Mac SEO Blog

A few days ago MSN’s Webmaster Tools officially came out of beta. Like Google’s Webmaster Tools, MSN’s tools let you quickly submit your sitemap.xml file that you have created with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. Once submitted you are provided with search engine feedback including;

• How many of your web pages are indexed in MSN’s search
• The date MSN’s search spiders last crawled your web site
• Which, if any, of your web pages could not be properly indexed
• Your web site’s most popular incoming links

Although you won’t find as many resources and tools that are provided by Google’s Webmaster Tools, you will get some interesting information about how your web site is performing in MSN’s search.

If you already have your sitemap.xml file published on your web site, all you have to do is create your free Windows Live account and follow the simple steps to submitting your sitemap.xml file. The next update to RAGE Google Sitemap Automator will feature an all new way to ensure that your sitemap.xml files are recognized by all major search engines including MSN.

RAGE Domainer 1.1 has just been released. This free update for registered users adds the following new features and enhancements;

[NEW] Full support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
[NEW] Support for additional top-level domains (.in,.cn,.cz,.se)
[NEW] Now remembers list column sizes
[NEW] Clicking AlexaRank loads Alexa.com’s web site
[FIX] Importing CSV domain lists
[FIX] Correctly assigns owner details

RAGE Domainer is the only web developer’s tools for Mac OS X that lets users easily track and manage their domain names while getting an overview of a domain’s popularity and value.

RAGE Domainer 1.1 can be downloaded from the Domainer download page.

RAGE Domainer can be purchased for just $39.95 from RAGE Software’s secure online store.

Now that you have your blog set up with lots of great content related to your company, you can promote your blog using both Blog Search Engines and Blog Networks to get more exposure and drive more readers.

Blog Search Engines

Much like the Google search engine which searches the entire web, there are many search engines related purely to online blogs. That is, they will only search blog posts. With the rising popularity of blogs and blog search engines, leveraging these resources can offer a large amount of targeted web visitors to your web site’s blog. Some of the biggest blog search engines include;

• Technorati
• Google Blog Search

Getting your blog listed in Technorati can help provide extra exposure and important stats including how many other blogs are linking to your blog and your Blog Authority which, like Google’s PageRank, is measured by how many quality blogs link back to yours.

Once you have set up your online blog it is extremely important to set up your Technorati profile. Then, add your online blog to your profile and you can start tracking your blog’s popularity. As you add posts to your blog, they can appear on Technorati’s web site if you follow the notification descriptions below.

Blog Networks

On step above blog search engines are blog networks. Blog networks usually focus on a particular subject and allow only high quality, related blogs, to join their networks. They may be community driven, in that you must submit your blog to the network and other may vote on its relevance, or there may be a panel of judges that will determine whether or not your blog meets the standards of the network.

One of the more popular, and exclusive blog networks is 9rules (Update 2019: Link no longer available). A few times a year 9rules will open their network to submissions by bloggers, providing an opportunity for them to have their blog evaluated, and possibly included in their network.

Interested visitors will often visit blog networks in search of content related to their interests. In turn, this helps push new traffic to your web site. Other members of your same blog network may also discover your blog and provide links back to your web site. Blog networks are a great way to build your blog’s brand recognition, create a perception of quality and increase traffic and blog exposure.

There are many blog networks around and reading other blogs in your industry, or doing a simple Google search will return the vast amounts of opportunities available to you. Some of the more popular blog networks include;

b5media (Update 2019: Link no longer available)
Smash.vc
Web2.0 Workgroup

For a long listing, and ranking scheme of the most influential blog networks, see The Blog Network List (Update: website no longer exists).

Automatically Notifying Blog Search Engines About Updates

The great thing about blogs is the ability to automatically let blog search engines, such as Technorati, know when you have posted a new blog article. This can happen instantly without you having to do anything but write your blog post and submit it to your web site. Technorati provides step by step instructions on how to PING (a fancy word for notify), their search engine when you write a new blog post. You can read the step by step instructions on the Technorati help pages (Update 2019: Link no longer works).

You can use Google’s Blog submission (Update 2019: link no longer available) service to submit your blog to Google’s Blog Search Engine. This works similar to the Technorati’s notification features described above.

Press releases are a great way to get your company name and product out to your customers. It is also a great way to obtain a large number of incoming links to your web site which can help improve your Google PageRank and in turn, your search engine rankings. A press release is a mock news story about any newsworthy information about your company, such as releasing a new product, acquiring a product from another company, or announcing significant company news.

There is a ton of information online that can teach you how to write press releases. For now, you can use the following guidelines to take into consideration when writing your press releases;

1. Make sure your press release relates to a newsworthy event
2. Don’t make your press release sound like a sales pitch. You are providing an unbiased news releases about a significant company event.
3. Always write your press release as if it were going out to people who have never heard of your company or product. Make sure you clearly define who you are and what you do each time a press release is sent out.
4. Always include an easy way for publications to get in contact with you if they have more questions.
5. Your first paragraph should concisely answer the questions, Who, What, Where, and When. Essentially a short summary of your entire release.
6. Try to keep your release to a page long and never exceed two pages.

There are a number of press release distributers. You can find ones that are more expensive but will get you a greater reach and have more credibility with publications, and you will also find some which are not too expensive and can still provide you with a number of media contacts and links back to your web site.

