Tool. If it has, this is something you need to fix ASAP because it may get your banned from Google and other search engines.

Check out this new addition to Google Webmaster Tools account. Make sure you have created your XML Sitemap file and submitted to your Webmaster Tools account.

Google has just announced that they will include Twitter updates in their search results.

This means you can now get up to the minute tweets in when doing a search in Google. So when you search for a current event, you can get the latest tweets from twitter users.

This also means, that if you have not yet done so, now is a good time to set up your twitter account and start tweeting about your business, products and website. Don’t forget to follow ragesw on twitter for more search engine tips and tricks.

We have published an updated step by step video tutorial for getting your website listed in all major search engines with Sitemap Automator. The tutorial was created by courtesy of AppTorial Video Tutorials.

Whether you are using WebDesign, iWeb, Dreamweaver, RapidWeaver, Sandvox, or any other web development tool of your choice, follow the quick and easy step by step video tutorial to learn how to get your website listed in all major search engines with just a few minutes of work.

Sitemap Automator is the easiest way to create, publish and notify search engines of your industry standard XML Sitemap. XML Sitemaps are used to let search engines know about all pages on your website, how important each page is, and how often each page is updated.

Twitter.com is known as a micro-blogging website. A micro-blogging website is a website that lets you leave short posts, just a sentence or two, about what you are currently doing. You don’t even need to be next to a computer because you can post what you’re doing right from a cell phone.

With twitter you can set up a profile with you micro-blog and find other users to “follow”. Following a user lets you keep up to date with what they are doing at all times. Yes, that does sound a little scary, but users from all over the world have quickly embraced twitter even though it has only been online for a relatively short amount of time.

You can use twitter to quickly post what your company is currently doing. For example if you release a new product today or want to show off a new Website design. The trick to using twitter is to find users who have similar interests and start following their blog. As you build up the list of people who you follow and post interesting subjects, other users will begin to follow you as well.

You should also consider getting your existing website visitors following you on twitter by posting a link to your twitter account on your website.

Many services allow you to easily publish a quick summary of your latest blog posts to your twitter account. Other apps for iPhones or blackberrys let you easily “tweet” about what is currently happening with you.

Both facebook.com and myspace.com are the two largest social networking websites in the world. A social networking website is a website that connects friends and family together using common interests groups. For years, myspace.com has been used my amateur and professional musicians, artists and movie stars to promote themselves and there work. Comedians such as Dane Cook have been rumored to owe their career to the popularity they received from utilizing myspace.com.

Both of these websites provide ample opportunities for promotion including posting your sample products, for example if you compose music, creating common interests groups, as well as cheap and targeted advertising. booksforschool.com, a Canadian based online textbook exchange service used facebook.com to advertise specifically to Canadian University students only. This lowered costs by only advertising to their target market and not paying to advertise to people who would never use the service such as students who have graduated years ago.

Facebook also lets you create company pages just like you can create a personal page for yourself. Your friends and customers can become fans of your company page and any updates you post to your wall will appear in their news feed.

You can use this feature to post about new products, special discount codes for your members only, or to simply engage with your customers on a more personal level.

When you create a company page, facebook lets you easily add a Facebook Connect widget to your website just like the one on the right and side of this blog. They provide all the code you need so you can easily advertise your company’s facebook page to your visitors and get them to join.

You can explorer the hundreds of facebooks apps you can add to your company page including automatic blog updates, twitter updates and even discussion boards.

Facebook and MySpace also provides an online market place and classifieds system which you can use to advertise your products for sale to thousands of online users.