Making Apple’s iWeb More “Search Engine Friendly”
I was recently asked by a friend and Apple Creative Genius to write an article about Apple’s idiot-proof web design software, iWeb, and the field of search engine optimisation; more specifically, how to make iWeb more search engine friendly.
Given my current interest in SEO, I was certainly excited about looking at iWeb and similar programs such as RapidWeaver and considering ways in which to improve your chances, as a general user, to get your web site well ranked in Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other major search engine.
And so, after a while of dissecting, cogitating, and pondering over various thoughts and processes I came to the following conclusions about Apple’s iWeb software and its search engine friendliness:
Making a Great Web Page
iWeb might make a great looking web page, but does it really make a great web page? And in reality, how much of the input of a web design software application like iWeb actually makes a difference to the “importance” of your web site both in general and in relation to specific keywords and its findability.
It is true that the design of a web page does not make up the entire equation when it comes to the role of search engine optimisation, and that there are elements to improving your visibility that do not even pertain to the task of building and creating web content. That’s to say, that essentially there are tasks that need to be completed above and beyond the work that is done in iWeb. For one, this includes marketing and PR online, creating a hub bub about your product or service and getting the “web” talking about it. So, in the end, one has to accept that even if iWeb, RapidWeaver, or any other such software for that matter, fulfilled their side of the SEO equation perfectly, this would or may not be enough to completely optimize your web site for search engine “friendship”.
Disregarding this fact, how well does iWeb actually do at making a search engine optimized page, what does it do well? and what doesn’t it do well?
The Successes and Failures of iWeb
Having spent the best part of the last 10 years with my head inside a combination of different web design apps, including Golive CyberStudio, Macromedia Dreamweaver and text editors such as BareBones’ Edit and TextMate, I found it intriguing to actually start performing forensics on the results of a standard theme html page created in iWeb. The problem was, that the more I dug through code and the more I thought about iWeb and how a user could make it more search engine friendly, the more i realized that actually, in order to allow ordinary mac users, who, for all intent and purpose, are just newbies when it comes to web design (i mean, why would the be using iWeb if they weren’t?), the more they would actually need to get under the hood and play with the nuts and bolts of the web page, something they might not feel comfortable doing, and what’s more, something that they might not even be able to do in iWeb.
However, I suppose if you are reading this far in the article, you probably are wondering what exactly it is, this mystical and magical process that people often mutter under their breath in ever hushed tones: search engine optimisation! And how you can actually get under the bonnet of the iWeb vehicle and start tweaking to improve google page rank through making iWeb HTML code more search engine friendly.
Part of the problem with SEO is that not all of it is completely concrete and in fact, as many people will tell you, there is no guaranteed return of investment (ROI) for your time/money input. Moreover, the process is as much about building well architected, usable, interesting and generally useful web pages for people. Whatever that means!
But in reality from iWeb’s perspective, you need to correct a small but potentially significant series of flaws. Included amongst these are:
- The lack of META TAGS, and more importantly the lack of unique, page specific meta-descripion and meta-keywords tags for ever single page.
- The propensity for iWeb to just save and export whole swaves of text, inputted in iWeb by hand as blocks of graphics which are not indexable by search engine spiders.
- The criminal use of, and the general lack of ALT and TITLE parameters in hyperlinks and images.
- The insane use of the DOCUMENT TITLE for just about ever single element on the page, including image file name, page names, page title and everything else, creating a general repitition of not necessarily relevant, and usually too few words.
- Make sure your code validates. Whether it is HTML, XHTML, CSS or otherwise, you need to be certain you have implemented valid code using the validators on the W3C web site.
Is that all? I hear you say to yourself. Shockingly, YES! But then that is why there is a certain art and science to doing search engine optimsation. These things might seem like little things, and like not very great in numbers. But these elements described above are some of the tools that an SEO expert requires, and which in great hands will potentially produce great results. SEO and the development of content for the web is certainly an art that should be carefully considered at every step.
Content: Standing Head and Shoulders Above Others
As I have said already, at least twice, and will say again, you do need to think about building a web site that is not sparse of information, that contains the kinds of things that you want people to find you for, and that are useful, coherent and easy to use. Well architected pages are few and far between and it is easy to make them stand out from the crowd. If sites were all built equal, search engines would have a lot harder time actually differentiating amongst them.
