Mac SEO Blog

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.

Today we are proud to announce a set of three add-ons for the Xsilva LightSpeed Web Store that will help Web Store users get more visitors to there store through search engines.

The three add-ons include;

1) RAGE SEO Add-on
Makes sure your Web Store is properly optimized for search engines by creating dynamic title and meta tags for your product pages.

2) RAGE Google Base Add-on
Gets your products listed in Google’s Product search engine so customers will see your inventory listed in Google’s search index within 48 hours along with a detailed description and price information.

3) RAGE Google Analytics Add-on
Links your e-commerce web store with Google Analytics so you can see where your customers are coming from, how they use your website, and who your most profitable customers are.

More information on the add-ons can be found on the LightSpeed SEO Add-on page.

Now that you have your blog set up with lots of great content related to your company, you can promote your blog using both Blog Search Engines and Blog Networks to get more exposure and drive more readers.

Blog Search Engines

Much like the Google search engine which searches the entire web, there are many search engines related purely to online blogs. That is, they will only search blog posts. With the rising popularity of blogs and blog search engines, leveraging these resources can offer a large amount of targeted web visitors to your web site’s blog. Some of the biggest blog search engines include;

• Technorati
• Google Blog Search

Getting your blog listed in Technorati can help provide extra exposure and important stats including how many other blogs are linking to your blog and your Blog Authority which, like Google’s PageRank, is measured by how many quality blogs link back to yours.

Once you have set up your online blog it is extremely important to set up your Technorati profile. Then, add your online blog to your profile and you can start tracking your blog’s popularity. As you add posts to your blog, they can appear on Technorati’s web site if you follow the notification descriptions below.

Blog Networks

On step above blog search engines are blog networks. Blog networks usually focus on a particular subject and allow only high quality, related blogs, to join their networks. They may be community driven, in that you must submit your blog to the network and other may vote on its relevance, or there may be a panel of judges that will determine whether or not your blog meets the standards of the network.

One of the more popular, and exclusive blog networks is 9rules (Update 2019: Link no longer available). A few times a year 9rules will open their network to submissions by bloggers, providing an opportunity for them to have their blog evaluated, and possibly included in their network.

Interested visitors will often visit blog networks in search of content related to their interests. In turn, this helps push new traffic to your web site. Other members of your same blog network may also discover your blog and provide links back to your web site. Blog networks are a great way to build your blog’s brand recognition, create a perception of quality and increase traffic and blog exposure.

There are many blog networks around and reading other blogs in your industry, or doing a simple Google search will return the vast amounts of opportunities available to you. Some of the more popular blog networks include;

b5media (Update 2019: Link no longer available)
Smash.vc
Web2.0 Workgroup

For a long listing, and ranking scheme of the most influential blog networks, see The Blog Network List (Update: website no longer exists).

Automatically Notifying Blog Search Engines About Updates

The great thing about blogs is the ability to automatically let blog search engines, such as Technorati, know when you have posted a new blog article. This can happen instantly without you having to do anything but write your blog post and submit it to your web site. Technorati provides step by step instructions on how to PING (a fancy word for notify), their search engine when you write a new blog post. You can read the step by step instructions on the Technorati help pages (Update 2019: Link no longer works).

You can use Google’s Blog submission (Update 2019: link no longer available) service to submit your blog to Google’s Blog Search Engine. This works similar to the Technorati’s notification features described above.

Press releases are a great way to get your company name and product out to your customers. It is also a great way to obtain a large number of incoming links to your web site which can help improve your Google PageRank and in turn, your search engine rankings. A press release is a mock news story about any newsworthy information about your company, such as releasing a new product, acquiring a product from another company, or announcing significant company news.

There is a ton of information online that can teach you how to write press releases. For now, you can use the following guidelines to take into consideration when writing your press releases;

1. Make sure your press release relates to a newsworthy event
2. Don’t make your press release sound like a sales pitch. You are providing an unbiased news releases about a significant company event.
3. Always write your press release as if it were going out to people who have never heard of your company or product. Make sure you clearly define who you are and what you do each time a press release is sent out.
4. Always include an easy way for publications to get in contact with you if they have more questions.
5. Your first paragraph should concisely answer the questions, Who, What, Where, and When. Essentially a short summary of your entire release.
6. Try to keep your release to a page long and never exceed two pages.

