Mac SEO Blog

The video below will show you how you can incorporate an image map on your WordPress website. Image maps allow your websites users to click on different areas of your image and be taken to different links. Image maps are extremely easy to create when using MapDesign.

Video Transcript:

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can add an image map to a website in WordPress, using MapDesign.

Before I begin I want to mention that there is one tricky part that will require the user to do a bit of trial and error. The image that you want to use to create your image map will need to fit into the body of your posts or pages. Basically you want to make it so that your image is the same size or less than the width of the body where your posts or pages go. This might require you to make a mistake or two along the way and go back and correct it. So I will leave that part up to you and continue along with the tutorial.

So here I have my image ready on my desktop. I am going to drag it onto MapDesign. Then I will create my hot spots by selecting the Rectangle, Circles, or Polygon tools.

Next, I will link these hotspots by clicking on Edit, and typing in the URL on the Behavior tab.

When I am done creating my hot spots, I will click on the Export To Web Site button to export the image map. You will notice I have select Simple Image Map. I encourage all of you to do the same to ensure that our image maps will work properly on our WordPress sites.

I will leave the format as JPEG and the Quality as High. I will click the next button, and save export the image map to my desktop.

On my desktop, I will now have an index.html file and an images folder, which will contain my image map.

Open up the index.html file in your favourite HTML editor. Make sure you are not opening it a web browser. I am opening mine up in our HTML editor called WebDesign.

Highlight all of the code with the opening Body and Closing body tags just like I have done. Then copy this code.

Now go to your WordPress dashboard, and either add a new post, or add a new page, whichever your prefer. Make sure you are on the HTML tab and paste the code that you just copied.

Now I will open a new tab or a new window in your web browser and go to imageshack.us. You can choose to host the image on your own server, but for the purpose of this video, I am going to host it on imageshack. The choice is up to you, but it will be easier for you to follow along if you also host it on imageshack.

Click on the browse button, and locate the image map which is inside of the images folder. Highlight it and click Open. Then click on the Upload Now button on image shack.

Highlight the URL in the Link field, copy it, and paste it in your web browser. Then do a secondary click on your image, and select Copy Image Address, or copy image location. Now go back to your post in your WordPress dashboard.

At the bottom of the code that we copied and pasted, you should see a location for your image which reads images/rage_css_imagemap.jpg. Highlight that part of the code, and paste the URL that we have just copied. Make sure your URL has quotation marks around it like mine does.

Quickly click on the visual tab to confirm that everything has worked. If you are able to see your image, then you have done everything correctly and you can publish your post or page.

The Site Settings section of SEIntellgence has some very cool features that most webmaster might never think to utilize. Watch the tutorial below to learn about the Site Settings section and how to properly use the features.

Video Transcript:

On the Site Settings tab in SEIntelligence, the first tab is for our domain. If your website’s domain is not already there, then type it in. Most of yours should already be there.

Setting your preferred domain tells search engines if you prefer to use the www version of your website or the non-www version of your website. The reason this is significant is because other sites may link to your site using the www or without the www. Search engines will classify these as two separate websites if no preferred domain is specified. Specifying your preferred domain will indicate to search engines to list your website with the www or without the www in search results. The choice is yours, however, we do recommend at least choosing one of these two options.

SEIntelligence also gives you the option to forward a not found page to a different page.  This means that if someone types in one of your web page URLs incorrectly, or if one of your pages no longer exists, it will forward the user to the page of your choice, rather than showing them a Page Not Found webpage. Simply check the box to forward the page, and select the page of your choice in the drop down menu.

You can also upload a favicon. Favicons are these tiny little images that appear beside URLs in the address bar. Simply click on Select Image For Favicon and select the image you want to use.

On the robots tab, here is where you would indicate to search engines which pages on your site you don’t want to be indexed. So for example, if I had a private page on my website called users.html, I would press this Plus button and type in that page. Most of you will be able to just leave this tab blank, but if you do wish to block one of your pages, this is how you can easily do so.

If your website has a Sitemap, or multiple Sitemaps, you can specify the location of your Sitemap here. If you do not have a Sitemap, or you are not sure what a Sitemap is, I encourage you to take a look at our page for Sitemap Automator which will help you to easily create and publish an XML Sitemap.