Much of what makes Google great is its Page Ranking ability. This isn’t something that Google invented, because the concept and algorithm have been around for years, to assess the relevance and importance of academic papers. The ingenuity from Google’s perspective, wasn’t using this, but in creating a system that could calculate the relevance of pages online and to do it on a scalable basis. And so the ultimate goal is to make pages that are of the highest quality and which stand out as such!
And so where does this leave you stuck in iWeb?
Conclusion: A Product Miss-sold
I suppose once you have accepted that iWeb has these flaws, the you may or may not have given up completely on the idea of having the perfect web site, and although iWeb doesn’t preclude you from having a well ranked site – one can NEVER say that, as your site might become insanely popular on the web of its own accord, and will reach a tipping point of popularity which overcomes such basic SEO issues – SEO is certainly something you should consider, and whether that means attempting to do it yourself or paying a more seasone dprofessional developer or seo expert to do it, so be it.
SEO in itself has it’s own saleability problems. It is definitely a product that is misunderstood and missold. many designers and developers will build sites without even taking the basics into hand. Others will say they know what they are doing, but in reality don’t, and others will do a great job, but in the end only do it one time.
Search engine optimisation is a means by which to leverage marketing, and as such you should spend time, money, thought and energy pursuing it. Not just the once, but constantly. It is something that, if you take your web site seriously as part of your business, you need to nurture and keep an eye on at all times, and that needs to be built up and grown; and it is something which should ultimately reflect itself in a better designed, more useful, and totally accessible web site with plenty of monthly traffic, and, if ecommerce is your thing, increased monthly sales!
January 15th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
My website was developed through iweb and is hosted by Mac. My domain name was obtained through Godaddy. I also registered my website with godaddy’s Traffic Blaser to get my site posted on various search engines. I went through the optimization procedure as directed in the traffic Blaser instructions. I selected meta tags key words etc. and thought I was submitting these to various search engines. My website never showed on any search engine when various key words were typed in. My website is visible only if one types in the actual address http://www.northparkart.com
The question is; Is this combination iweb and godaddy traffic blaser a way to get my website posted on search engines?
If so , how do I do it ? what are the steps? HELP!
Thanks,
January 17th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I hate that iWeb doesn’t let you easily edit the title or add meta tags. However i have been using this tool to add this information to my iWeb site;
http://www.ragesw.com/products/iweb-seo-tool.html
January 18th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Robert, I would start by clearing up the meta data and titles of your site, as per Marc’s suggestion with a application like Rage’s iWeb SEO tool that I have reviewed elsewhere on this site.
A lot of your traffic is likely to come from Google, and is easiest to generate from there. Last I heard, Google covers some 60-80% of the search market int he USA, so I suggest you do a decent job on focusing there. You can’t go much wrong with that. I would signi up for webmaster’s tools and creating a sitemap, and getting feedback from the Google. Also, the process of telling them what is on your site will help ensure all the pages are indexed, but best to do that once you have done a stellar job on the meta data and keywords on your site.
On a side note, I love the shaped canvases, wouldn’t mind ordering one myself!
January 18th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Robert, another thing I noticed is that your site is framed, just for the purpose of keeping your domain in the URL, this is not a good idea and is the first thing you should work on getting rid of.
February 5th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Vincent – What do you mean by “framed?” I, too, am trying to SEO my website. The suggestion to use iWeb Tools is great. I will be working with that in the next day or two.
Do you mind looking at my website (I think my name is linked to it) and let me know if it is framed as well. Additionally, what advise might you have to fix it.
Thanks for the help!
February 15th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Steven =
Framed essentially refers to the use of frames in the HTML for the site. You can either tell by looking at the code, or by watching the URL bar of your browsers whilst you surf the site, if it doesn’t change then the site is likely in a frame, and must be broken out of it.
I see you have already used the iWeb SEO Tools though I recommend use of unique keywords, descriptions and titles per page and pertinent to the content. I would also suggest trying to narrow down a target audience, as I am sure that resumes in general are over subscribed and it would be easier to dominate lesser key phrases.
