Mac SEO Blog

We have a few important updates currently being beta tested. First and foremost, Macintosh Explorer, our file browser for Mac OS X has some new features including a new tabbed interface, support for Quick Look on Leopard and a few more enhancements.

We also have an update to iWeb SEO Tool which improves on some long standing issues. You can now properly use iWeb SEO Tool when you have MobileMe syncing enabled. You can also now optimize blog pages for search engines.

You can download both beta versions from;

http://www.trybeta.com/

Just create a free beta testers account at the above site and you will see both products listed. Try them out and please submit your feedback and any problems you encounter so we can fix them ASAP.

Google recently updated their analytics code for a number of reasons. The most important reason is so that the code can run asynchronously while your website loads. This means your website load time should be faster and tracking should be more reliable.

In order to take advantage of the new Google Analytics code, we have added the ability to enter code into the head section of your website in iWeb SEO Tool. This means in addition to adding Google Analytics you can add custom javascript, favicons, meta tags or just about anything else you need to enter within theandtags.

To take advantage of this feature, open your iWeb site in iWeb SEO Tool. Your existing Google Analytics code will be in the ‘Footer Code’ field. Remove that code and login to your Google Analytics to get the new code snippet. Copy and paste this snippet into the ‘Head Code’ field. The following video tutorial explains how to add Google Analytics to your iWeb site with iWeb SEO Tool.

This new update also lets you quickly open the modified website folder when pressing the Export button. You have a third option to show your website folder in addition to publishing to your MobileMe or FTP server. Now if you have to you can use a third party FTP client to publish your site or use another tool such as WebCrusher to optimize your iWeb site for faster loading times.

You can download iWeb SEO Tool and use it on your iWeb site today.

Video Transcript:

Once you’ve loaded your website in iWeb SEO Tool, you will be able to see files and folders on the left hand side. Just a quick note for those who watched the tutorial on how to load a site in iWeb SEO Tool properly, you might have seen some text in these two fields here. Normally, these fields would be empty, but I had already added the text into those fields previously, so that is why there was text there. We’re going to talk about what to put in those fields later in this video.

The first thing you need to do is select one of your website files with a .html extension. You will all see an index.html file in your website folder. Do not optimize this page. The index.html page is just for redirect purposes, so whatever you do, do not optimize the index.html file.

So now you can begin adding your title tags, meta tags, and alt text to your site. I’m not going to explain what these items are, or the best way to create them because I want to keep this tutorial short. If you need to learn more about these items, I highly recommend purchasing the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial. It’s only $29.95 and what you will learn in that course is worth much much more than this small price tag.

On the Site Settings tab, there are two fields. One is for the Head code and one is for the footer code.  What you should put in the Head code section is the code for Google Analytics. You can obtain this code by signing up for an account with Google Analytics, and registering to get the code. You can do all of this at google.com/analytics.

What you should put in the Footer code section is the code for Statcounter.com You can obtain this code by signing up for an account at statcounter.com and registering your website to get the code.

Both of these codes will allow you to receive information about your website visitors such as the number of unique visits, and how these people found your site. You don’t need to add both codes, but it is entirely up to you.

There is also a video in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial that will show you exactly how to obtain both of these codes.

Remember to click on the Apply button, or Apply To Entire Site button on the Site Settings tab to apply the changes to your site.

If you are using header tags on your site, make sure you select the option to Convert header tags and then press the Apply To Entire Site button. This will just strip the code from your site. It will not make the text in your header invisible. We never want to hide any text, so keep that in mind when creating your header tags. There is more information on header tags in the video course I mentioned earlier as well.

One last note, the Custom Meta Tags section is for advanced users, a large majority of you will never use it, so don’t worry about putting anything in there.

When you are done, you can publish your site by clicking on the Publish button. You can also find more video tutorials that will help you publish your website.

We are happy to announce a major update to SERank 2.1, the most powerful search engine rank checker for Mac OS X. With SERank you can check where your website ranks in over one hundred search engines around the world, track your changes and even create PDF reports for yourself, clients or customers.

SERank 2.1 adds the ability to check multiple websites at once as well as faster, more search engine friendly rank checks, important fixes for Google and Ask and more.

SERank 2.1 is free for anyone who currently still has a valid upgrade plan. All purchases for SERank come with one year of free upgrades. You can purchase the full version of SERank, or renew your license, by visiting out secure online store.

We look forward to hearing your feedback and are here to answer any of your questions.

