Mac SEO Blog

Google is working on their next generation search engine algorithm, known as the “Caffeine update”, and is giving everyone the opportunity to test it out.

Although you won’t see any interface changes, the new infrastructure attempts to offer faster indexing of websites, a larger search database and better search results. You can see where your website is ranking in the new index by going to their temporary search page.

Right now Google is looking for feedback about the results you get for your search term. You can submit feedback by doing a search then scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the dissatisfied with search results link.

Although Google claims that the update is not because of any new search engine rivals, such as Microsoft’s new Bing engine, some may find many reasons to doubt that.

With the release of Bing, Microsoft is putting the pressure on Google to continually update their products and services. Maybe now with a suitable competitor, Google may need to cut their beta periods on new products by a couple of years and start introducing new features at a faster pace.

We all know that in order for your website to appear in a search engine’s results page (SERP) you must either have that keyword included in your website content or have another website link to your website using that keyword.

Competing for keywords can be very difficult. Often times a keyword you want to rank high for involves competing with thousands, or millions, of other websites. So what if it were possible to find keywords before they became popular? Almost like seeing into the future.

Well you can get some “insight” into what keywords are rising in popularity with Google Insight for Search.

With Google Insight for Search you can find out what your customers are searching for before the keyword term has become popular. You can narrow your search down to specific countries or regions, look across different services such as Google Web search, news search image search, etc… and even narrow your search down by category.

Google Insights for Search will even provide popular synonyms and upcoming search terms that are gaining in popularity.

Try doing a search for one of your keywords within the last 30 days to see what your customers are searching for on Google Insights for Search.

Nobody likes visiting a slow loading website. Websites that take a long time to load (more than 5 seconds) are losing out on potential visitors. Studies have shown that visitors will wait no more than 8 seconds on average for a page to load. But did you know that search engines won’t wait for pages to load either?

Google in particular does not like slow loading websites. In fact, if you are using adwords to promote your site, the speed of your website’s load time is used as a Quality Factor to help determine your cost-per-click and your ad position.

Even more important however, is that your website’s load time will effect how many of your pages Google will index. Take a look at the following graphs taken from Google Webmaster Tools. The bottom graph shows the time spent downloading a page while the middle graph shows the number of kilobytes downloaded per day and the top graph shows the number of pages crawled per day.

You can easily see that as the time spent downloading pages went up Google indexed LESS pages. There is a clear inverse relationship between download time and number of pages indexed.

How do you check your own site?

You can check this for your own site by creating an XML Sitemap file and checking the Crawl Stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

How do you fix this?

Fortunately there is a very easy way to fix this. You need to reduce the size of your website and you can easily do this with WebCrusher website optimizer. WebCrusher will instantly optimize your site by removing unneeded website code and compressing image files. Then it can automatically publish your site directly to your webserver whether your are using an actual web host or MobileMe/iDisk to host your site.

In just 5 minutes you can have a faster website, that loads as quickly as possible for your visitors and insures Google and other search engines can properly scan and index all of your webpage files.

You also want to make sure that you are using a fast web hosting service to host your site. If you are a MobileMe/iDisk user it may be time to change to a fast and reliable web hosting service.

So you’ve created your website in iWeb, using Apple’s easy to use webpage builder. Its published online ready for the world to see. The only problem, nobody knows about it.

We get hundreds of requests from iWeb users who have created business and even personal websites, trying to figure out how to get traffic to their site. Most users know that search engines provide the number one source of targeted traffic to a website. So how do you get your website to the top of search engines and start getting new visitors and customers?

Today we have made this difficult task much easier for you iWeb users with iWeb SEO Tool. Combined with our suite of Mac SEO Software, iWeb users can now enjoy the same search engine benefits and fairly compete for top search engine rankings.

Here are your steps to high search engine rankings for iWeb based websites. Keep in mind, the following strategies are not instant, but over time will help you get the top spots on all search engines.

