Mac SEO Blog

Anchor text refers to the link captions you click when you travel from web page to web page and is commonly blue and underlined. Anchor text is an extremely important factor in your on-page optimization strategies.

Broadly speaking, search engines see anchor text as a description of the page they link too. So for example if you link to a web page using the anchor text “About Blue Widgets” search engines will use this information to help understand the content on the linked-to web page.

Do a Google search for “Click Here”. As the number 1 search result you will see a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page. This is because so many web sites will say something like: “You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here to download it”. Even though the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page does not contain the text”Click Here” anywhere on the web page, it still ranks highly for this search term because of the web sites that link to it.

Keep this in mind when you link to other pages on your web site as well as any third party web pages. Instead of using the caption “click here”, try being more descriptive about the content the user is about to see. Lets say you are linking to another page which shows off a software application that verifies web site links are working correctly;

Inefficient & Generic Anchor Text

“Click here”
“More Information”
“Click here for more information”

Better Anchor Text
“Easily Check For Broken Links”
“Download Marketing Success E-book”

You don’t want to overdue this technique and sometimes it is appropriate to use a non-descriptive caption such as “click here”. However, when you can, try to make your anchor text more descriptive so that not only search engines know more about the content on the next page, but your web site visitors will be better informed as well.

There is one more important reason to using descriptive anchor text. If you do a search for a popular term such as “Apple Computers”, you may notice the extra links underneath the top result in Google’s search index as shown below;

Google automatically determines whether or not to show these additional links based on a number of factors. It is not known exactly when these links will appear but since they are generated using a computer algorithm and with no human intervention at all, you must make sure your web site is properly optimized so that they have the potential of showing your most important pages in the supplemental links section of your search engine rankings.

If you want to have these additional links show up, make sure you use consistent and descriptive anchor text in your inbound links for your most important pages such as a product information page or an online store.

Recently, Google updated their Webmaster Tools to provide more flexibility and control with these supplemental links. If you have created your XML Sitemap with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator you should already have a Webmaster Tools account. You can use the Webmaster Tools admin area to set which links you would not want to appear as an additional link. This is a fairly new feature that lets you have a little more flexibility with your web site’s search engine listing.

We were extremely pleased to find RAGE Domainer chosen as a Staff Pick on Apple’s Mac OS X download pages. It joins RAGE Google Sitemap Automator and RAGE MapDesign on Apple’s Staff Pick list.

Check it out here: Domainer on Apple’s Staff Pick List.

Recently Google updated their Webmaster Tools account with more data and a revamped Interface. Personally I find the new interface to be much easier to use.

The biggest addition is a web site feed subscriber stats section. You can see the subscriber stats from the Statistics tab.

The all new subscriber stats give you details about how many people subscribe to your web site feeds, such as RSS and atom feeds, through Google services. Although this won’t give you the total number of subscribers since not everyone is using Google tools to subscribe to your feeds, it does provide a nice overview and a gauge at how popular your feed actually is.

If you are unsure what a feed actually is, or you are interested in learning how to get more subscribers to your feeds through Google, there is a Google help page describing how to set up and track site feeds

If you don’t yet have a Google Webmaster Tools account, or have your XML sitemap up, do so now with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. XML Sitemaps help you get your web site indexed faster and more thoroughly, giving you much more control on how search engines find and index your web site.

So we’ve been working really hard all summer on some great new updates AND some awesome new products. First and foremost, we have an update on the way for RAGE WebDesign, which I mentioned earlier and RAGE Google Sitemap Automator.

To give you some clues on what’s new, we are going to have to redo all the screen shots on for both products! 🙂

Aside from that, we have been working on two amazing new apps. These applications are one of a kind on the Mac. There are no other tools that can do what they do!

So keep checking back and make sure you get our newsletter so you’ll know what’s coming up. If you run a web site, you’ll love these products!

In version 1.5 of RAGE Google Sitemap Automator there is a small problem which will display a bug report message on launch if you create FTP bookmarks without entering a default path. This has been fixed for the next free update which is due out very soon.

If you would like to try the latest beta version, just sign up at the URL below.

TryBeta

Well we’ve finally done it. We have released our first Universal Application.

Although it did take us a while it doesn’t mean that this is what you can expect from all of our other applications. We already have RAGE ButtonDesign and RAGE Macintosh Explorer running natively on Intel Macs here. We just don’t want to release an update only offering native Intel compatibility.

In fact you can sign up to our beta program at the URL below and start testing it for yourself. Just create your login and you can begin testing;

http://www.trybeta.com/home/

We hope to get an update to RAGE Macintosh Explorer out before the holiday season. Not only will it be a Universal Binary, but we have also added some nice new features and fixed some annoying bugs.

Great news today from the top search engine giants. According to TechCrunch Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced an agreement on the sitemaps protocol created by Google.

It’s great to hear that these three competitors have worked together for the benefit of Internet users. This will greatly enhance the ability of web developers to let all major search engines know which of their web site’s pages are important and how often they are updated. I hope this leads to more relevant results from these search engines based on the information provided by web site owners.

It is also likely the sitemap protocol will be expanded to add more features and give more control to web site owners over what kind of information the search engines store about each web site.

What does this mean for RAGE Google Sitemap Automator users? Your sitemaps will now be recognized by Yahoo and Microsoft in addition to Google. Further, any search engine can decide to support sitemaps which means your sitemap has just become that much more important for your search engine ranking strategy.

If you have already created your sitemap in RAGE Google Sitemap Automator you do not have to change a thing. Your sitemaps will already be compatible with Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engine.

We will be adding features to make it much easier to submit your sitemaps to Yahoo and Microsoft. We will also obviously adjust the name once these features are added to better reflect the programs new features.

More information on the changes can be found at sitemaps.org.

We will be posting more details as they become available. A significant update to RAGE Google Sitemap Automator will be released very soon. We have added some great new features that will make creating and uploading your sitemaps much easier. We are just fine tuning its performance for Intel computers.

A new version of RAGE Google Sitemap Automator is out. Its got a new parsing engine which can find more links on your page such as those in image maps, frames and meta redirect pages. If you were getting errors saying that no web pages could be found, this update should help a lot.

It also allows you to prevent certain pages from being scanned for links such as images. Images can still be added but they will not be downloaded or scanned for links.

Check it out here;
http://www.ragesw.com/products/googlesitemap.html

About a week ago the Google Sitemap team posted a long interview on their blog which discusses the future of sitemaps. It also talks about some features and common problems. You can check it out here;

Google Sitemap Team Interview

Its been a long few months since the first release of RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. We just released version 1.1 and its a whole lot faster as previously mentioned. If you have an older version, or downloaded one of the betas, you’ve got to update to the final 1.1 release.

It fixes a lot of issues, even since the last beta was sent out. So if you don’t already have it you can download it here;

http://www.ragesw.com/products/googlesitemap.html

The update is free for registered users. Otherwise you can download the demo and try it out on your site.

We have a lot of new features planned for future versions. If you have any requests, just post it on the RAGE Discussions forum or send us an email.