Mac SEO Blog

Coming up with a domain can be a difficult challenge. Determining whether to use keywords, or business names in your domain name can be a tough decision. This tutorial will discuss this issue, and hopefully guide you in the right direction. Even if you already have a domain name, it can be a good reference for any future domain names you plan on purchasing. Remember to register to view the entire SEO course, and to ensure you are watching the most updated video tutorials.

Video Transcript

Many of you may already own your own domain name, but for those who don’t, or for those who are considering buying a new one, there are a few things that I want to discuss with you.

When choosing your domain name, you have two options. The first option is to make your domain name something along the lines of your company name. The other option is to have your domain name contain one of the key-terms you have recently researched. You will see that as I flip through these websites, some have company names as domains, while others have key-terms. Some sites even have a combination of both.

If your company name is already branded, it will make most sense to include the name in your domain. If you are able to include keywords in your domain, it certainly will not hurt you when it comes to rankings. Including a key-term in your domain will give search engines another indication as to what your website is all about.

I wouldn’t put too much debate into deciding whether to use a company name or a key-term as the domain. The domain is something you will not be able to change. If you can’t make up your mind, I would suggest using your company name over a key-term. The reason for this is because your company name most likely won’t change, similar to how you won’t be able to change your domain.  You also want something that has the potential to become a branded name. A key-term doesn’t not give you that opportunity.

While it may be an added bonus to have the key-term in your domain, it won’t make too much difference in the long-run. And like mentioned earlier, you can always do the combination of both company name and key-term.

When you are deciding on what domain to use, you can use the domain checker on our site at www.ragesw.com. Although they are not easy to remember, domains with dashes separating the words are easier for search engines to differentiate between the words in the phrase.

If you already have a domain, and have been concerned with its brand-ability, don’t worry about getting a new one. It may benefit you to use the one you already have as many people believe new sites struggle to rank for the first 6 to 9 months, almost as if they must pass a probationary period before search engines trust them.

In the first of two tutorials for the Planning Stage of our SEO process, we are going to discuss how to choose proper keywords, and an easy way to organize them. Remember to visit video course page, which will have all the tutorials outlined in a very organized manner.

Video Transcript

The reason we are starting with keyword research is because we will be using our keywords throughout all three stages. So to begin our keyword research, open up your web browser and go to google.com. Next, type in the search phrase “google keyword tool” and click on the first result, which should be the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool.

This will take us to the Google AdWords keyword suggestor tool. Type in the Captcha if the popup box appears for you. In the box that tells you to enter your word or phrase, type in a keyword or two that you think most closely relates to the content on your site. As an example, I will type in golf clubs.

After just a few seconds, a long list of potential keywords shows up. Let’s start with the first keyword we see. To the right of this keyword, we see that there is a green bar under Competition. What this means is that this particular key-term has many advertisers competing for top placements in the sponsored links section of a Google search. A key-term with not as much green in its advertiser competition bar will not have as many advertisers competing for the sponsored links section. What this indicates to you as you are creating your web site, is that targeting a key-term with high competition may be an extremely tough challenge, and as a result, you may find more success targeting a key-term with not as much competition, which would be indicated here by a smaller amount of green in its bar.

I’m going to just pause this demonstration of Google’s keyword tool, to show you a good way of double checking that the competition is in fact low. So let’s assume that the keyword I have found with low advertiser competition, and a high search volume is “golf tour club.” I will go to google, and search for this term. The first thing I will notice, is the number of results. This term actually has a relatively high number, so that might indicate to me that this term may be too competitive. The next thing I will do, is check out the sites that rank highly for this term. What you want to be asking yourself, is whether or not these sites are of high quality or low quality. If they are high quality sites, this is another indicator to you that this phrase may be hard to compete for. If they are low quality sites, then thats when you might decide to target this phrase. To figure out if they are high or low quality sites, it will have to be a judgment call by you, but you can visit the site, and see if it is professionally done, and then also see if it is a site that has a lot of incoming links, or even see if it has a high page rank. We will learn more about incoming links and page rank later on in the video. For now, let’s get back to Google’s keyword tool.

Beside the advertiser competition is the Global monthly search volume. This number is based on an average of the global monthly google searches for each key-term performed over a 12 month period.

The figure beside the Global monthly search volume is the Local monthly searches. This number is based on the 12 month search average for your targeted country and language. The search I am showing here is targeted for the United States, and English.

Finally, the Local Search Trends bar graph shows the monthly fluctuations in searches for this term. It is also based on your targeted country and language.

