Listed below are step-by-step instructions for using SEIntelligence. It is highly recommended that you watch each video and follow the recommendations. The videos are fairly short in length, but watching them and following along will make your optimizations go a lot smoother.
In the tutorial below, we will show RapidWeaver users how you can easily embed a mailing list sign up form on your website, using MailShoot. The process is fairly simple and will only take a few minutes minutes.
Video Transcript:
Keeping a mailing list is a great way to for you to keep in touch with your website visitors. It can also be a really good avenue for you to promote your product or services to people who might be genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
This tutorial is going to show you how to embed a mailing list signup form on your website. In case you are not familiar, the application I am showing you is called MailShoot. MailShoot is a mailing list manager that will allow you to easily embed your signup form on your website. You can then manage all of the e-mail addresses on the list and send them e-mails whenever you desire.
For this demonstration, we’re going to stick with the golf theme and assume I am running a golf website. The first thing I am going to do is save my document. I do this by clicking File, and going to Save As. I will them name my project and save it.
The next thing I will do is click on the Mailing List button. Currently, I have no lists because this is a brand new document. I will click on the Plus sign to add a new list.
If I double click on my list, the list editor window will appear. This is where all members of my mailing list will appear after they have been added.
So now we’re going to begin making our mailing list signup form. The first thing we are going to do is change some of the field names. These are going to be the fields for the information that we want to get from people who are signing up to our mailing list.
So here I will input just a few examples of the information I might want to collect from potential customers. (favoirte golfer, handicap, name of country club, left handed)
When I’m finished inputting the fields, I will press Done, and my next step will be to setup the Subscribe Page.
In this first step, I’ll need to give my list a name. I am going to call it Jeremy’s Golf Shop.
The List Short Name will be what is used in your signup form’s URL. This name must be unique across all MailShoot users so I’ll just add some random digits to the end of it to ensure it is unique. You can do the same if you’d like, or you can click on this Check button to see if what you have entered is unique or not.
Next I’ll enter a password for my list, followed by a list description.
In the Owner’s Details section, I will need to fill out all of these fields. The owner e-mail is especially important as this is the email address that users will see when the signup to the mailing list, as well as the email address where you will be notified of a signup.
The welcome message can be customized to your liking, or you can leave it as is.
In the custom fields section, you will need to tick off whatever custom fields you want included on your signup form. I will tick off the ones I customized earlier in the tutorial.
You can choose from four different type’s of fields you want to use. You can also input a default value for each field, as well as indicate if you want to the field to be a Required field or not.
In the links section, here is where we will get our code for embedding the form on our iWeb website. I’ll simply press the publish button, and the embed code will appear. You will also notice that two links appear. The first link will take us to the Subscribe page. The second link will take us to the unsubscribe page. When you create your form, click on these links so you can see first hand what your subscribe and unsubscribe pages look like.
Now, I’m going to highlight the embed code, and copy it.
In RapidWeaver, I am going to add a new page. I am going to choose the HTML Code page option. I will simply paste the embed code, and as soon as I click on the preview button, I will be able to see my sign up form. Now you might notice here that some of my signup form is cut off. All I have to do is go back to the embed code, and change the value in the Height field, and check to see if I can now see my entire form.
And that is how you set up your mailing list sign up form. Remember to save your work as you go in MailShoot. For more MailShoot instructional videos, visit the MailShoot product page at ragesw.com/products/mailshoot.html
The way you link internally on your site can be a very important way for you to tell search engines about the content on each of your pages. To learn more about internal links, watch the video below.
Video Transcript:
The links tab will show you how your linking structure is set up on your site. You will be able to see the outgoing and incoming links for each page on your site. Just so there is no confusion, the incoming links in this section of SEIntelligence are for internal incoming links.
In each links section, you will see three headings; Anchor Text, URL, and Title.
The one heading I want to focus on is Anchor Text. What is anchor text? Anchor text is the text used to link to a certain page. Typically, it is the text you see that is blue and underlined.