On the header and footer code tab, here is where you will put items such as Google Analytics codes, and statcounter.com codes. Another video will show you how to obtain and add both of these codes, and where to place each of them.

When you are done with the Site Settings section, don’t forget to click the Update button to ensure your changes are saved.

Your website content is so important for making a well rounded search engine optimized website. Watch the tutorial below to learn how to use the ‘Content’ tab on SEIntellgience.

Video Transcript:

Website content is an extremely important aspect for making a well rounded search engine friendly website. Without content, a website stands little chance of ranking high in search results.

On the content tab, you’ll be able to see the code for your page. If you don’t like looking at code or don’t know how to read it, then don’t worry about it. Just look at the suggestions below.

Read the recommendations and make the applicable changes to your site. Please note that these changes are not made here in SEIntelligence, but rather in your website builder or HTML editor.

Just a quick note for users who are using drag and drop editors such as iWeb, or web based builders such as WordPress. Some of the recommendations you will not be doing. For example. this recommendation states to add an address tag to each page. You would not do this recommendation as your website builder does not allow for it.

SEIntelligence also makes it incredibly easy to add alternative text, or alt text, to your website images. Watch the following video to learn more about alt text, and how you can easily implement it on your website through SEIntelligence.

Video Transcript:

A picture may say a thousand words, but to search engines it doesn’t say much. Because of this, and a few other reasons, the alt attribute exists. On the Images tab, you will see the Alt Text and Image columns. Under the image column, you will see the file name of your images. If you click on each of them, you should be able to see previews for your images.

So why do we create alt text. As stated earlier, search engines are not really able to see an image the same way a human is able to. For search engines, the alt text can be a helpful way to understand what an image is. The alt text is also helpful when an image does not show up in a browser. This might happen when the image doesn’t load properly, or the user is using a non-visual web browser. In it’s place, the alt text will typically appear.

To add, or change your alt text, click in the alt text area and type your alt text. Your alt text is almost like a brief sentence, or a few words describing your image. Avoid using one word descriptions, but also avoid writing excessively long sentences.

Be brief, and to the point, while trying to include high quality key-terms that users would actually search.

For example, this image shows a set of men’s left handed golf clubs. This is exactly what I will type in. It contains good keywords, and describes the image perfectly. It wouldn’t be enough if I typed in golf clubs as that doesn’t really describe the photo well. It would be too much if I typed in left handed golf clubs that are nice and shiny and super expensive to buy.

When you type your alt text, it can be exactly like you see here. Almost like you are writing a sentence. No hyphens or commas are needed to separate the words.

Adding header tags to an iWeb site has never been easier. Follow the instructions carefully in this video tutorial to learn how you can properly add header tags to your iWeb website.

Video Transcript:

Being introduced for the first time ever, iWeb users will now be able to add header tags to their websites, without having to hand code it in the HTML. Header tags are another way for you to demonstrate to search engines which keywords are important on your page.

So what is a header tag, and how do we make one?

Basically, a header tag is a block of text that can be compared to a title, or a headline for a larger body of text. Think of a newspaper article. There is a headline which indicates what the entire article is about. Then there is a subheading which gives a bit more insight into the article.

Our websites are similar to the structure of a newspaper article. A headline can contain our primary key term for each page, and an optional subheading can contain our secondary key term for each page.

In HTML, there are six headers that you can use. Those headers are h1 through h6. I am only going to demonstrate adding an h1 header since that is what most of you will be doing. If you want to add an h2 as well, then feel free to do so. h1 and h2 are the most popular headers, so use those if you have room on your site. Trying to add all headers to your site is not generally a good idea, unless your site is structured in a way that makes sense to do so. Also, the rule of thumb is to only have one h1 per page.

So to do this in iWeb, simply click on the Text Box button, and type in this code you see here.

The area where I wrote ‘This is my header tag’ is where you should type in your header tag. The HTML here should look identical to mine. But the text part should contain your header tag which could be anything you want it to be. I recommend putting the main key-term you are targeting for this specific page.

Before we move on to the next step, I want to point out that you can also change the font of this text like you normally would with any text, by highlighting the text and clicking on the Fonts button.

