Mac SEO Blog

Recently Microsoft announced their all new search engine Bing. Coined as a “decision search engine”, Bing has certainly started off on the right foot providing one of the best search experiences of any previous Microsoft search engine and arguably of other major players in the field.

What is a decision based search engine?

Unlike Google who ranks websites based on popularity, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine attempts to understand what you are actually looking for. For example, if you were to type “digital camera” into Bing you will see a list of categories on the left hand side. Click the Shopping category to quickly see product reviews, comparisons and price. What’s more, your category selection is remembered so that each time you do a search for a product, you are taken directly to the Shopping category once again.

Bing helps you make decisions on any number of questions you may have. For example, type in “flights from boston to san francisco” and you will be able to quickly see when the best time to travel is, how much a flight would cost and what the best price is. Microsoft has attempted to bring features from dozens of other websites under one easy to use search engine including stocks, shopping, local maps and more.

Optimizing your website for Bing.com

With an estimated $80 million dollar marketing budget Microsoft will no doubt be attracting more and more users to its new search engine. Unlike MSN search and Live search, Bing brings innovation and much needed improvements to the search industry. So how you can you optimize your website for Bing?

Lets first take a quick look at Bing’s search results. Howevering your mouse over a search result in Bing reveals a popup window with a quick preview of the listed page. This isn’t a full web page preview like other search engines may provide. Instead, Bing attempts to grab the most relevant portions of a website so searchers can quickly decide whether or not they would like to visit it.

Bing website description

This means, having the number one spot for a search result may not always provide the most amount of visitors. Here are some tips for optimizing your website for Bing.com;

1. With the new page summary features, ensuring you have enticing content on your page will allow you to be able to attract more visitors from the search results page.
2. Ensuring all of your pages have enough text on them with your targeted keywords. Initial studies show that having larger blocks of text near the top of your page results in better page summaries.
3. Keeping anchor text (text used to link between pages) consistent for important pages so they show up under the ‘Also on this page’ section.
4. Local search results are getting more and more important so be sure to include your address on your website.
5. Create your XML Sitemap file and submit it to Bing Webmaster Tools.

How can RAGE Software’s SEO products help?

Sitemap Automator will work flawlessly with Bing.com to get your website noticed by Bing as well as all other major search engines.

XML Sitemaps created with Sitemap Automator are still the best way to get your website listed in all major search engines.

SERank is being updated as we speak to include support for Bing.com. A new version will be available in the next few days so you can easily track your website’s success in Bing.com’s search results.

Domainer is still an invaluable tool for tracking your domains and websites, finding link partners and discovering how successful your competitor’s website’s are.

Domainer 1.9 has just been released with a number of highly requested features and enhancements to the domain management software for Mac OS X.

This free update for registered users of Domainer 1.x includes the ability to add custom fields for each domain so you can track and store any kind of information, lets you create smart folders based on custom fields and will once again retrieve RSS subscriber details for blogs.

Domainer is the fully featured domain management tool for Mac OS X, letting you track and manage all of your domains and websites. In addition to providing all administrative details and sinking your domain expiration dates with iCal, Domainer provides all important search engine optimization (SEO) statistics so you can easily gauge the value of any domain.

RAGE WebCrusher has just been updated to version 1.5. This all new update signficantly improves the speed of optimizing your website files. Now you can optimize your website files up to 10x times faster than before.

It also includes improvements to CSS optimizations and PHP optimizations. It is a free update for registered users of version 1.x.

WebCrusher, for those who have never tried it, is an intelligent website code and image optimizer for Mac OS X. It can significantly reduce the size of HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP and Javascript files without changing the appearance of your site. It can also reduce the size of image files making sure your website loads as fast as possible in any web browser.

Download WebCrusher website optimizer for Mac OS X and make sure your site loads as fast as possible for your visitors and customers!

A fast loading website is also essential for a top ranking website in Google and other search engines.

Nobody likes visiting a slow loading website. Websites that take a long time to load (more than 5 seconds) are losing out on potential visitors. Studies have shown that visitors will wait no more than 8 seconds on average for a page to load. But did you know that search engines won’t wait for pages to load either?

Google in particular does not like slow loading websites. In fact, if you are using adwords to promote your site, the speed of your website’s load time is used as a Quality Factor to help determine your cost-per-click and your ad position.

Even more important however, is that your website’s load time will effect how many of your pages Google will index. Take a look at the following graphs taken from Google Webmaster Tools. The bottom graph shows the time spent downloading a page while the middle graph shows the number of kilobytes downloaded per day and the top graph shows the number of pages crawled per day.

You can easily see that as the time spent downloading pages went up Google indexed LESS pages. There is a clear inverse relationship between download time and number of pages indexed.

How do you check your own site?

You can check this for your own site by creating an XML Sitemap file and checking the Crawl Stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

How do you fix this?

Fortunately there is a very easy way to fix this. You need to reduce the size of your website and you can easily do this with WebCrusher website optimizer. WebCrusher will instantly optimize your site by removing unneeded website code and compressing image files. Then it can automatically publish your site directly to your webserver whether your are using an actual web host or MobileMe/iDisk to host your site.

In just 5 minutes you can have a faster website, that loads as quickly as possible for your visitors and insures Google and other search engines can properly scan and index all of your webpage files.