1. Research the keywords your visitors are searching for in major search engines. To find out exactly what keywords are being searched for, download RAGE SEKeyword, the free keyword research tool from RAGE Software.
2. Make sure these keywords are placed in the right places on your website. That means in your title tag, meta tags, alternative image text and your actual webpage content. This is where iWeb SEO Tool comes in handy. Use iWeb SEO Tool to add your keywords to your title tags, meta tags and alternative image text. This step is known as on-page search engine optimization since they are strategies you apply directly to your website.
3. Publish your website to your server, which can all be done through iWeb SEO Tool, whether you use MobileMe or your own hosting provider.
4. Submit your website to all major search engines the proper way with XML based Sitemaps. Create your XML Sitemaps with Sitemap Automator, the only tool built specifically for iWeb based websites.
5. Get third party websites to link to your website with the keywords you researched in step one. The more links you have to your website, the better chance you have of ranking high for these keywords. This step is known as off-page optimizations and combined with on-page optimizations, puts your website in the best possible chance of ranking at the top of search engines. To find high quality link partners try Domainer the domain management and SEO tool. It will give you important search engine statistics about your website and any another website online.
6. Continually repeat step 5 in order to climb to the top of search engines. Remember, be patient as top search engine rankings do not happen over night. They take time as search engines update their indexes and algorithms.
7. Check your search engine rankings with RAGE SERank, the number one search engine rank checker for Mac OS X to see exactly where your website ranks for your most important keywords. Plus, you can see where your competitors rank too!
8. For more secrets to high search engine rankings see the SEO for iWeb article on the RAGE Software 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

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.

Summary: The difference between search engines and online directories and how to find quality directories that will actually provide value to your website.

As we all know a search engine allows potential visitors to find your website amongst billions of others fighting for attention. Much like search engines, online directories provide another way for web searchers to find your Websites.

The following table summarizes the differences between search engines and online directories.

There are a countless number of online directories with one of the largest being DMOZ, a not-for-profit directory that relies on volunteer editors to determine whether or not a website should be added to the directory.

Directories can also be specific to certain subjects, for example there are directories that will focus only on Small Businesses, or directories like VFunk which specializes in listing dance music and urban lifestyle related websites.

Directories can provide a great way to get incoming links to your website, and some, like DMOZ can actually help your search engine rankings. Since directories review each web page before adding them, a well respected directory can help signify a high quality website to potential visitors and search engines.

The trick to getting links in directories is too find the directories that focus on your niche, and that would actually provide value to your link popularity. Many directories charge a one-time, monthly, or yearly fee to get listed so you have to make sure that they will actually provide enough value to justify the investment. Unfortunately, many of them will not. However, here are some indicators to find out whether or not they will actually be a valuable investment;

Page Rank: Don’t confuse Page Rank with search engine rank. Page Rank is a website popularity measure invented by Google that ranges by 1-10. It tries to measure the popularity of website based on how many people link to a website. A high PageRank signifies a more popular website with higher quality incoming links. If a directory has a high PageRank, this is one indication that they will provide value.

Incoming Links: Incoming links refers to how many other websites are linking to the directory. Combined with the above measure, the number of incoming links can provide a good indication of the quality of a directory. The more incoming links a directory has, the better indication that it will provide better value to you. Remember, that each incoming link counts as a vote for a website, so the more votes a directory has, the more value it will provide.

Domain Age & Expiration Dates: The longer a directory has been online for and the longer the directory domain name has been registered for is a good indication of its quality. Many people start online directories in the hopes of creating advertising and sign up revenue. Only a few will ever provide any kind of value for your website. A person’s commitment to their directory can be seen by how long they have paid to make it available.

You can quickly and easily find all the above information in seconds for dozens of directories at a time. Just enter each directory in RAGE Domainer to find all the above popularity statistics as well as other important information including;

• Who is tagging the directory on the social bookmarking website http://www.delicious.com
• How many blogs are linking back to the directory

With this information you can easily see which directories you should be listed in, and which directories will be a waste of time submitting too.

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.