Mac SEO Blog

Once again we will be exhibiting at Macworld Expo 2011 in San Francisco from Jan 27 – 29. Come stop by our booth (#448) to take a look at some of the great new products we have lined up for 2011.

If you have questions about our SEO Software, SEO Training Courses, or Web Hosting stop by and we would be happy to help!

We are very excited for this year’s Macworld and hope to see you there!

If you have an iWeb website and always wanted to start a mailing list, now you can with MailShoot, the fully featured newsletter and email management software.

MailShoot will let you instantly create an online sign up form for your iWeb website without any technical skills on your part. MailShoot can publish a signup form to your website with just a few clicks.

Once your sign up form is on your iWeb website you can start collecting emails. Then you can send email updates to all, or certain segments of your list. Check out this video tutorial which shows you exactly how to create your sign up form and publish it on your iWeb website.

If you have just started an iWeb website and are looking to get more visitors to your site, check out our SEO for iWeb Walkthrough tutorial.

When you have a website and you have visitors, how do you ensure that they come back to your website? An email newsletter is a great way for you to keep in touch with your website visitors and make sure they are kept up to date with all your latest news and announcements.

MailShoot, our fully featured newsletter and mailing list manager, can help you instantly set up an online sign up form on your website. In just a few clicks you can start collecting email addresses as well as any other information that you choose on your website.

Once you have the email addresses, you can use MailShoot to send out periodic emails to your entire list, or a segment of your list that match a certain criteria. Check out this preview of MailShoot or download the free MailShoot demo and try it out for yourself.

Hey WebCrusher Owners! Have you been keeping an eye on the speed of your website? Google finds the speed at which at website loads to be very important. As Google continues with its campaign to make the web faster, so should you. By ensuring your website is loading at an optimal speed, you can give your site an advantage over your competitors by loading quicking, and moving up in the search results.

Watch the following video tutorial to see how you can check on the speed of your website.

Video Transcript

One of Google’s latest search ranking criteria is the speed at which a website loads. You have already taken a step in the right direction by taking an interest in WebCrusher. I hope that you have used WebCrusher and continue to use it whenever need be.

For those of you who have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can get a good idea of what your website’s current speed is. In your Dashboard, press the plus sign next to Labs and select Site Performance. Here you will see the speed performance of your website.

Google believes that anything that falls below 1 and a half seconds is considered to be fast. Anything slower than 1 and a half seconds is considered slow. See where you are, and make sure you run your website through WebCrusher for optimal speed.

Don’t forget to check out our SEO Video Courses which will walk you through the entire process of optimizing your website for the best possible search engine rankings.

If you are an iWeb user, be sure to check out the iWeb SEO Video Walkthrough Tutorial. If you use anything else to build your website, be sure to check out the SEO Video Course. RapidWeaver users can now purchase the SEO For RapidWeaver Video Tutorial as well.

In our effort to make things as easy as possible for our software users, we have created this quick tutorial that will demonstrate how a user should properly publish their iWeb website to FTP using iWeb SEO Tool. The tutorial will identify common mistakes users make, and how to determine if your FTP login information has been entered correctly. To learn how to make your iWeb site rank higher in search engines, be sure to check out the iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video.

Video Transcript

There were many people asking me publishing related questions with iWeb SEO Tool. This tutorial is going to strictly cover publishing a website to FTP using iWeb SEO Tool. We will cover all of the main points involved with publishing, and then we will discuss the biggest issue users have when publishing their website. That issue is the directory path.

The first thing you will need to do is press the publish button, and then make sure Publish to FTP is selected and then press the next button.

In the FTP field, here is where you will put your server address. Sometimes the server address may look like the one I have here (an IP address,) but more often than not, it will just be your domain. So if my domain were publishingtoiweb.com then that is what I would put in this field.

Do not include http, www, or ftp in this field. Just put your domain.com or .net or whatever the extension may be.

Your username and password must be accurate otherwise logging in will not work, and you will not be able to publish.

To check to see if you have all of your FTP login details entered in correctly, press the Browse button. If you are able to see files and folders like we see here, then you have logged in correctly. If you get an error similar to this, then your FTP information is incorrect. You must get the correct FTP information before proceeding to the next step.

I’m now going to discuss the Directory Path field. This is the area where most users experience the most difficulty. Chances are, if you are watching this video, you need to enter something in this field.

We are going to focus on one method for finding out what the directory path should be. I think this will be the easiest way for you to do it, and it will work out well for most people.

If you use RAGE hosting, you should type in /public_html. For everyone else, please refer to the following method;

What you want to do is open up iWeb, and go to the publish page of the website you want to publish in iWeb SEO Tool. The first thing I want you to do is have a look at the current FTP information you already have. In the directory/path field, there may or may not be some text. If there is some text, I want you to copy it. If there is no text in there, don’t worry, just bear with me for a moment.

Go back to iWeb SEO Tool, and in the directory path field, paste the text you just copied. Make sure there is a forward slash at the beginning of this text.

Your site should publish properly now.

