Before we jump into optimizing our sites right away, it is best to first take a tour of the on-page optimization window in SEIntelligence, and become familiar with the functions of each section.
Video Transcript:
After you’ve loaded your website into SEIntelligence, you will see a window that looks similar to this. This is where we will be doing all of our on-page optimizations.
Let’s quickly familiarize ourselves with all the aspects of this on-page optimization window.
On the far left, you will see all of the files that are contained in the website folder that you loaded into the application.
Clicking on one of the HTML files will show the meta keywords under the Keyword heading. You can add, or delete these keywords by clicking the plus sign, or minus sign at the bottom of the window.
This section is where you will find all of the on-page recommendations for your site. We will discuss this section in greater detail in another video.
The Suggest Keywords button will allow you find more keywords that are related to the keywords that you currently have on your website.
The Get Competitors button will give you the search results for your top 10 competitors for the keywords you have chosen. We’ll also talk about this more in depth in another video, but here is what the results look like.
The site settings button will allow you to do certain things such a specifying your domain preferences, as well as your Sitemap location, and adding analytical codes such as Google Analytics and Statcounter. The publish button will allow you to publish your site along with its changes, to your server. We will also dicsuss these two buttons more in depth in another video.
SEIntelligence is our most powerful SEO software to date. With SEIntelligence, you are able to load in your website, and compare it to your top ranking competitors. You can then modify your site to be more like your competition. The tutorial below will introduce you to SEIntelligence, and tell you how to load your website into the tool.
Video Transcript:
When you first launch SEIntelligence, the Manager window will popup, giving you three different options. The options are for optimizing a local website, analyzing competitor’s backlinks, and watching video tutorials.
Let’s start by clicking on the button next to Optimize Local Website.
In this window, here is where we will be given the different options for opening our websites. The existing profiles section shows websites that have already been loaded into SEIntelligence. This means that if this is your first time using the application, this section should be blank, and if you have used it before, an existing profile, or existing profiles should be present.
To load a site into SEIntelligence, you can open a site from your local hard drive, download the site from your FTP server, or download the website from a URL.
If you choose to download the website from a URL, keep in mind this warning at the bottom which says that publishing a site back to an FTP server that was download from a URL is not recommended.
If you are opening a website from a local folder, select the first option, and press the Next button. Then type in your website’s URL, but remember NOT to include http or www. Then press the Choose button, and find your website folder, and press Choose again. Then press the Next button.
If you are downloading a website from an FTP server, select that option, and press Next. Type in your domain at the top of the window, and then enter your FTP login details. Then press the Download button. It can take several minutes for your website files to download.
If you are downloading a website from a URL, select that option and press Next. Type in your URL and press the Get button.
So those are the different ways of loading your site into SEIntelligence. Be sure to watch the other free videos to learn more about how to use SEIntelligence.
When it comes to placing links on our page, the anchor text, or the phrase that you can click on that takes you to the destination page, plays a far greater role than most people imagine. For example, let’s do a Google search for the term “click here.” You will notice that the first result is for Adobe Reader. No where on the Adobe site does click here appear, yet it ranks number one for the term. The reason for this, is because many other websites, including very high authority sites such as educational institutions, link to this exact page, and the anchor they use is “click here.”
I want to show another good example of anchor text that will really illustrate how the anchors influences the results in searches. As you can see here, this particular anchor is actually a typo. Instead of typing AppTorial, this webmaster accidentally typed in AppToria. Also take note of the destination URL for this link. Let’s see what happens when we search for the term AppToria in Google. You will notice that in the results, the exact page that had the link for AppToria appears. No other page on the AppTorial site appears for this search term.
When you make your site, keep this SEO tip in mind. When you link to other pages on your website, avoid using common phrases like click here or anything similar to it. Instead, use some of the keywords and phrases that you have written down. So for example, if I want to send my users to my page that talks about left handed golf clubs, I will type in “left handed golf clubs” highlight the string of text, right click and select Add Link. Then, I will link to the appropriate page on my site.
Many webmasters forfeit potential traffic by not properly naming their images. It is very common to see images labeled as ‘img’ followed by a bunch of numbers. By doing this you can lose out on potential traffic from image searches. Google Images is an example of an extremely popular image search engine. By using our keywords and phrases in our images, it gives us another opportunity for getting noticed by search engines for those particular words and phrases. So as an example of image names, this folder shows you what we want to avoid using with our images. This folder shows you examples of good, keyword rich image names. This is not one of the most critical aspect of your SEO campaign, but it certainly will not hurt you to give your image files descriptive names. You may be pleasantly surprised by the amount of traffic you can gain by this simple tweak.
For those who’s business targets a local customer base, it is always a great idea to include the cities or towns that your business serves, somewhere on your site. This will assist you in coming up in searches where the users types a key-term as well as a city or town name. There are many different ways you can do this. You can include your address in the footers, the city or town names in the title tag, and even a Contact Us page that has a more detailed section of where you operate and which cities or towns you serve. We will be discussing the footers, and title tags later in on the video.