Another cool feature that Google has added to the keyword tool is the availability to sort the keywords. On the right side of your page, you should see a drop down menu right beside the words Sorted by. The default will be set to Relevance, however, you can change it to any of the options you see here such as keyword, competition, and global monthly searches.

As we scroll down the list, you will begin to see all of the other suggested related terms, along with their advertiser competition and search volume. It is highly recommended that you spend some time going over some of these key-terms, creating new ones, and figuring out some good terms that you can use that are still highly searched, but do not have as much competition associated with them.

When you see phrases that you like and want to use, click on the check box which is located on the far left side of the keyphrase. Repeat this for all keywords that you want to target. Once you are done, you can download these keywords. Click on the button that reads Download and choose Download Selected. Choose whichever format you’d like, and download your keywords. Keep this list handy as you will be referring back to it throughout your optimization.

The first video in our RapidWeaver SEO Video Course outlines what this course is about and what you can expect from all of the tutorials in the course. Remember to get visit the video course page, which will have all the tutorials outline in a very organized manner.

Video Transcript

Hello, my name is Jeremy and over the next little while, I will be showing you how to properly optimize your RapidWeaver web sites so that you can have the best possible chance of ranking at the top of search engines.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of attracting more visitors through search engines. You will notice how I do not define SEO as having a top ranked site. This is because even if you have a site that ranks at the top of all search engines, there is no guarantee that searchers are typing in the specific keywords you rank for, and will even click your website in the search results. In this series of tutorials, we will cover the basics of how to discover highly searched key-terms and how to determine which ones are best to target.

These tutorials have been created to help you to understand the major optimizations, and how to implement them on your site. With so much information available on the web, search engine optimization can seem very confusing and time consuming to learn. These tutorials are to-the-point, and allow you to visualize what needs to be done, so that you can have a better understanding at a much quicker pace than if you had to sift through a 400 page book.

SEO is a process that we must go through in order to achieve our desired results. It’s not something you do once and just forget about. It’s a form of marketing and if you want to keep on improving your chances at success and growing your business it is something you will constantly evaluate. Remember, if SEO were an easy thing to do, every site would be number one in search engines, which is simply impossible.

This video will be broken down into three stages. The first stage, called the Planning stage, will be the briefest. We will go over a couple of things that we should do before we even begin optmizing our website. The second stage will be the on-page optimization stage. This is where we will be looking at the different methods for making our actual site more search engine friendly. The third and final stage will be the off-page optimizations, where we go over different methods of getting our RapidWeaver website noticed by search engines.

The video will be shown in step-by-step format. This does not mean that you must follow this plan perfectly, but it is setup that way so that those who require this type of instruction still have that opportunity.

I want to make a note that the applications I use in this video are available to purchase or download for free at www.ragesw.com. You are not obligated to purchase any of these applications. The work can be done by hand. That is, you can still complete the tasks without the applications, however, using the applications will make your life a lot easier.

Remember, if you have any questions or do not understand one or more of the concepts, you can start a thread in our SEO forums, or submit a ticket through our support system.

We have just released a new update for SERank, our search engine ranking checker. In this update, we have improved the reports section so that it is more aesthetically pleasing. The table row heights will adjust to the content in each cell, so nothing will get cut off.

If you are using SERank for your clients, or for your company, the reports in SERank are a great way to present the data in an easy to understand and organized manner. Check out the reports if you have yet to do so.

Download the most recent version of SERank, and stay tuned for more awesome updates.

We regret to inform everyone that the web service used by SEKeyword to obtain the suggested keywords has been discontinued by Yahoo. As a result, RAGE SEKeyword, our free keyword research tool and keyword organizer has been discontinued.  We are looking into alternative sources for keyword suggesters that will integrate nicely into our easy-to-use application, but for the time being, the software will no longer be supported.

As an alternative, we recommend using the Google Keyword Tool . Our SEO Video Courses will explain in greater detail how to use the Google Keyword Tool, and how you can find the proper keywords that you should be targeting on your website.

We are excited to announce a new update to SERank. SERank allows users to check rankings for multiple keywords, in multiple search engines, with just a few clicks. The following items have included in this update:

[FIX] Fixed a crash when updating search engine scripts
[FIX] Stability improvements
[CHG] We changed the name from RAGE SERank to SERank so the update will not replace the existing version you have on your computer. Please keep this mind when updating.

We recommend deleting RAGE SERank from the Applications folder (as well as the dock) to avoid any confusion. This way, you won’t open the old version by accident.

Download the latest version of SERank right now!

In this video, we’re going to show you how you can add an image map made in MapDesign to a RapidWeaver 5 website.