Introduction

1. Becoming familiar with the MailShoot interface

Mailing Lists

1. How to setup your first mailing list in MailShoot

2. Learning about the mailing list window

3. Creating a subscribe page

4. Embedding a sign up form on an iWeb site
4.1 Embedding a sign up form on a RapidWeaver site
4.2 Embedding a sign up form on a Sandvox site

5. Importing subscribers who signed up on your subscribe page

Compose

1. How to compose a message in MailShoot

Send Mail

Filtering subscribers to only send mail to certain users

A More Powerful MailShoot

Effortlessly Increase Mailing List Sign Ups By 300%

We are very excited to announce the first beta of MailShoot, a powerful newsletter and subscription management software. MailShoot will let you instantly create an online subscription form for your website, no programming skills necessary, where your visitors can subscribe to your newsletter. It even works with iWeb websites hosted on MobileMe.

From there, you can quickly and easily keep your visitors up to date with periodic email updates keeping them coming back to your website.

We have released the first beta version on Trybeta. Users who submit valuable feedback will get a free license when the final version is released. Just sign up as a beta tester to Trybeta below;

http://www.trybeta.com

We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Domainer 1.9.6 has just been released with important fixes for importing domains from CSV files and syncing domain expiration dates with iCal.

Domainer is the fully featured domain management tool for Mac OS X. Providing the ability to track and manage domain details and important SEO stats for an unlimited number of websites.

Domainer comes with a free trial and costs just $39.95 USD for the full version.

We are extremely proud to introduce WebDesign 3.0, a major update to our web authoring and html editing software for Mac OS X. In development for a few years now, WebDesign 3.0 includes many new features including a redesigned user interface, over 20 professionally designed website templates, live side-by-side website previews and much more.

This release of WebDesign is the biggest yet. We focused all of our attention on making it easy for beginners to design their first website while giving power users the features they need to create and edit their existing sites. By providing website templates, users now have a starting point to base their websites off of so they can get their site up as quickly as possible. The live side-by-side web page previews show you exactly what your website will look like as you build it.

We wanted to create a tool that provided a great transition between a web builder like iWeb or RapidWeaver to an HTML editor that didn’t require you to be a coding expert. All the essential tools are now available to you to create that professional, fast loading website.

Check out the free, fully featured trial version and get your website up and running today.

One of the things that many webmaster don’t realize is how vulnerable their website becomes when they start using social networking scripts such as forums and blogs to help build communities around their website. Although it is a very good idea to integrate these scripts on your site, when doing so you can potentially give your visitors access to sensitive parts of your website that they would normally not have

Since many blogs and forums are open source, malicious users have full access to the source code and can find vulnerabilities or take advantage of how a system works in order to gain access to protected pages on your site, spam your site, or use your site to help get your visitors to their site.

Google Webmaster Tools has always been a great way to find out if your website has been hacked by looking at the outgoing links or most common keywords. Now, Google Webmaster Tools can notify you on your dashboard if your website has been compromised. It can tell you;

1. New versions of your installed blogs, forums and other software
2. Spammy or abused user-generated content
3. Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
4. Suspected hacking

This is very important to keep track of because if your site has been hacked Google will either remove your website completely from their search index or warn users every time they click your site in their search results. This can dramatically affect your reputation and prevent users from visiting your site.

A Google Webmaster Tools account is free to set up. You should submit your XML Sitemap file in order to get your website listed in Google and help Google’s crawler access the important pages on your website.

WebCrusher 1.7 has just been released and brings a number of new features and enhancements. Firstly this update will optimize iWeb built sites much faster than before because it can intelligently determine which files are modified and which aren’t (since iWeb always updates all pages when you export a site, this is actually not an easy thing to do).

It also improves publishing speed when uploading to your FTP or MobileMe server. In addition it fixes problems with PNG files not being optimized which makes it a recommended update for all users. This update is free for all registered users.

Late last year Google announced that the speed of a website will play a factor in how it ranks in their search results. They have started an initiative to speed up the web and offer many tips and tricks for speeding up a website’s load time. Fortunately WebCrusher can do many of the recommended speed optimizations for you automatically.

If you have created your XML Sitemap file and submitted it Google Webmaster Tools, you will also see the new Page Speed tests Google has implemented for your site. You should login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and see how your website performs relative to other sites in your industry.

Now its not only important to have your website load quickly for your visitors, but it’s also important for your search engine rankings too.

Over the past few years, iWeb users have used our software to help with their search engine rankings. iWeb SEO Tool has been extremely popular with iWeb users since it lets you easily optimize your iWeb site for search engines.

Over the years we have had numerous requests to provide a more step by step approach to the entire SEO approach. A lot of things about search engine optimization can be overwhelming for people just starting out.

So today we are happy to announce the iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial. This step by step video will explain everything you need to know about search engines and iWeb. It will walk you through the entire process making sure you understand what is happening and exactly what needs to be done to get more visitors to your site through search engines.

The iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial costs just $69.95 and can be purchased safely and securely through our online store.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. If you have any additional questions, please let us know. We are always looking for feedback on improving the video.