You also want to make sure that you are using a fast web hosting service to host your site. If you are a MobileMe/iDisk user it may be time to change to a fast and reliable web hosting service.

Macworld was a tremendous success for RAGE Software this year. We had the opportunity to provide a presentation for Xsilva LightSpeed Resellers on how to apply search engine optimization strategies to their small business, talked with a record number of attendees and customers during the show, and had the opportunity to check out the San Francisco hot spots.

SEO Presentation at Xsilva’s Day Camp

Our week started with an in depth presentation on search engine optimization for Xsilva LightSpeed POS resellers and users. We provided specific search engine optimization strategies and demoed our LightSpeed Web Store SEO Add-ons. The Day Camp presentation took place at the Westin St-Francis hotel.

Exhibiting at Macworld 2009: New SEO Software for Mac OS X

Starting early Tuesday morning we got to speak with hundreds of new and existing customer’s interested in promoting their websites in search engines and learning about our web development software and all new web hosting services for Mac users.

We updated the following software for Macworld 2009:
Sitemap Automator 2.0 which includes a totally redesigned user interface, support for robots.txt file, the ability to report potential indexing errors on your site and the ability to remember the details you have set for each page after re-scanning your website for new content. Sitemap Automator is now the most complete, and fastest way to create and update your XML Sitemaps on any platform.

WebCrusher 1.4 which significantly improves optimizations of cascading style sheets, iWeb based websites and more. Watch for all new, feature packed updates coming soon!

SERank 1.9 includes improved reporting features, new exporting options for importing into Excel or Numbers and a number of bug fixes.

Check out some of the highlights from show;

Macworld After Parties and Sponsorships

Macworld isn’t complete without the after parties. This year, RAGE Software sponsored the popular MacMingle party at Jillian’s restaurant. The party was a tremendous success once again and we were happy to speak with customers and press outside of the busy show floor.

We are pleased to announce major updates to our search engine optimization software suite for Mac OS X. The updates include new versions of a number of our products including Sitemap Automator, WebCrusher and SERank.

Sitemap Automator
The only way to get your website recognized by all major search engines, Sitemap Automator 2.0 now lets you easily manage an unlimited number of websites. In addition, it can easily show you potential search engine crawling errors on your website, supports robot.txt files and offers improved support for iWeb built websites.

This 2.0 update is the first paid upgrade since the initial release back in 2005. If you purchased before May 1, 2008 you can purchase an update for just $19.95 USD. If you purchased after May 1, 2008 then you can get your free upgrade serial number from http://www.ragesw.com/getupdate.php

WebCrusher
Optimize your website so they load as fast as possible for your visitors. At the click of a button, WebCrusher can take any website and intelligently remove unneeded code and compress images making the website load as quickly as possible in any web browser. This free update to version 1.4 includes enhanced CSS optimizations and improved iWeb optimizations.

SERank
See exactly where your website ranks in over 60 search engines for your most popular keywords. Discover who ranks higher than you and how you can rise above them to get the number one spot on all major search engines. Version 1.9 adds enhanced reporting features, new exporting options with compatibility with Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers, as well as includes important bug fixes.

If you will be attending Macworld Expo 2009 please stop by our booth at #1744 and we would be happy to talk with your about our software and these updates.

We have gotten a lot of questions regarding how to properly create an XML sitemap using Sitemap Automator and get your iWeb based website into all major search engines. The process usually takes less than a few minutes, but can be confusing. This is why we have put together a short video tutorial on how to easily create an XML Sitemap and get your iWeb based website in search engines today.

This step by step video tutorial is still useful if you have not used iWeb.

We also provide detailed, written instructions for getting your iWeb based website into all major search engines if you require more help.

We are once again very excited to be exhibiting at Macworld Expo this January 5th-9th 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Our entire team will be there to demo new products, talk about great new updates and mingle with the Mac community.

Our booth this year is 1744, right behind Apple’s booth in the South Hall. We’ve got lots of new updates to talk about and look forward to meeting our current users and introducing our products to new users.

We will also be sponsoring the MacMingle party taking place on Thursday January 8th at Jillian’s, right down the street from the Moscone Center. The MacMingle party is one of the best attended party during the show. It is opened to all Macworld attendees. More details on the MacMingle party can be found at:http://shadovitz.com/macmingle2009/

See you in San Francisco next month!

WebCrusher 1.3 has just been released and we are pleased to announce that it is now the most powerful website optimizer for Mac OS X. In less than 6 months, WebCrusher has outpaced its competition by being able to optimize a website more than any other tool available for Mac OS X.

We used the sample website our competitor created to show the true of power of WebCrusher. See the side by side comparison of WebCrusher and its competition using the sample website our competitor created.

If you use iWeb to create your website, this update is for you. You will see significant file size reductions with this version which means much faster website loading for all of your visitors.

We’ve also added one great benefit for all registered users. You can now get up to 4 months FREE when you sign up to our web hosting. Now you can have all of your website needs under one roof with RAGE Software.

Today, WebCrusher 1.2 has been released with an all new Reports feature that details exactly where optimizations were made and where improvements to your website have been made.

This free update also includes important fixes for HTML tags with embedded PHP code in them. We have also eased some of the trial restrictions so that you can now view your entire website in your web browser. Please note however that random letters are still flipped around in optimized websites so do not use optimized websites from the trial version as your live website.

WebCrusher can be purchased safely and securely from our the RAGE Online Web Store.