So why do we care about anchor text? To help me explain, let’s take a look at an example. If I perform a Google search for the term ‘click here’, you will notice that the first result is for Adobe Reader. Why would Adobe Reader appear number one for the search term ‘click here.’ It has nothing to do with that term. The reason for this is because so many sites on the web link to this exact URL, and the anchor text they use is ‘click here.’
Because all of these sites are linking to the Adobe Reader page using ‘click here’, search engine algorithms now classify that page with that key-term.
So what does this information mean to you? Well, take a look at the anchor text you use to link to other pages on your site. Read the recommendations in SEIntelligence and see what you can do to improve your anchor text. If page A on your site is targeting West Palm each real estate, then make sure that whenever you link to page A, you use West Palm Beach real estate as the anchor text.
You can change your anchor text right here in SEIntelligence. So as an example, this page that I’m on right now is targeting these two phrases. If I look in the incoming links section, I will see all of the pages that are linking to this page. If I click on each of these arrows, it will bring me to each of those pages. I will then find the link in the Outgoing links section, and change the anchor text. So I will change this anchor from Listings to West Palm Beach Real Estate, or West Palm Beach Real Estate Agent.
I’m also going to change the Title for this link. The title attribute is usually used to give a bit of extra information about an element. The title attribute is not really a place to repeat your anchor text. You’ll notice that when you hover your mouse over a link that has been given a title attribute, the text will appear.
So in this case, instead of writing west palm beach real estate, which is what I have as the anchor text, I might type something different, but along the same lines. As an example, I will write John Smith’s real estate listings in West Palm Beach, Florida. If you can’t really provide any more information beyond your anchor text, don’t worry about putting anything in the title attribute. Theres is still some debate about whether the title attribute has significant value in terms of SEO, so I encourage everyone to do further research on this topic.
SEIntelligence also allows you to easily modify other meta tags on your site, such as your webpage language. This quick tutorial will go over this section, and show you how to use it.
Video Transcript
On the Meta Tags tab in SEIntelligence, the first thing we will be told is the amount of unique keywords that we have added on our page. We will also be informed that we should only target about 2 to 4 keywords per page. This is a good recommendation that most of us can follow. If you are not able to target 2 to 4 keywords in your meta tags, don’t’ worry too much about it. Just make sure you don’t have too large a number of keywords as it might be seen as a form of SPAM. I like to target two keywords per page. One primary keyword, and one secondary keyword, as I have been referring to them in previous tutorials. Remember, you can add or delete your meta keywords by clicking the plus sign or minus sign at the bottom of the keywords section.
By default, the options for telling search engines to index this page and telling search engines to follow all links on the page will be checked. If you do not want these options, you may uncheck them. There is also an option to indicate to search engines how often to revisit. We left this unchecked by default as some search engines might follow it while others might not. It’s not all that important, but feel free to use it since it won’t cause any harm.
You can also select your webpage language if you want. This can be especially helpful if you have some pages on your site in English and some in Spanish, for example. You can now indicate to search engines what language each individual page is. If your entire site is in English, then you should set your webpage language to English on every page.
The videos listed below will give you detailed instructions on the proper way of using Sitemap Automator. These videos were made to help make your experience using Sitemap Automator as easy as possible. Watch each video carefully, and in the order in which it is listed.
Header tags are a great way to explain the content of your page to your website visitors, as well as a great way to indicate to search engines about the keywords you are targeting. The tutorial below will explain header tags in greater detail and show you how you can modify your headers in SEIntelligence.
Video Transcript:
Header tags can be described almost in the same manner as a newspaper headline. The point of the newspaper headline is to catch the readers attention and describe what the article is about. On your website, an h1 header tag should contain your primary keyword. That is, it should contain the main key term you are targeting for that particular page. It will help search engines to properly place your page in the search results for similar searches.
You will notice that the header tags section in SEIntelligence has two sections. One is for the actual text of the header, and the other is for the level of the header. The levels range from h1 to h6, with h1 being the highest. Generally, each page on your site should only have one h1.
