Mac SEO Blog

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.

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

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.

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.

Introduction

1. Opening Your Website in SEIntelligence
2. Keyword Research – Learning how to find high quality keywords

On-Page Optimizations

2. Getting Familiar With On-Page Optimizations
3. Adding Meta Keywords & Getting Ready To Do On-Page Optimizations
4. Adding Great Title Tags To Enhance Search Engine Visibility
5. Writing A High Quality Meta Description
6. Editing Other Meta Tags
7. All About Header Tags
8. The Importance Of Internal Links
9.Putting Words To An Image with Alt Text
10.High Quality Page Content
11. Using the Site Settings Tab
12. Applying Changes & Publishing Your Site
13. Re-Opening Your Site In SEIntelligence

Site Settings

1. Site Settings
2. Header & Footer Code Tab

Other SEIntelligence Videos

1. SEIntelligence for RapidWeaver – Part 1

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.

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.