Mac SEO Blog

More and more users accessing the internet via their mobile devices. As a result it is important for the user experience that the webpages they browse look good on their hand-held devices. The video tutorial below will show you how you can create a mobile friendly version of your iWeb website. Users visiting your website on an iPhone or Android device will automatically be redirected to the mobile version of your website. Be sure to use the sample code for setting up the redirect:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can create a mobile version of your iWeb website, so that users visiting your site on an iPhone or Android will be directed to your mobile friendly website.

In order to follow this tutorial completely, you must have a RAGE Web Hosting account. You can sign up for a hosting account ragesw.com/hosting

You will also need iWeb SEO Tool, or SEIntelligence, which are two applications offered by RAGE Software that allow you to add search engine optimization features to your website.

Our first step in the process will be to setup the address for the mobile site. If you have paid attention in the past to the addresses of websites you have visited on your phone, you may have noticed that typing in facebook.com for example, will turn into m.facebook.com – In this case, M represents mobile.

Now we must set it up so that your address will turn into something similar. The first thing you need to do is login to cPanel. Your cPanel login information was sent to you in your RAGE Web Hosting: New Account Information email. When you are logged in click on the icon that reads Subdomains.

In the Subdomain text field, type in mobile just like you see here. You will notice that your mobile URL will now be the combination of this subdomain plus your domain. So in my case, it will be mobile.ragesw.net. Just a quick note, if you have multiple domains on your account, you can click this drop down menu to select the domain you want to use for the mobile site. You will notice that the Document Root field will automatically be filled with www/mobile. Take note of that because we will be using it later on in the video.

The next thing we are going to do is prepare our mobile sites in iWeb. What we will do is create a new site by going to File and selecting New Site. Since we want our mobile site to be mobile friendly, our best option is to choose the blank page. Now, I’m just going to get rid of this text box, and then disable the navigation menu. This is done by clicking on Inspector, and clicking on the Page tab, and unchecking the options to Include this page in the navigation menu, and DIsplay navigation menu. The reason we do this is because since we want to ensure mobile friendliness, we basically want a blank page and none of the page defaults from iWeb.

With the inspector window still opened to the Page tab, click on the Layout button, and change content width to 300 pixels. This is going to create a mobile size canvas for us to create our mobile sites on. Repeat this for all of the mobile pages you are going to make.

Now you can design a more mobile friendly version of your website. This can include images that are smaller in file size, and larger more compact text. It might be a good idea to visit some mobile friendly websites on your phone so you can get a better idea of how to design your mobile site. One tip is to always include a link to view your full site. A way to do this is to just create a text box that says View Full Site, highlight the text, open the Inspector window, go to the hyperlink tab, click to enable as hyperlink, and type in the non-mobile link for this respective page.

When you are done creating your Mobile friendly site, you will need to publish it. The important thing here is to publish the mobile site to that new subdomain that we just created.

So if you are using iWeb 09, you will go to the publish page by clicking on the site name, and select Publish to FTP server from the drop down menu. Customize the site name and contact email to your liking.

Input your server address, username, and password. In the Directory/Path field, type in the location of your subdomain, which if you remember from earlier, was www/mobile.

In the website URL field, make sure you type in your URL as http://mobile.yourdomain.com. In my case, I will type it in as http://mobile.ragesw.net

When you are all ready, click the Publish Site button to publish the site.

If you are using an older version of iWeb, publish this new mobile site like you would publish your regular site. The most important thing to remember is that you need to publish the site by putting www/mobile in the Directory Path field. If you forget to do this, it will not work, and you risk overwriting your original website, so do not forget about this step.

When the site has been published, you can visit it on your phone by going to mobile.yourdomain.com to make sure everything looks the way you want it to. If not, go back to iWeb and make your changes and then publish the site once again.

Once you are satisfied with the mobile version of your site, there is one last thing that needs to be done in order to make the phone know to send the user to the mobile version of your site.

Go to ragesw.com/blog. In the search field, type in web hosting tutorials, and select the result that reads RAGE Web Hosting Video Tutorials. The direct link to that page is this. On this page, locate and click on the link that reads Setting Up A Mobile Friendly iWeb Site.