I want to make a note that this method should work for 95-99% of users. Since there are so many variations when it comes to publishing, some users may not achieve success using this method. If you are in that 5%, submit a support ticket at ragesw..com/support and we will be happy to assist you.

To wrap your text around an image in iWeb, you must remember to insert the image into the textbox. The following video tutorial will demonstrate this, along with the common mistake that many users make when trying to wrap text around an image in iWeb. Remember to check out our SEO For iWeb video tutorial to learn how to make your iWeb website rank higher in search engines.

Video Transcript

In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how to wrap text around an image in iWeb. Before I show you the proper way of doing it, I am first going to show you a common mistake people make when wrapping their text around an image.

The first thing I am going to do is insert my image by selecting Insert in the Menu bar, and then going to Choose. This isn’t the only way to insert an image, but it will do for this demonstration.

Now that my image has been inserted, you will notice that I can move it around and place it wherever I want. I’ll open the Inspector and then the Text tab, and then the Wrap tab. Now you will notice that the Object Causes Wrap option cannot be selected. This is the problem that many users face. Here is how we solve it.

First, I’m going to delete the image that I just inserted, and now I will click within the text box, and reinsert the image again.

So now that the image is within the textbox, I will once again open up the inspector, and you will notice that the Object causes wrap option is no longer greyed out and I can now select it. I can also choose to align my image left or right.

I can also move the image in the textbox, and make it bigger or smaller.

And that’s how you wrap your text around an image in iWeb.

This video tutorial is going to show you how you can make your RapidWeaver URL shorter by eliminating the folder name that shows up in the URL. Learn how to get your RapidWeaver website ranking high in search engines with the SEO For RapidWeaver video tutorial.

Video Transcript

When you first create a website in RapidWeaver, you will notice that as you navigate to other pages on your site, the URL in your address bar will show your domain followed by the folder name followed by the page name. Some of your folder names and page names will look different, as these items are easily customizable, but I have left mine as is to show what the default folder names and page names are.

If you want to shorten this URL by eliminating one of these items, follow these simple instructions. What we are going to do, is shorten the URL by getting rid of the folder name. Once again, the folder is this second one which comes right after the domain name.

So to get rid of the folder, open up RapidWeaver, and highlight the page on the left hand side, and then press the Page info button. In the text box next to Folder, delete whatever is in there, and put in a forward slash. Repeat this process for the remaining pages on your site. You will notice that the homepage does not contain anything in the text box next to folder. You do not need to add a forward slash to the home page. Just leave it as is.

Now, when we publish our sites, that folder name will be gone, and we will be left with a smaller, nicer looking URL in the address bar. To learn how to get your RapidWeaver website ranking high in search engines, be sure to check out the SEO For RapidWeaver video tutorial at ragesw.com

Your website is ranking for keywords you may not even know it is ranking for and you can instantly boost the number of visitors you are getting from search engines with a single change to your site.

So you have your XML Sitemap file submitted to your Google Webmaster Tools account. Now, login to your account to see what search terms your website is appearing for AND what search terms people are actually clicking on to visit your site.

The trick is to find the relevant search terms that are appearing a lot in search results, but that customers are not clicking. By simply changing your Title Tag and your description tag, you can dramatically improve the number of visitors who visit your website.

Watch this step by step video tutorial to learn exactly how to do this;

Make sure you have created and submitted your XML Sitemap file. If you think you’ve missed a step and feel a little lost, we have our step by step walkthrough SEO videos which explain everything you need to know about optimizing your website for the best possible search engine rankings.

People from all over the world are using Google to find what they are looking for. Whether it is products, services or information, everything they want to know can be found by “Googling It”.

If you have a business located in Canada that can only service customers locally, what good does it really do you to show up for a searcher in Australia. They can’t use your products or services so you shouldn’t have to care whether or not an Australian user can find you when they search.

With your Google Webmaster Tools Account and your XML Sitemap file, you can actually target only local users. Meaning when a Canadian searches for your website you are more likely to appear for them than if an Australian searches for your website. You can do this by clicking a single checkbox in your Webmaster Tools account.

Watch our step by step video tutorial to find out how;

Make sure you have created and submitted your XML Sitemap file. If you want more tips and advice we have our step by step walkthrough SEO videos which explain everything you need to know about optimizing your website for the best possible search engine rankings.

So in part 1 of this series you learned about the importance of your web page title tags and how to use them to attract searchers to your site. Now we need to learn the second part of the equation to ensure searchers are actually clicking your search result and coming to your website.

Once you have grabbed a searchers attention with your title tag, the next thing they look at is your page description, a short snippet of what the page they are about to visit is all about.

Your page description needs to include a brief summary of what they will find when they visit your site. If you don’t have a meta description, or it doesn’t accurately describe what is on the corresponding page, Google will provide a description from your page content that may not make much sense to a potential visitor.

This video tutorial will explain how a description tag works and why you need one;

Now that you know about your meta description tag, learn how to add one to your website and what makes a good meta description to help entice users to click your web page link when searching. Check out our walk through SEO video tutorials to learn how to improve your website’s search engine rankings.