One of the most popular, and least expensive press release distribution web sites is PRWeb. You can send a release for as little as $0 to $80 $40 depending on who you want to reach. If you live in the UK, another popular newswire web site is http://www.sourcewire.com/.

Look around for other press release distributers, especially one that may be specific to the product or service your offer. For example, if you were a Mac Software developer you may want to use the services of PRMac which targets just Macintosh related web sites and publications.

Other press release distribution web sites that are more expensive but provide added credibility in the eyes of your target media include;

PR Newswire
Business Wire
CNW Group (Canadian)

Update: Changed the PRWeb pricing details as they have changed since this article was originally written. Thanks Mario!

Anchor text refers to the link captions you click when you travel from web page to web page and is commonly blue and underlined. Anchor text is an extremely important factor in your on-page optimization strategies.

Broadly speaking, search engines see anchor text as a description of the page they link too. So for example if you link to a web page using the anchor text “About Blue Widgets” search engines will use this information to help understand the content on the linked-to web page.

Do a Google search for “Click Here”. As the number 1 search result you will see a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page. This is because so many web sites will say something like: “You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here to download it”. Even though the Adobe Acrobat Reader web page does not contain the text”Click Here” anywhere on the web page, it still ranks highly for this search term because of the web sites that link to it.

Keep this in mind when you link to other pages on your web site as well as any third party web pages. Instead of using the caption “click here”, try being more descriptive about the content the user is about to see. Lets say you are linking to another page which shows off a software application that verifies web site links are working correctly;

Inefficient & Generic Anchor Text

“Click here”
“More Information”
“Click here for more information”

Better Anchor Text
“Easily Check For Broken Links”
“Download Marketing Success E-book”

You don’t want to overdue this technique and sometimes it is appropriate to use a non-descriptive caption such as “click here”. However, when you can, try to make your anchor text more descriptive so that not only search engines know more about the content on the next page, but your web site visitors will be better informed as well.

There is one more important reason to using descriptive anchor text. If you do a search for a popular term such as “Apple Computers”, you may notice the extra links underneath the top result in Google’s search index as shown below;

Google automatically determines whether or not to show these additional links based on a number of factors. It is not known exactly when these links will appear but since they are generated using a computer algorithm and with no human intervention at all, you must make sure your web site is properly optimized so that they have the potential of showing your most important pages in the supplemental links section of your search engine rankings.

If you want to have these additional links show up, make sure you use consistent and descriptive anchor text in your inbound links for your most important pages such as a product information page or an online store.

Recently, Google updated their Webmaster Tools to provide more flexibility and control with these supplemental links. If you have created your XML Sitemap with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator you should already have a Webmaster Tools account. You can use the Webmaster Tools admin area to set which links you would not want to appear as an additional link. This is a fairly new feature that lets you have a little more flexibility with your web site’s search engine listing.

We had the great opportunity to talk SEO and web site marketing with MacVoices.com Podcast. Chuck of MacVoices spoke with us about;

1. Using popular web development tools including RAGE WebDesign, iWeb and Rapidweaver and how to optimize your web site for search engines.
2. Most effective techniques for achieving higher search engine rankings
3. How to avoid hurting your search engine rankings
4. Awesome new software soon to be released by RAGE Software
5. How you can meet the RAGE team at MacWorld 2008 in San Francisco

Check out the full Podcast at the MacVoices web site.

If you have any further questions, be sure to post them to the RAGE Software discussion forum. We can help you with any web site marketing or search engine question you may have.

RAGE Domainer was reviewed on episode #130 on MacReviewCast.com.

“[Domainer], aimed at webmasters, provides a great way to see information about all of your domains all from within one interface. The UI is intuitive and extremely easy to use … The app shows various page ranking statistics as well as some basic stats about incoming links. This makes it useful if you want to quickly check performance of multiple domains.”

Check out MacReviewCast.com for more great software reviews, software discounts and the latest in Mac news.

We were extremely pleased to find RAGE Domainer chosen as a Staff Pick on Apple’s Mac OS X download pages. It joins RAGE Google Sitemap Automator and RAGE MapDesign on Apple’s Staff Pick list.

Check it out here: Domainer on Apple’s Staff Pick List.

We are extremely happy to finally release version 1.0 of Domainer, a new application for web site owners, marketers and investors to track and manage their domain names.

Domainer is the first, and as of this writing, the only tool for the Mac that gives an overview of a web site’s popularity using Google PageRank, AlexaRank, incoming back links and social tags. With Domainer, you can quickly, and easily, see all important domain details in one easy to use application.

Use RAGE Domainer to manage your domains, track and beat the success of your competitors, and find profitable web sites to buy and sell.

A free download of Domainer can be found here. Domainer is available for purchase immediately through the RAGE Software secure online store for just $39.95 USD.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Come discuss your thoughts, feature suggestions and any questions you may have for Domainer on the RAGE Discussion forum.

Here is a feature that many users may not know about in RAGE WebDesign. You can quickly add a table with any number of rows and columns without doing any typing or using any of the wizards.

First, go to the Preferences and select the ‘Toolbar’ tab. Scroll the list until you see Table Creator. Make sure it is selected and close the Preferences window.

Then, go to the window menu and and select ‘Toolbar…’ to show the WebDesign Toolbar. You will see the Table Creator button as shown below. Click it to reveal a popup window that makes it extremely easy to insert a table with the selected number of rows and columns.