A splash screen or splash page, is usually the main page on a website, which consists of a large image, often with an Enter button. This is an example of a splash screen. A splash screen is something we want to avoid. Your main page is supposed to be one of the most important pages on your website. You should be including your most important links on your home page. Having just an image and no content does not give search engines a good indication of what your site is about.
The old saying of a picture is worth a thousand words is anything but true when it comes to search engines. For the time being, search engines cannot view an image and then know what keywords to associate them with. Instead, search engines rely on the webmaster to give an indication of what the image is about, via the alternative text feature.
In RapidWeaver, select an image, and then press the Media Inspector button. In the Alt Image field, type in your Alternative Text for your image. Remember to be descriptive, while not keyword stuffing. Avoid making your alt text misleading in any way.
Remember, try and include the keywords or phrases you have been using throughout your site while also keeping the text short, to the point, and relevant to the actual photo. Do this for all images you deem necessary to having alternative text. Do your best to avoid putting too many words in the alt text.
Another method of emphasizing your most important key-terms is by utilizing header tags. Header tags can be used in various ways on a website. They are sometimes used to display the title of a page, like the one you see here, or as the headings for content, similar to what you see here on this site. There are six different header tags in HTML. The most important header tag is said to be the h1 tag.
The situation with header tags in RapidWeaver is this: Currently, there is one H1 tag, and one H2 tag. These are located in the title…and slogan, respectively. The biggest downside to this is that the location of these headers make it kind of difficult for you to customize the header to fit each page. In addition, these headers are identical on every page of your website.
My recommendation is this: If the header tags don’t concern you all that much, then don’t worry about them. If you want to have a good consistent site title or slogan across all pages of your website, then do so. You could attempt to make this title or slogan include some good keywords, and that might be a good idea.
Here is an alternative to creating your own header tags. This method is going to have you not include anything in your title or slogan, which might look a bit strange on some templates, but very normal of some of the other templates.
This method really is optional. If you don’t want to do it, don’t feel that you have to. Not having your header tags as optimized as they can be will not completely ruin your chance at ranking high in search engines. The first thing you are going to do, is turn off the Title and Slogan, by pressing the Setup button, going to the General tab, and unchecking the boxes next to Title and Slogan. Then, in the RapidWeaver edit window, we’re going to create our H1 tag. To do this, type the code exactly as I am doing. Replace the word KEYWORD with your own keyword. Having just one H1 tag per page should suffice.
If you feel it is appropriate to do so, you can add an H2, or even H3 tag to your page the exact same way. So when it is appropriate to do so? The answer to that depends on a few different factors. The H1 tag should contain your most important, or primary keyterm. If your webpage touches upon things related to your other keyterms, then it may make sense to put another keyterm in an H2 tag. The one thing you need to ask yourself when adding these header tags is ‘does this help my visitors better understand my page?’ if the answer is ‘no,’ then you might be better off only including the H1 tag. Adding header tags just for the sake of SEO is not the right way to do it.
This video will demonstrate how you can check to see if you have correctly published your XML Sitemap using Sitemap Automator.
To check to see if your Sitemap has published correctly, first open your website in your web browser.
If your site shows up as yourdomain.com, then type in sitemap.xml beside the domain, similar to how I am doing it. If the sitemap shows up, then you have published it correctly.
If your site was made in iWeb, it might look something like this. Just replace pagename.html with sitemap.xml.
If your iWeb website’s URL contains the Site Name in the middle here, then you can replace these two items with sitemap.xml
If that doesn’t work, you can also try seeing if your Sitemap is located inside of the site folder by just replacing pagename.html with sitemap.xml like this.
If none of these options worked for you, then you most likely did not publish your Sitemap correctly, and you must try it again.
This quick video tutorial will show you an easy way of backing up your iWeb SEO Tool data so that you can use it on another computer.
If you want to back up your data in iWeb SEO Tool, you will need to follow these simple steps.
First, open the finder window and click on your username, then Library, then Preferences, and located the file called com.ragesw.iwebseotool.xml
You can then copy this file and then paste it where you want to store the backup files.
You will then need to go to Username, then library then Application Support and find the folder called iWeb SEO Tool and also copy and paste that in the location where you are storing the backup files.
You can then put these files back in the same location if you want to use it on a different computer, or for whatever reason, and your old data should re-appear when you load in your site and press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button.
We have just released SERank 2.5, the most powerful search engine rank checker for Mac OS X. SERank 2.5 adds Google Analytics integration which shows you how much traffic keywords are actually sending to your website. It also includes many enhancements to the reporting features allowing for more detailed reports on how your search engine rankings have changed and which keywords are the most effective in bringing in new search engine traffic.
See How Much Traffic Each Keyword is Sending to Your Website
SERank connects your Google Analytics account with your search engine rankings to show you how many visitors each keyword is actually sending to your website. Now you can easily see which keywords are your most effective and which are not actually sending any traffic to your website.
Video Transcript
Connect your Google Analytics account to your copy of SERank to receive even more information about the traffic coming to your site.
Select SERank in the Menu bar, and click on Preferences. Select the Google Analytics tab, and enter your username and password. Then press the Authenticate button.
Then find the URL you want to check, and select that URL’s respective Profile under the Account heading.
Choose how far back you want to receive visitor data for. Selecting Rank Check would give you the data during the period between now and your last rank check. For this example, let’s choose 90 days.
Now we’ll run our search like we normally would, except when we bring up the Check Rankings window, make sure to select the option for Getting Google Analytics Visitor Data.
I’ll just fast forward through the search process so we can take a look at the results.