Now, you cannot change the header levels here in SEIngellience, so if you want to do that, you will need to do it in your website builder, but you can change the text of the header.
So as you can see here, I have a bunch of headers and some information about headers at the bottom. So what I would do in this situation, is first, I am going to click on my primary keyword, and see what my top ranking competitors have. I could have also clicked on my secondary keyword to receive this information. According to the information received, the top ranking websites use an average of one h1 tag per page. I also have one h1 tag, which means I am matching up with those top ranking competitors. But if I look below, I am also informed that the text in my headers do not match up with the phrases I am targeting. This doesn’t make much sense from an SEO standpoint. So what I will do is change the text of these headers so that they do contain my phrases.
Let’s take a look at my h1 tag which says Listings. A quick addition to this text and I now have my primary keyword in my h1, while not sacrificing the descriptiveness of this header.
I will do the same for the remaining headers on my page. If I find that it would be confusing to any of my website visitors if I included one of my phrases in the header, I would not add that phrase as user friendliness is always my top priority.
In this section of our SEIntelligence series, we are going to cover page descriptions. More specifically, what page descriptions are, how they can benefit a website, and how to change your page descriptions in SEIntelligence.
Video Transcript:
A web page’s description can play an important role when it comes to search engines. If we take a look at this block of text here in a Google search result, it tells us a bit about what we can expect to find if we were to click to be taken to this page.
But where does this text come from? Well if we click to go to this page, and view the site’s source code, we will see that the snippet of text from the search result is actually taken from this page’s description tag. Google and other search engines, will use a page’s description in the search results when it deems that the description sufficiently describes the page.
When you load your site in SEIntelligence, you will be able to see each of your page’s descriptions by clicking on the page, and then selecting the Description tab. You can then get some feedback on your description, and then modify it in the text box should you choose to. Generally, you want to make your description enticing to the person viewing it in the search results, enough to make them want to click to be taken to your site. Every page on your site should have a unique description.
Sandvox users can easily add a mailing list signup form to their websites. Just follow the easy instructions in the tutorial below your MailShoot mailing list sign up form will be on your website in no time.
Video Transcript:
Keeping a mailing list is a great way to for you to keep in touch with your website visitors. It can also be a really good avenue for you to promote your product or services to people who might be genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
This tutorial is going to show you how to embed a mailing list signup form on your website. In case you are not familiar, the application I am showing you is called MailShoot. MailShoot is a mailing list manager that will allow you to easily embed your signup form on your website. You can then manage all of the e-mail addresses on the list and send them e-mails whenever you desire.
For this demonstration, we’re going to stick with the golf theme and assume I am running a golf website. The first thing I am going to do is save my document. I do this by clicking File, and going to Save As. I will them name my project and save it.
The next thing I will do is click on the Mailing List button. Currently, I have no lists because this is a brand new document. I will click on the Plus sign to add a new list.
If I double click on my list, the list editor window will appear. This is where all members of my mailing list will appear after they have been added.
So now we’re going to begin making our mailing list signup form. The first thing we are going to do is change some of the field names. These are going to be the fields for the information that we want to get from people who are signing up to our mailing list.
So here I will input just a few examples of the information I might want to collect from potential customers. (favoirte golfer, handicap, name of country club, left handed)
When I’m finished inputting the fields, I will press Done, and my next step will be to setup the Subscribe Page.
In this first step, I’ll need to give my list a name. I am going to call it Jeremy’s Golf Shop.
The List Short Name will be what is used in your signup form’s URL. This name must be unique across all MailShoot users so I’ll just add some random digits to the end of it to ensure it is unique. You can do the same if you’d like, or you can click on this Check button to see if what you have entered is unique or not.
Next I’ll enter a password for my list, followed by a list description.
In the Owner’s Details section, I will need to fill out all of these fields. The owner e-mail is especially important as this is the email address that users will see when the signup to the mailing list, as well as the email address where you will be notified of a signup.
The welcome message can be customized to your liking, or you can leave it as is.