There are a number of press release distributers. You can find ones that are more expensive but will get you a greater reach and have more credibility with publications, and you will also find some which are not too expensive and can still provide you with a number of media contacts and links back to your web site.

One of the most popular, and least expensive press release distribution web sites is PRWeb. You can send a release for as little as $0 to $80 $40 depending on who you want to reach. If you live in the UK, another popular newswire web site is http://www.sourcewire.com/.

Look around for other press release distributers, especially one that may be specific to the product or service your offer. For example, if you were a Mac Software developer you may want to use the services of PRMac which targets just Macintosh related web sites and publications.

Other press release distribution web sites that are more expensive but provide added credibility in the eyes of your target media include;

PR Newswire
Business Wire
CNW Group (Canadian)

Update: Changed the PRWeb pricing details as they have changed since this article was originally written. Thanks Mario!

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 are extremely happy to finally release version 1.0 of Domainer, a new application for web site owners, marketers and investors to track and manage their domain names.

Domainer is the first, and as of this writing, the only tool for the Mac that gives an overview of a web site’s popularity using Google PageRank, AlexaRank, incoming back links and social tags. With Domainer, you can quickly, and easily, see all important domain details in one easy to use application.

Use RAGE Domainer to manage your domains, track and beat the success of your competitors, and find profitable web sites to buy and sell.

A free download of Domainer can be found here. Domainer is available for purchase immediately through the RAGE Software secure online store for just $39.95 USD.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Come discuss your thoughts, feature suggestions and any questions you may have for Domainer on the RAGE Discussion forum.

For the past 8 years we have been providing software that makes it really easy for Mac users to design beautiful web sites. We started with RAGE WebDesign, the best Mac Web Development tool back in early 2000. Than we released RAGE ButtonDesign and RAGE MapDesign to make it really easy to add professional looking graphics and add some really cool effects to your web site. We even released 15 beautiful CSS based templates for users who need a little inspiration when designing their web sites.

Now we are entering a new segment in the web development arena. In 2005 we released RAGE Google Sitemap Automator to help web developers get their web site listed in major search engines. This was a huge hit with our customers as they loved the ability to not only get their sites listed in search engines really easily, but the added feedback provided by Google’s Webmaster Tools has enabled users to obtain an edge over their competition.

Today we are announcing beta versions of two awesome new web promotional tools. Never before has their been a native Mac application as robust and beautiful looking as our new Mac SEO Tools. So Today we are proud to announce the beta versions of;

Domainer – The only tool for Mac that lets you easily track and compare multiple web sites in one easy to use interface. Domainer provides important SEO details including Google PageRank, AlexaRank, Incoming Links and Number of Social tags in addition to key Domain details such as expiration and creation dates, domain owners, FTP details and hosting information.

RAGE SERank – Check your web site ranking in over 40 search engines. Now you can know exactly where your web site appears in search engines for the keywords you are targeting. Plus, you can easily see which one of your competitors ranks above you and easily track your search engine rankings over time. Built on a beautiful Mac interface, RAGE SERank is the first native search engine rank checker for the Mac.

You can sign up to beta test each application by creating a free beta testing account at the following URL;

Beta Test Here

Once logged in you will see the two applications listed. You can then request to beta test. Beta testers will receive a free license once the application is officially released.

We look forward to getting your feedback and hearing what you have to say.

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.

Recently Yahoo performed a number of tests to determine what are the major factors to slow loading web pages and provides 13 useful tips to help improve your web page load time. Having fast loading web pages is important for a variety of reasons including;

1. It has been estimated that visitors will spend less than 8 seconds waiting for a page to load before going somewhere else

2. Search engine bots will be able to scan and index your web site faster

How does this relate to RAGE MapDesign? Well Yahoo found that the number one factor to speeding up page load time is too reduce the number of HTTP requests sent to your web server. A web browser sends a request to a web server for each image it must load according to your HTML code. Yahoo actually recommends creating one large image map instead of splitting up your images manually. And of course RAGE MapDesign is the faster and easiest way to create web site image maps.

This reduces the number of requests sent to your server and in return helps speed up your web page load time. You can read the 13 Tips To Faster Loading Web Pages at Yahoo’s developer web site.

Some tips get very creative so go through them to see what else you can do to help reduce the amount of time it takes web browsers to display your web site.