In the keyword section, you will see a number under visitors for each keyword. This number represents the total number of visits to the site from this keyword for all search engines for the time period you selected.
The number under the visitors heading in the rank results section shows the number of visitors for each keyword for the specific search engine. So for example, you can see that the term Apptorial has 77 visitors in total, and if we look under Google we can see there have been 74 visits from there, and the remaining 3 visits came from Yahoo which we see at the bottom here.
So you can use this feature to determine which keywords are providing you with a lot of traffic, and which ones aren’t. Then it might be a good idea to re-evaluate your keyword strategy based on your findings. For example, if you rank highly for a key-term that is bringing in a small amount of visitors, it could be a good idea to replace that key-term in certain areas on your site with a more highly searched key-term.
The meta keywords attribute has been around for quite some time. Unfortunately, too many webmasters were using this feature incorrectly by adding keywords that were unrelated to the content on their site. As a result, the meta keywords tag became less and less reliable. Nonetheless, it still exists, and there has been some speculation that some search engines still do take it into account. Therefore it only makes sense for us to include our keywords in them.
Putting in our meta tags is very simple. This process is going to be very similar to the page description process. Press the Page Info button, and make sure you are on the header tab. Press the ‘Plus’ button, and under the Name heading, type in ‘Keywords.’
In the content section, type in your keywords. Remember to separate each keyword or phrase with a comma. Do not add keywords or phrases which are irrelevant to your page. Keep this section to a minimum. Adding a bunch of keywords and phrases will not help your efforts. As an example, if this page was about left handed golf clubs, it wouldn’t make sense to add the phrase ‘Right handed golf clubs’ in the meta keywords. It would be more appropriate to save that phrase for your right handed golf clubs page.
The description tag is a place where you can give a quick description of what is on your webpage. This isn’t a place to just pack in some keywords, but it is a great spot for you to write one or two sentences that really describe your page. It can also be thought of as a way of selling users on coming to your site. The reason for this is that sometimes, your description will show up in search engine results, right below the title tag here. So as you can see, this little blurb here reads “At Lefties Only, left handed golf clubs are our specialty.” If I were to click to go to this site, and then view the source code, we can see that that blurb actually came straight from the meta description. This isn’t always the case, but you have seen first hand how important it is to have a great description.
To change your page description in RapidWeaver, highlight the page that you wish to update, and click on the Page Info button. Ensure that the Header tab is selected. The next thing you are going to do is press the ‘Plus’ button which is located on the right hand side of the window, almost half way down. In the name field, type the word ‘description.’ In the content field, type in your desired page description. Remember to make the description enticing enough for visitors to be interested in going to your website and learning more. Since every page on your website is unique, so should each page’s description. Keywords are in bold in the search engine snippet when they match up with the users search query, so make sure to use good keywords in your description
Get ready to begin doing your optimizations by doing a competitive analysis of your top ranked competitors in SEIntelligence.
Video Transcript:
Now that we have a good understanding of the way the on-page optimization window works, let’s begin our own optimization process by first analyzing our top ranking competitors.
If you remember from an earlier video, I mentioned that when you click on one of your website’s pages, your meta keywords will show up under the Keywords heading. If no keywords show up for you, it most likely means that your site does not contain any meta keywords. If you want to change, or if you want to add some keywords, you can do so by clicking the plus sign at the bottom of the window.
We’ll now be using these keywords to find the top ranked websites to compare our sites to. To do this, press the Get Competitors button. Select some, or all of the keywords that you want to search, and then select the search engines that you want to see the rankings for.
It can take several minutes for the application to retrieve the search results, so I will just fast forward through this process.
When you have the search results, you will notice that the information at the bottom will tell you detailed information about your site, and then give you recommendations on what you should do to keep up with your competition.
You will notice that if you have the Results tab selected, you will see all of the information about your site, and your competitors, while if you click on each section, you will only see the information for those particular sections.
We will touch upon what each of these sections are, the purpose they serve, and what you will need to do with them, in another video.
The title tag is one of the most important elements for search engine optimization. The title tag consists of the words and phrases found at the top of your web browser when you are visiting any given website. It is also what is shown as the first line when you are doing a search engine search.
The title tag should contain your most important keywords. Some of the biggest mistakes we see when it comes to title tags are seeing titles that simply read “Home,” “Welcome,” or some other non-descriptive term. Another mistake is having just your company name as the title tag. Unless you are a company such as Nike or Pepsi for example, your company name alone, should not be in your title tag. The reason for this is that in your online business venture, you are trying to gain customers who have might not be aware of your existence. If they don’t know your business exists, how will they know to type your business name in a search query? You still should put your company name in your title tag, for branding purposes, or to make it helpful for the users who do know your company name to find your site. Just make sure that you order them properly by having keywords first, followed by the company name.
The title tag is located near the top of each page in the “head” tags. Google will only show up to about the first 70 characters in its results, so as mentioned earlier, make sure that your most important keywords are near the beginning of your title. Do your best to make each page on your site have a unique title. The title should also be very relevant to the content on the actual page.
To change your title tags in RapidWeaver, highlight the page on the left hand side, and press the Page Info button. In the field that says browser title, type in your desired title tag. Remember to use all of the tips mentioned earlier when creating your title tag.
So how do you know if you’ve created a good title tag? Well your best option is to try it out for a few months, and see if anything is going on with your rankings. If nothing has really improved, it might be time to change them up. If you are going to change them, make sure that you are not changing title tags on pages that currently do have rankings. You will risk ruining those rankings.
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