Mac SEO Blog

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.

Video Transcript

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.

Video Transcript

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.

Video Transcript

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.

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.

Video Transcript

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.

Video Transcript

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.

Video Transcript

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.