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.
With many iWeb users e-mailing us, letting us know that their websites do not look good in Internet Explorer, we began investigating ways to help iWeb users make their sites become a lot more compatible with Internet Explorer. In the video below, we will discuss and demonstrate seven different ways to ensure your iWeb website has a better chance at being more compatible with Internet Explorer. The following is a summary of the seven steps, with the video tutorial below.
1. Text based navigation menu (Better for all web browsers and search engines)
2. Web-safe fonts (Always a good idea to use no matter what)
3. No shadows and reflections for text and images
4. YouTube for video, not QuickTime
5. No embedded images from third-party websites
6. WebCrusher’s ‘Improve Internet Explorer Compatibility’ option (plus makes your site faster too!)
7. Check compatibility in all web browsers
Although iWeb makes it extremely easy to build websites, there are still things you need to consider when designing your websites. This video goes over many of these guidelines. Because of the nature of the web, we do have a few limitations but we can still design beautiful and professional websites with iWeb.
iWeb and Internet Explorer Video Transcript
Many iWeb users have been reporting that their websites appear abnormal when viewed in Internet Explorer. In this video, we are going to go over several ways of making an iWeb site more compatible with Internet Explorer. This doesn’t mean that everyone’s website will look perfect in Internet Explorer, but an iWeb site’s appearance in Internet Explorer can be greatly improved by following these steps.
Make sure to listen to each step carefully, and not leave any of them out. Especially one of the last steps we will talk about, which involves our application called WebCrusher, which most of you are familiar with. For those not familiar with WebCrusher, it’s an application that reduces the size of your site so that it loads faster in your users browsers. We have released an update to it, that specifically targets this issue with Internet Explorer.
The first way of making an iWeb site more compatible with Internet Explorer is to make a text based navigation menu. This is because, for security reasons, Internet Explorer may not have javascript enabled, which is what is needed to show the iWeb navigation menu. For both Internet Explorer compatibility, and SEO benefits, change your navigation menu to a text based navigation menu. So to change your navigation menu in iWeb you will first need to disable the current navigation menu. To do this click on a page of your website, open the Inspector window, select the page tab, and then deselect the option that says Include Page In Navigation Menu. Repeat this process for all pages on your site.
When this is complete, you will no longer have any links in your navigation menu. Now you will need to create a custom navigation menu using text links. Simply click on the Text Box button, type in your anchor text, resize the box, and move it to where you want it to be on your navigation menu. Then highlight the text, and press the inspector button. Then go to the link tab which is a blue circle with an arrow in it. Check the option to Enable As Hyperlink, and type in the URL or select the page from the drop down menu. Repeat this process for the remaining links. When you are all done, select all text boxes by holding down command and clicking on each text box. Then copy what you have selected. Now you will need to go to each page on your site and press the paste button. And your navigation menu will now be text as opposed to javascript.
The second step is very easy to do. Using a font that is considered web safe, will give iWeb users a much better chance at having their website load correctly in Internet Explorer. To find a web safe font, just press the Fonts button, and click where it says Web. Here is a list of about 10 different fonts that you should choose from to use on your site. These fonts should be used everywhere on your site that contains text. Using web safe fonts will increase the compatibility of your website with Internet Explorer.
The third step is also an easy one. Much like how we want to avoid using fonts that are not considered web safe, we also want to avoid altering our text and images by using shadows and reflections. Doing so will also increase our chances at having our sites load normally in Internet Explorer. So how can you check to see if your text and images have shadows or reflections? Simply click on the text or image, press the inspector button, click on the Graphics tab and see if Shadow, or Reflection are checked. If they are, you may want to consider unchecking them so that your site can be viewed better in Internet Explorer.
By default, iWeb uses QuickTime, which is installed by default on all Mac computers. This isn’t the case for Windows users, however. Instead of putting your videos on your site directly, it is a better idea to upload them to YouTube, and then embed them on your site using the YouTube Widget. This will ensure the best compatibility for users who might not have QuickTime installed on their computer.
To avoid Internet Explorer giving your users security warnings, do not include HTML Snippets that embed images from other websites. This might sound a bit technical, but basically to avoid any security popups for Internet Explorer users, only use image and media files from your local computer.
An example of something that would provide a security warning for Internet Explorer users is this;
What this does is tell the web browser to load an image from a third party website which it may interpret as a security risk.
This next step is the most important one, as I mentioned earlier in the video. In this step, we are going to be using WebCrusher. The version of WebCrusher I am using in this tutorial is 1.9. Make sure you have this version or later. It is always a good idea to make sure you are using the most recent version of any software. Visit our website at ragesw.com to make sure you have the latest version.
The first thing you will need to do is open the Preferences by clicking on WebCrusher in the menu bar, and selecting Preferences. Next, under the Tag Optimizations heading, look for an option that says Improve Internet Explorer Compatibility, and make sure it is selected. Close the preferences window, and drag and drop your website folder onto WebCrusher like you normally would.
In the bottom left corner, there is a button that says Options. Click on that button, and make sure that Only Optimized Modified Files is not checked. The reason for this is because we want to make sure we apply the Improve Internet Explorer Compatibility option to every page on our site. Then, you can press Go and optimize your site and publish it like you normally would.
Since every website is built differently, it is still very important to check your site’s compatibility by visiting your site in as many browsers as you can. The most important thing to understand is that your site will not be perfect in many browsers, especially older ones such as Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Following the above steps, especially the step involving WebCrusher will make your site look much better in Internet Explorer 8 and higher. It is important to note that you should not expect perfection, but combining all of these methods should result in your site looking very good.
In the first lesson of the on-page optimizations section, we will discuss a commonly overlooked place to insert your keywords. Remember to register to view the entire RapidWeaver SEO course, and to ensure you are watching the most updated video tutorials.
Video Transcript
If we take a look at what we see in our address bar here, we see this site’s domain, which is rockbottomgolf.com. If we look directly beside the domain name, we see “golf swing trainers and practice aids.” The latter part of that address is what is known as the page filename. Page filenames are a fantastic place for us to include our websites keywords. Unfortunately, many webmasters make the mistake of not taking advantage of this opportunity. You will notice how this particular address is not painfully long, has dashes separating the words, and is very clean looking. This page name makes it much easier for search engines to understand what this particular page revolves around. If we compare this address to one that looked something like this, we can really get a good idea of how search engines would have an easier time categorizing this page.
It’s typical to see webmasters naming their page files with generic names such as page1 or homepage. Our goal is to utilize every option we have for incorporating our keywords into our website. Whenever you create a new page, make sure your file is given a keyword rich name.
If you already have pages with poor filenames but are actually successful with search engines, do not change the filename as this will ruin your ranking. Just be sure to apply this optimization tip in the future.
To name your files, highlight the file in the Webpages navigation on the left. Then press the Page Info button, and where it says Filename, type in your new page file name. Try to use a key-term that is greater than one word, and less than 6 words in length. Remember to use dashes to separate each word. It is important to note that your homepage’s filename will be index.html. Do not rename this page. Just leave it as is.
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