If you are unsure if you’re site has been published correctly using WebCrusher, this short video demonstration will show you how you can easily identify a properly published website.
Video Transcript
To check to see if you have properly published your site after using WebCrusher, simply open your website in your browser, go to View in the menu bar, and select View Source.
If your code looks like normal code with various spaces and line breaks like this, you have NOT published your site correctly with WebCrusher.
But if your code looks like this, with all of the code being tightly squeezed together, then you have published your site correctly with WebCrusher.
And that is the easiest way to determine if your site was published correctly with WebCrusher. If your site was not published correctly, go back to the Publish window in WebCrusher and make sure you have entered your FTP login details correctly, as well that you specified the correct Directory Path.
We have just posted an update to MailShoot, our email marketing and management tool. This version adds the following changes;
[NEW] You can not specify a sending limit per hour incase your ISP limits the number of emails that can be sent out per hour
[FIX] Characters such as &<> now work properly when used in the online subscription form
[FIX] Can now properly retrieve subscribe page details with your list id and password
[FIX] Custom Mail tags can now be entered into a message even if your sent list has not yet been specified
MailShoot is a fantastic application for small business owners to quickly and easily set up an online newsletter for their website. With MailShoot you can instantly create and online subscription form that your visitors can use to subscribe to your newsletter. Then you can easily import your new subscribers to your mailing list and keep them updated on your latest news and announcements.
Download the free demo of MailShoot and try it out on your website.
The content you place on your site will have a large impact on your search engine rankings, as well as your ability to obtain incoming links. Each page on your site should contain content in the form of text. Ideally, you should have about 250 to 500 words on each page. In that text, you should make it a point to include the key-terms that relate to that specific page. Do not overload the text with those key-terms too many times, but use them when it is appropriate to do so. Within your text, it might also be a good idea to link to highly regarded sites that are relevant to what your page and key-terms are about. This allows search engines to relate the pages you link to with the content on your site.
A blog is a fantastic place for you to add some content to your website without having to create another page. Adding content on your blog adds freshness to your site, and shows search engines that the site is still being looked after. Search engines put a lot of emphasis on the natural growth of content on a site. So adding new content to your site, will over time improve its search engine ranking.
When writing your content, keep in mind that you should always avoid having duplicate content on your site. This means no copying and pasting articles from other sites, and no taking your past articles and simply re-wording them. Remember to write content for your users, and not for search engines. Like mentioned earlier, overloading the text with key-terms will be annoying to your users. Lastly, make sure you double check your spelling and grammar. This is very important because this could influence your link-ability.
Back in February of 2011, we made a post with a video tutorial showing you how to create a custom Facebook page for your business using MapDesign. Not too long after, Facebook discontinued the use of FBML which was vital to the creation of the custom Facebook pages. In this new video tutorial, we will teach you the new and updated way of creating your custom Facebook page using MapDesign. This method is actually a bit easier than the last video as we are able to use a Facebook App called iFramed. So without further ado, here is the new tutorial:
Video Transcript
As of March 2011, there was a change to the way we add our image maps to our fan pages on Facebook. If you’ve added your image map in the past, you most likely did it by using the Facebook Markup Language. FBML has since been discontinued, and there is now a new method for getting our image maps on Facebook.
In our tutorial, we covered how to sign up for a Facebook fan page. We will do the same here, however it will not be as extensive as last time. If you need assistance signing up for Facebook and then creating a page, you can refer to the old tutorial, but I will warn you that there have been some interface changes so things may look a bit different.
So let’s get right to it. What you’ve been seeing here is a Facebook profile. Like mentioned earlier, you must have one of these in order to create a page. From here, I am going to go to the address bar and type in pages, so that my destination is facebook.com/pages.
Next, I will click on the Create Page button which is located in the top right corner.
Choose the type of page you are making, and fill out the required fields.
Now that the Facebook fan page has been created, I’m going to prepare my image. Remember that this can be any image you want, but for this tutorial, I am showing how to make your image a picture of your website since that seems to be the most popular request. So I will go to the page on my site that I want to be shown in my image, and I will take a screen shot by holding down Command, shift, and 3.
Next, you can see your screen shot on your desktop. Let’s open up our screenshot so that we can crop out any unnecessary parts of the image. Basically we want to crop out as much as we can as we’re going to be trying to fit a pretty large image into a pretty small area. Now I’m just going to copy what I have highlighted and then I will select New From Clipboard.
Next, and this is an extremely important step if you want the image to fit in the Facebook page, I’m going to select Tools in the menu bar, and then I am going to click on Adjust Size. Then I will change the value of the Width to 510 pixels. If you remember from the old tutorial, this number was 520px, but I am making it a bit smaller because I found 520 to be a bit too wide. I don’t have to change anything else as it is done automatically for me. Then I will save this image to my desktop.