Video Transcript

There are two types of image maps that you can make in MapDesign. A Simple map, and an Effects Map. This tutorial is going to show you how you can add a Simple Map to your RapidWeaver website.

After you have created your image map, you will need to export the image map by pressing the Export To Web Site button. Make sure Simple Image Map is selected and press the Next button and save your image map.

Once you save your image map, you will notice that you have an index  file, as well as an images folder that contains your image.

Open RapidWeaver and add a new page. Make sure you select the HTML Code page. Next, open the images folder, and drag and drop the image into the Resources section.

Now open up the index file in an HTML editor so that you can see the code. Highlight all of the code that is within the opening, and closing body tags. Copy this code, and go back to RapidWeaver, and paste the code in your HTML Code page.

Locate the image path, and replace images with resources just like I have done.

When you press the preview button, you will see your image map, and you can test to see if it works by clicking on the hotspots.

We are happy to announce that we have just published an update to Sitemap Automator. The new release contains the following updates:

• [NEW] Scanning your website will now be faster in this version
• [FIX] Sometimes the wrong referring URL would appear for a broken link
• [FIX] Fixed certain scanning issues with websites that use 301 or 302 redirects

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Download Sitemap Automator 2.4

When you update your site in iWeb, you will essentially be overwriting the optimizations you made in iWeb SEO Tool. In order to correct this, you must publish your site to a local folder again, and then load it back in iWeb SEO Tool. You must then press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button in order to apply your old tags again, and then publish the site from iWeb SEO Tool.

Video Transcript:

After you optimize your website in iWeb SEO Tool for the first time, you are going to eventually want to update your site in iWeb. When you update your site in iWeb, the optimizations you made in iWeb SEO Tool previously, and the newly updated site in iWeb will be two separate items. This means that if you add a new photo to your site in iWeb for example, you will need to follow these steps in order to have the newly updated site also contain your optimizations made in iWeb SEO Tool.

Simply load your website back in iWeb SEO Tool. You will do this by using the exact same method outlined in the how to load your site in iWeb SEO Tool video.

When your site is loaded, just press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button, and all of your tags will re-appear. You can make any alterations if you want, and then you can now publish your site. Remember to publish the site from iWeb SEO Tool if you publish it to FTP.

Also, if you see your optimizations before you press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button, just know that that is normal, but you still must press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button in order for the optimizations to actually be applied.

This video is an update to an earlier video in which we show you the proper way of loading your site in iWeb SEO Tool. This video is specific to users who publish their sites to MobileMe. There is a recommended method for a MobileMe site and using iWeb SEO Tool and we encourage all MobileMe users to follow along.

Video Transcript:

It is very important to learn about the proper ways of loading your website into iWeb SEO Tool.

If you are watching this video, it means you publish your website to MobileMe. We have specific instructions on how to load your site in iWeb SEO Tool if you publish to MobileMe.

First, you must have iWeb open to the publish page. You can get to the publish page by clicking on the Site Name in the menu here on the left hand side. If you have multiple websites, each of your websites will have its own Site Name. So click on the Site Name to be taken to the publish page. Now, everyone who publishes to MobileMe, will publish their website to MobileMe right from within iWeb. This is the way you normally publish your site, so there is nothing different at this point. Every time you update your website in iWeb, you are going to publish it to MobileMe in iWeb.

Now that our sites have been published to MobileMe, let’s open up iWeb SEO Tool so we can load our site in it.

To load our sites, click on the Load iDisk Sites button. All of your websites will show up on the left hand side. Find the site that you want to optimize and click on the arrow to view the website files.

When you make your optimizations, clicking the Apply, or Apply To Entire Site button, depending on which tab you are on, will publish the changes to your site. This means you do not need to press this Publish button in the top right corner here. The changes will be published automatically when you click the Apply, or Apply To Entire Site buttons. Remember, do not go back into iWeb and publish your site from iWeb after do ing this. This will overwrite everything and you will be left without your optimizations.

The process should just be this

1) Create Site in iWeb
2) Publish site to MobileMe in iWeb
3) Load site in iWeb SEO Tool via Load iDisk Sites button
4) Make optimizations and click Apply or Apply To Entire Site buttons

Now one note I want to make here, is that if you do publish to MobileMe and load your website into iWeb SEO Tool this way, you will not be able to add a favicon to your site.

Lastly, as everyone should be aware by now, MobileMe is being discontinued. This means you will need to find another hosting company. I encourage everyone to sign up to our hosting. We will make sure we do what we can to make your transition easy. You can also take comfort in knowing that we are the only hosting company who can provide support for iWeb users.

You can visit us at ragesw.com/hosting.php or by clicking on Hosting in our navigation menu.