On this page, you will see this link that reads “Be sure to use the sample code for setting up the redirect” Click on this link and copy the code that will appear on the page that follows.

Now, before we paste this code somewhere, I want you to first publish your main website from iWeb to a local folder on your hard drive. Then load that local folder into iWeb SEO Tool, or SEIntelligence, whichever program you use. In this example, I am using iWeb SEO Tool, but the same principle applies to SEIntelligence.

With your website loaded in the tool, paste the code that we just copied in the head code section of the Site Settings tab. Replace the URL which reads mobile.ragesw.net to your mobile URL. If you are using SEIntelligence, open the Site Settings tab, and paste the code in the Header Code/Google Analytics box. Also replace the mobile.ragesw.net URL with your mobile URL.

If you have another code in this box, such as Google Analytics, just paste this code above it. Then click on the Apply To Entire Site button.

The new Retina Macbook Pro’s are simply beautiful. If you haven’t gotten a chance to try one, I highly recommend it.

We are working very heard to get all of our software updated for Retina displays starting with WebCrusher 2.3.

WebCrusher 2.3 includes support for Retina displays as well as a whole bunch of other fixes. You’ll find the software works a lot smoother as we made a lot of optimizations within the software.

WebCrusher is our website optimization tool that speeds up your website’s load time for your visitors in just a few second. Simply open your website in WebCrusher and let it do the rest. WebCrusher will work with any web building tool including; iWeb, RapidWeaver, Sandvox, Dreamweaver, WebDesign, MacFlux and more…

This update is free for registered users or you can download the free demo to try it out.

If you are keeping up with the world of SEO, you are probably aware of Google’s recent algorithm change known as ‘Penguin’ change which has affected the rankings of many websites. The update targeted websites whose back-links were not considered ‘natural’.

As we have mentioned in many of our tutorials, back-links should come naturally. Natural back-links typically occur when a website has something unique or interesting to offer, causing users to talk about it and place links to it in various places on the internet. Google’s ‘Penguin’ update now better determines the links that point to your website that Google finds to be unnatural.

So how do you tell if you have any of these unnatural back-links, and what can you do to correct it?

The first thing to do is a back-link check to see a nice list of the websites linking to your site. This can easily be done in SEIntelligence. Here is a screenshot of the results for 200 back-links to one particular page.

One of the things I want you to take note of is the Page Rank for that particular page that is linking to this site. For those of you not familiar with Page Rank, it is a score given to a web-page by Google. The score ranges from one to ten with ten being the highest. Pages obtain page rank when other websites link to them. For example, let’s say Page A on Site A has a page rank of 6. If Page A on Site A links to Page A on Site B, it is essentially giving a ‘vote’ to Page A on Site B. This in turn will give Page A on Site B some page rank. This is because Page A on Site B is a trusted source, and that trusted source is essentially saying that this page is good enough (or bad enough) to link to.

What you want to do, is make sure that the pages pointing to your site are from trusted sources. Page Rank is a great way to tell this. If all the pages linking to your page have zero page rank, it might look a bit suspicious, so just make sure you are getting links from a variety of pages, including pages with high page rank. Don’t just consider the Domain’s page rank, but pay close attention to the URL Page Rank as highlighted in the screenshot.

Another area of focus that users should pay attention to is the anchor text used by sites linking to your site. The anchor text is the exact text used in a link for users to click on to be taken to the linked-to website.

What you want to look out for is having the anchor text be the same for a large majority of the links pointing to your site. When the anchor text is the same, it might indicate that the user has added these links manually, which is not considered to be a natural way of link building. As a result, it could lead to loss of rankings.

So be sure to check out SEIntelligence and do a back-link check on your website. Ensure the sites linking to your site are considered ‘important’ with higher page ranks. Don’t forget to make sure that there is a good variety of anchor text from the websites linking to your site.

Sparrow is a neat e-mail client that has gained much popularity over the last few months, especially since being bought out by Google. In the video below, you will learn how to easily setup Sparrow on your Mac to use with your e-mail address hosted with RAGE Web Hosting.

Video Transcript:

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to setup Sparrow for your RAGE Web Hosting email account. This tutorial assumes you have already setup your email address in cPanel. If you have not done that yet, please do so now and continue with this tutorial when you are finished.

