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.

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

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.

This morning we finally released RAGE SERank 1.0, an all new application for Mac web site owners to track and manage their search engine rankings. With RAGE SERank you simply add the keywords you want to rank highly for and select from the over 40 search engines to check your search engine rankings.

RAGE SERank will automatically check your rankings and provide a detailed report of where your web site ranks in each search engine for all of the keywords you have entered. RAGE SERank can also be used to check the search engine rankings of your competitors to easily see what keywords they are targeting and ranking highly for. RAGE SERank will keep track of your rankings over time so you can graph changes or go back to any previous rank check.

With the professional version of RAGE SERank you can create customized PDF rank reports that you can use for personal use, or send to your clients or colleagues. The professional version also allows an unlimited number of web sites to be checked.

Download a free trial version of RAGE SERank or order your full standard or professional license.

A few days ago MSN’s Webmaster Tools officially came out of beta. Like Google’s Webmaster Tools, MSN’s tools let you quickly submit your sitemap.xml file that you have created with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. Once submitted you are provided with search engine feedback including;

• How many of your web pages are indexed in MSN’s search
• The date MSN’s search spiders last crawled your web site
• Which, if any, of your web pages could not be properly indexed
• Your web site’s most popular incoming links

Although you won’t find as many resources and tools that are provided by Google’s Webmaster Tools, you will get some interesting information about how your web site is performing in MSN’s search.

If you already have your sitemap.xml file published on your web site, all you have to do is create your free Windows Live account and follow the simple steps to submitting your sitemap.xml file. The next update to RAGE Google Sitemap Automator will feature an all new way to ensure that your sitemap.xml files are recognized by all major search engines including MSN.

RAGE Domainer 1.1 has just been released. This free update for registered users adds the following new features and enhancements;

[NEW] Full support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
[NEW] Support for additional top-level domains (.in,.cn,.cz,.se)
[NEW] Now remembers list column sizes
[NEW] Clicking AlexaRank loads Alexa.com’s web site
[FIX] Importing CSV domain lists
[FIX] Correctly assigns owner details

RAGE Domainer is the only web developer’s tools for Mac OS X that lets users easily track and manage their domain names while getting an overview of a domain’s popularity and value.

RAGE Domainer 1.1 can be downloaded from the Domainer download page.

RAGE Domainer can be purchased for just $39.95 from RAGE Software’s secure online store.

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!

We had the great opportunity to talk SEO and web site marketing with MacVoices.com Podcast. Chuck of MacVoices spoke with us about;

1. Using popular web development tools including RAGE WebDesign, iWeb and Rapidweaver and how to optimize your web site for search engines.
2. Most effective techniques for achieving higher search engine rankings
3. How to avoid hurting your search engine rankings
4. Awesome new software soon to be released by RAGE Software
5. How you can meet the RAGE team at MacWorld 2008 in San Francisco

Check out the full Podcast at the MacVoices web site.

If you have any further questions, be sure to post them to the RAGE Software discussion forum. We can help you with any web site marketing or search engine question you may have.