In the custom fields section, you will need to tick off whatever custom fields you want included on your signup form. I will tick off the ones I customized earlier in the tutorial.
You can choose from four different type’s of fields you want to use. You can also input a default value for each field, as well as indicate if you want to the field to be a Required field or not.
In the links section, here is where we will get our code for embedding the form on our iWeb website. I’ll simply press the publish button, and the embed code will appear. You will also notice that two links appear. The first link will take us to the Subscribe page. The second link will take us to the unsubscribe page. When you create your form, click on these links so you can see first hand what your subscribe and unsubscribe pages look like.
Now, I’m going to highlight the embed code, and copy it.
In Sandvox, I am going to add a new page. I am going to choose the Empty Without Sidebar option. I will then go to Insert, and select Raw HTML. In the popup window, I will paste the code that I just copied in between the span tags. Now I will publish my site, and then view the signup form in my web browser. If I find that the form needs to be adjusted a bit, which in this case I do, because parts of the bottom of the form is missing, I will go back to Sandvox, delete the code from before, and re-peat the process from before. This time, I will adjust the height to a number I think will suffice, and then publish the site again. This time my form looks just the way I wanted it to.
And that is how you set up your mailing list sign up form. Remember to save your work as you go in MailShoot. For more MailShoot instructional videos, visit the MailShoot product page at ragesw.com/products/mailshoot.html
This video is an update to an older video tutorial. In this video, we will show you how to properly verify your website with Google Webmaster Tools using Sitemap Automator, and then submit your Sitemap to Google and the other major search engines. If you haven’t already, please watch the first part of this tutorial which will show you how to create and publish an XML Sitemap.
Video Transcript:
So now that our Sitemaps have been published to our websites, we must notify the search engines. To do so, we’ll simply press the Notify Search Engines button. When you press this button, you will most likely see this window popup. This window is for instructions on notifying Google about your Sitemap. Notifying Google is slightly different from notifying other search engines. To notify Google, we will be creating an account for what is called Google Webmater Tools. In Google Webmaster Tools, we will be provided with some very useful information about our websites.
So to begin the process, first click on the Create account button. Your web browser will appear at the Google Webmaster Tools website. The first thing you’ll need to do is sign in with you Google account. If you don’t have an account, you can easily create one by clicking on the button for signing up for a new account.
When you are logged in the first thing you will need to do is click on the Add a site button. Then, you will need to paste your site’s URL and press the Continue button. Note that you did not copy your URL, but it was copied for you when you pressed on the Create Account button to be taken to Google Webmaster Tools.
Our next step is to verify our website. The reason we must verify is because Google Webmaster Tools will provide us with certain information about our sites. Information that only the webmaster should have, and not the general public. Because of this, we verify that we are the actual owner of the site.
First, we’ll click on the link to download the HTML verification file.
Then we’ll go back to Sitemap Automator, and select File in the menu bar, followed by Publish Verification File. Then press the Select Verification File button, and locate the verification file that you just downloaded. Highlight it and click Open.
Now we must Publish the verification file. If you publish to iDisk, click the Publish to iDisk button. If you publish to FTP, press the Publish to FTP button. Publish the file just like you did when you published the Sitemap.
When you are done publishing, go back to your web browser to where Google Webmaster Tools is open, and click on the link to confirm that the uploading of the file was successful. If you see a page like this, then you have done it correctly. If you get an error, then you have not done it correctly and you must try it again.
If you have published it correctly, click the Verify button.
You have now successfully verified your site. We have just a couple more steps left at this point. If you see this page, click the Continue button.
Make sure you get to your site’s Dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools. Click on Site Configuration, and then select Sitemaps. Then click on Submit a Sitemap and then type in sitemap.xml just like I am doing.
At this point, you have just submitted your Sitemap to Google.
Now just go back to Sitemap Automator and click on the Notify Search Engines button and your Sitemap will have been submitted to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.
Remember to subscribe and visit our site for the next steps in our Sitemap Automator Instructional series.
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