The first thing we need to do is download Sparrow. This can be done at sparrowmailapp.com. Look for a button the says Sparrow for Mac. If the site looks different than what you see here, don’t worry, just find a button or link that either says Sparrow for Mac, or something similar to it. Once on the Sparrow for Mac page, find a Download button and click it to download. At the time of this tutorial, it is September 2012. You can either download a free version which has some ads in it, or pay the fee to download the non-ad version, whichever you prefer. Once downloaded and installed, launch Sparrow.

Upon initial launch, you should see a window that looks similar to this. Type in your e-mail addresses and password. This is the e-mail address and password that you setup in cPanel. For Port, leave as Auto, and then remove the Secure Connection check mark. Click on the Custom button so that we can enter custom details.

For server type, the default selection is IMAP. I recommend leaving that as your server type. Your server address will be mail.yourdomain.com So for example, since my domain is ragesw.net, my server address is mail.ragesw.net. When you are done, click the Next button.

On the next window, type in mail.yourdomain.com as the SMTP server. So since my domain is ragesw.net, I will type in mail.ragesw.net

For Port, make sure to put in 26 just like I am doing. Once again, remove the Secure connection check mark.

The other fields should already be filled in for you. If not, put a check in Use Authentication, and once again type in your e-mail address in the Login field and your password in the password field. Then click Next.

Sparrow is now setup for you and you can begin sending and receiving e-mails.

Those of you who have a Google Map on your website might have noticed that after MobileMe was discontinued, your map no longer worked. The video below will show you what to do if you are one of the many users in this situation.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Now that MobileMe has been discontinued, you might have noticed that the Google Maps widget that is included in iWeb will no longer display correctly. Instead, you might see just a piece of that MobileMe is closed sign.

To correct this problem, first what you’ll need to do is remove the Google Maps widget from your iWeb site. You can do this by simply clicking on the widget and hitting the delete key on your keyboard.

Next, go to maps.google.com, and in the search bar, type in the address for your business and hit return to perform the search. Next, click on the icon with the chain link and copy the code under Paste HTML to embed in website.

Now, back in iWeb, drag an HTML snippet onto your page, and paste the code. Your map should appear. If you want the map on multiple pages on your site, click the respective page, drag and drop the HTML Snippet, and once again paste the code.

We have released minor updates to both iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher. If you publish to an FTP server these updates will fix the dropped connections errors that seem to happen randomly for some users.

WebCrusher
Optimize your website so it loads as fast as possible for your visitors. WebCrusher removes unneeded code, re-arranges your code for faster parsing and reduces the size of image files with one-click.

iWeb SEO Tool
iWeb SEO Tool helps you quickly and easily optimize an iWeb website for search engines by adding title tags, meta tags and alternative image text. It also lets you add favicons (the small icons in your web browser’s path bar when visiting a website) and Google Analytics.

Domainer 2.2.1 is now available. It fixes problems with getting the expiry date for .co.uk domain. It also contains fixes for Mountain Lion.

Domainer lets you easily track and manage your domain names providing you with important details on your domain value.

It is a free update for registered users of Domainer 2.x.

The following video tutorials will help you to use WebCrusher more effectively. These tutorials do not need to be watched in any particular order.

Using WebCrusher

How To Load An iWeb Site In WebCrusher

How To Publish A WebCrusher Optimized Site To An FTP Client

How To Tell If A Site Has Been Published Correctly With WebCrusher

A More Powerful WebCrusher

Make an iWeb Site Work with Internet Explorer

WebCrusher & Other RAGE Applications

How To Use Both iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher

This instructional video is going to show you how to transfer more than one domain when signing up for RAGE Web Hosting.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

If you are signing up for RAGE Web Hosting for the first time, and you have multiple domains that you want to transfer over, follow these important steps.

First, click on the Sign Up Now button to be taken to the start of the signup process.

Next, select the second option for transferring your domain. Type in your domain, and select your domain’s extension from the drop down menu. Then click the Click to Continue button.

This next page will show you that your domain is available. This is true because you selected to transfer your domain. Had you typed in a non-existent domain, it will tell you that the domain is not available for transfer.