Now when you publish your site to a local folder, and load the site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must check the box to Convert header tags in text boxes to HTML code, and then press the Apply To Entire Site button. What this will do is strip the HTML code from the site, so that only the actual text is being shown. Remember, your header tag should be visible on your site. If you can’t see it, or if you still see the HTML code, it means you did not do this process correctly, and you will need to try again.

Some of you can expect to run into some issues when adding header tags. For example, you will notice that the header tag does not always end up in the same place online as it did in iWeb. This is normal. You may need to play around with it a bit until you find the right spot. To make things easier on yourself, try not to place the header too close other items on your page. This will leave you with a bit of a buffer for when the header ends up in a slightly different location.

Also, if your site has a black background, you most likely won’t be able to see your header. If that is the case, just send us an e-mail read this knowledgebase article on how to alter the font color.

A lot of you have been asking how to add a contact us form to your site in iWeb. Here is a quick tutorial showing you how to easily add a form to your site. Don’t forget to also use MailShoot to add a mailing list signup form to your site in iWeb.

Video Transcript:

You can easily add a simple contact us form to your iWeb website. First go to foxyform.com

In the Step 1 settings section, select the fields that you would like to appear on your form. A standard form will have Name, and E-mail. You can choose to add some others such as subject and phone number, but I recommend keeping the total fields to a minimum.

In step 2 Advanced settings, here is where you can change the way the form looks. I won’t go into detail on this section, but I do encourage you to play around with this section if you want to customize your form a bit.

Then enter your e-mail address. This is the e-mail address where you will receive the messages from the people who type something into the form on your website.

At the bottom, you can see a preview of what your form looks like.

Then press the Create Formular button. Highlight the HTML code and copy it.

Then open up your site in iWeb. Click on the Add Page button, find your theme and add a blank page. Delete any extra text that comes on the blank document.

Then add an HTML snippet to this blank page, and paste the code you just copied. You now have a contact form on your website. If you want to add this form to any other page on your site, or add it in any different way shape or form, feel free to experiment.

For more helpful iWeb tips and tricks, be sure to subscribe and visit our website.

Sitemap Automator 2.5.1 is now available. This free update adds improvements to web page scanning. If you have had any issues creating your XML sitemap file, this update will have probably fixed them.

Sitemap Automator creates speciality formatted XML sitemap files that list all of your web page files. You can then submit these files to all major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to quickly and easily get your website fully listed.

We have just released a large update to SEIntelligence, our most powerful SEO Software.

SEIntelligence, released just 1 week ago, was our largest software release to date, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The beauty of SEIntelligence is that it works with all the popular web building software and provides step-by-step recommendations on how to improve your website for the best search engine rankings.

This update of SEIntelligence includes a large number of improvements and fixes. It adds support for favicons. Now you can select any image and use that as your favicon for your website. It automatically converts header tags from iWeb sites just like iWeb SEO Tool did. You no longer need to use iWeb SEO Tool to optimize your iWeb sites as SEIntelligence will do it all for you (note: this is all done automatically in the background for you).

It also includes some important fixes for collecting back links for your competitors and fixes a crash when pressing the Apply All button to apply your optimizations to your website.

This version also includes a number of interface improvements and other bugs fixes.

Download the free demo

SERank 2.6 is now available. This new version brings important fixes including fixing a problem with CAPTCHA’s when too many searches have been performed. It also adds over a dozen more search engines including the popular Yandex search engine.

You can Download the update from the SERank download page.

We are very pleased to announce the official release of SEIntelligence, our most powerful search engine optimization software for Mac OS X.

SEIntelligence uses statistical analysis to compare your website to the top ranking websites in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines. It then tells you exactly what you need to change on your website in order to beat your competition.

SEIntelligence can also track back links to your website and to your competitor’s websites. Providing reports and key SEO metrics, including social media marketing strategies.

Download the free trial version of SEIntelligence today.

SEIntelligence is by far our most robust and feature rich SEO software for Mac OS X. It works great with any website no matter what web building software was used including iWeb, RapidWeaver, Sandvox, DreamWeaver, WebDesign, WordPress, SquareSpace and more.

SEIntelligence builds on, and replaces our free iWeb SEO Tool. It works in conjunction with our other SEO products including Sitemap Automator, SERank, and WebCrusher.