Now we’ll launch MapDesign, and drag and drop this saved image, and it should appear in the application. As of now, this is just a screenshot of this webpage. It doesn’t do much, in the sense that I cannot click on any of the links. So for example, this navigation menu allows you to click on all of these links if you were browsing this page in your web browser. But as an image, this ability is gone. This is what we are going to change with the use of this application.
The first thing I’m going to do is choose the Rectangle option. Now I will be able to create the area that will have a live link. I’m going to do this for all of the text and images that I want to have links. I’m going to fast forward through this process since it can take a few minutes depending on how many areas you are going to link.
So now that all of my link options are set, you will notice that there are now a bunch of options in the Hotspots section, which is located on the left hand side of the application. These options are labeled Rectangle 1, 2, 3 and so on. Each of these represents each rectangle that I placed on the image. For example, you saw that the first rectangle I placed was around the area that says Home. This means that Rectangle 1 belongs to that area.
Beside each hotspot is an edit button. Selecting the edit button will allow us to set the URL to the destination we want to link each area to. So since this rectangle is surrounding the text that reads “Home,” I will link this area to the homepage. I will then need to link Rectangle 2 to the Store as that was the second hotspot that I created. We will need to repeat this process for the remaining hot spots on the image.
You will notice that for each link, I am including http:// and also selecting the option to open in a new window. You must do this as well or your image map may not function correctly.
When we are all done, we’re going to Export the image map by selecting File in the menu bar, and then pressing the Export button. I am going to export it to my desktop.
Next, I am going to create a new folder, and I am going to call it mapdesign. You can name it whatever you want, but make it something you can easily type because we’re going to be typing it in again. Then place the exported files into that folder. There should be one file named index, and one folder names images.
Now what we need to do with this folder is we need to publish it to our server. I am going to demonstrate publishing it to FTP. If you’re publishing to your MobileMe account, the process is going to be very similar.
So here I’ll just drag and drop the folder onto my server via CybderDuck.
Now I’ll head back to my Facebook page, and in the search field, I am going to type in iFramed. What iFramed is, is just an app we’re going to use to add our image map to our page. Doing it using iFramed versus installing iFrames manually will save us a lot of time, and it is much easier to do.
So we’ll click on Go To App, and then select one of the Tabs, and then choose the page that we want to add the application to. Then press the Add iFramed! button. This will take us back to our Page, and you will notice on the left, there is a new link that says Welcome. We’ll click on Welcome, and the iFramed app will load. Click the Start button.
Now we’ll need to type in the location of the folder that we just published. So if you published to the root of your server, you should type in your domain slash folder name. So for example, I will type in www.ragesw.com/mapdesign-facebook. If you published the folder to your iDisk, you will type in web.me.com/username/foldername. It is very important that you know the precise location of where you published the folder to, otherwise the image map will not show up.
You will notice that there are two different places to put your URL for your image map. One is the fan view, one is the non-fan view. So that means if you want to show different image maps for people who have Liked your page versus people who haven’t, you can do that. For this example, I will just make both of them the same. Press the Save buttons, and then you can preview your image map, and test it and make sure everything works the way you wanted it to.
And that’s how you customize your Facebook page with iFrames and not FBML. Now your Facebook page can have the same look and feel as your website.
Navigating through a website should not be a difficult task. Find out how to make your site easier to navigate for your users, while making it more friendly for search engines.
Video Transcript
This optimization is very simple and easy to accomplish. When it comes to the navigation of a website, there is nothing search engines like to see more, than a nice structural and consistent navigation menu.
What this means, is that your navigation menu should flow from page to page within your site. There shouldn’t be any differences in your navigation menu on any page on your site. A good navigation menu also includes proper keyterms linking to pages relevant to each of the keyterms. In other words, the keyterm is not misleading to any user who might click on it. Google likes it when websites have a natural flowing hierarchy that makes it easy for users to go from one page to the next. Making your users click several times before landing on the page they want is not the right approach to take.
Google also likes a breadcrumb navigation, which looks like this; This is a row of links which allow users to easily navigate back to the previous page, or to a page which is more than one back click away. These breadcrumb navigations can be helpful to your users and are best placed at the top or bottom of each page.
Navigation menus are very easy to edit in RapidWeaver. Simply click on the page, and then press the Page Info button. Then type your new page name in the Page Title field. You will want to make sure that these keyterms are not excessively long, and that they are not misleading. In addition, some pages won’t require you to make new keyterms. For example, a contact might not need to have a keyword in the navigation menu. Leaving it as Contact, or Contact Us will suffice.
There is also a breadcrumb feature in RapidWeaver that we can also turn on. Press the Setup button, and select the Advanced tab. There you will see an option to display breadcrumb trails. Click on the tickbox to activate the breadcrumb trails. You will notice that the breadcrumb trails appear at the bottom of each page.
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