Double check that your domain has been spelled correctly, and then click the Click to Continue button.

Now select your billing cycle, and any add-ons that you want to purchase. Since you are transferring multiple domains, you will need to select the option to Host 3 Additional domains so that you can host more than one domain on your account. If you plan on having more than 3 domains, then you will need to order two hosting accounts.

When you are done, click on the Add to Cart button.

Here is where you will need to enter the EPP or authorization code for your domain. You need this code in order for us to transfer your domain correctly. You can get this code from your account at your current registrar, or you can phone or email them and ask them for it. You will also need to unlock the domain in order for the transfer to be put through.

When you are done, click on the Update Cart button.

You will now see your total with your hosting package, your domain you are transferring, and any add-ons you have included. Now, in order to include those other domains you want to transfer, click on the Home button, and then type in your domain, and select the Transfer button. It should say that your domain is available to transfer. Double check the correct spelling of your domain and then click Add to Cart. You will then need to enter the EPP or Authorization code for this domain.

When you are done, scroll down and click Update Cart. You will notice your other domain has now been added to the order. Let’s do this process one more time. Click on the Home button, and then type in your domain. Then click the Transfer button. Double check your domain’s spelling, and click Add to Cart. Enter your domain’s EPP or Authorization code, and then click on Update Cart. All of your domains will now have been added to your cart, and you can now checkout.

Transferring your domain to RAGE Web Hosting will allow you to manage your domain(s) and hosting under one roof. This video will explain how to transfer a domain, and eventually point the domain to RAGE Web Hosting so that you can have your site hosted with RAGE in just a matter of minutes.

Video Transcript:

When you transfer your website to RAGE Web Hosting, not only will you get a reliable host, but you will also receive an all in one place for your domains, hosting, software, and SEO needs.

If you already have a domain it is very easy to transfer your domain to RAGE Web Hosting. The process will take less than 5 minutes.

The first thing you’ll want to do is e-mail your current domain registrar and tell them to unlock the domain, and send you the EPP or Authorization Code. Most registrars will let you do this on your own, but if you don’t want to do it on your own, you can just send them an e-mail.

In this demonstration, I’m going to show you how to obtain the Authorization Code from your GoDaddy account. The process should be fairly similar with other registrars, but note that some will refer to the code as an EPP code, while others may refer to it as an Authorization Code.

So to do this in GoDaddy, you will first need to open the Domain Manager by clicking on My Products under the My Account tab. Then click on Domain Manager which is located on the left hand side of the window under My Products.

When the Domain Manager opens up, click on the domain that you wish to transfer.

Under the heading Domain Information, there are two things we will need to do. You will see that Authorization Code that I mentioned earlier, with a Send By Email link right beside. Click on the link and have the email sent you.

The next thing is to unlock the domain which will allow us to transfer it. As you can see, this domain is currently locked. To change this, press the Manage button, and uncheck the box to unlock the domain.

Once you have received that code, you can go to the RAGE Web Hosting page, which is located at ragesw.com/webhosting.php or by selecting Hosting in the navigation menu on ragesw.com

The next thing you’ll do is press the Sign Up Now button.

On the first page of the shopping cart, you will need to select the second option which reads “I want to transfer my domain to RAGE Web Hosting.” Then type in your domain.

This is a really important step if you are transferring your domain. If you keep it on the default option which is for registering a new domain name, then you will be told that the domain is already registered, which would be true, because it is currently registered by you.

On the next page, you can choose your Billing Cycle, and any add-ons that you might want.

On the next page, here is where you will enter the EPP or Authorization code that you received from your registrar.

When you are finished with the signup process, you will receive an e-mail within a few hours. Included in this e-mail will be your FTP login details to publish your site, as well as the Nameservers that you will need to update your website.

You will then be able to go back to your registrar and update your nameservers . In the same section where I got the Authorization Code and unlocked the domain, there is a link that says Set Nameservers. You can click on this link and update the information to include the Nameservers that you recieved in your e-mail from RAGE Web Hosting.

When you are done, you will receive an e-mail within the next few days, telling you to approve the transfer.  Approve the transfer, and you’re all set.