Beyond that most of your content is in text which is good, I would also encourage you to add link titles and alt tags to images, that can’t do any harm. Also add Google analytics to your site and sign up for Google webmaster tools. For finding keywords try Google Insight.
Best, Vincent =
February 24th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
My iWeb-made site is not showing up in Google. I attempted to include metadata (”description” & “keywords”) using Web Widgets. To date I get no response from Google even when I enter very specific search terms. I worry about Google Web Tools because in the Terms it states that they can place advertising on my site at their discretion. Because of this I am reluctant to use their Web Tools. It would help if I could ask someone at Google what this means, but I gather they don’t talk to people. I could not find this concern addressed in Google’s Help Forum.
February 24th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Greg =
Right now your site only has it’s index page indexed and showing up in Google. Other things of note, your site doesn’t have any meta data and the page titles are all the same and not pertinent to any keyphrases you might wish to dominate. If I were you I would investigate using something like Rage SWs iWeb SEO tool, and try and improve the quality and content on your site.
Best, Vincent =
March 16th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Hello Vincent, I’ve read through and I have the same problems as the other people here. I understand that I would need to populate links to my website but I need to be very specific to appear on Google. Even typing my company name exactly as it is puts me 5th on the search list. Can you give me any hints!? I would really appreciate!
Thx, Etienne
March 28th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Hello Vincent –
The issue I keep coming up with is that iweb apparently puts all of the text I write in as an image, so while I have content, the search engines won’t recognize it. Is there any way to add text as just plain text visible to search engines if I am using iWeb, or do I need to look for another website program?
Thanks, Abby
March 28th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Abby- I think the key is to make certain that you are putting your text into “text boxes” rather than into “shapes”.
HTH! :-)
March 29th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Hi Abby,
I’ve been going nuts over this since last July, and just found a post that may help both of us out. I haven’t tested it yet, but it sounds like it will work.
The resolution seems to be to change the font from Arial to Helvetica or Verdana and it should work. Only 1 of my pages was being picked up by the search engines – the About_us page, and the font there is Verdana. The font on all of the other pages is Arial.
Here is the post that explains it – http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006012617091313
Hope this helps. If it still doesn’t work for me, I’ll let you know. If it works for you, please let us know.
Thanks, Debbie
March 29th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Hi Abby,
I’ve got it! I feel so stupid!
What I was doing wrong, which may not be your case, is I created rounded rectangle shapes that I typed text into which caused .png files to be created. I don’t think it was the font at all, just a coincidence I didn’t have rounded rectangles or other shapes with text in it on the About_us page.
These rectangles are part of my layout design, so I really don’t want to get rid of them. So instead, I tested inserting a text box inside the rectangle, and it appears to work. My text is now part of the .html source, the page looks the same, and the .png file created is just an empty rounded rectangle.
Of course I will have to publish it to the server and wait to see if the search engines pick it up, but I’m happy I finally spent the time to figure this out. This is one of those things that makes too much sense. . .
April 17th, 2009 at 10:52 am
I too am having problems with iWeb and recognition by various search engines. My website is large and changes weekly. I have noticed that since I started using iWeb individual names are not being picked up. Before I started handling my own site the person (a professional) who handled my (a total novice) site had many names in the metadata. The change was necessitated by my need to make so many changes and her inability to do so. What do I have to do to make my site more search engine friendly?
Thank you,
April 17th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Mary =
You may wish to look at Rage’s iWeb Seo Tool which is free and is reviewed here:
http://www.techtalkpoint.com/articles/place-higher-in-google-with-rages-iweb-seo-tool/
Best, Vincent =
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Hello All,
Any help is appreciated! My site built with iWeb blog template (pardon the construction) is http://www.watchesandreviews.com, but when it is pulled up it looks like this http://www.watchesandreviews.com/Watches_And_Reviews/Blog/Blog.html . I am told this is because I am using a blog format that iWeb then creates a sub folder or a redirect. I used Submitnet to help optimize my site and one of the functions it offers is “search engine readiness”, this search engine readiness all looks good except I have warning that my site might get overlooked because engines look over redirects. It is a small redirect as it only redirects from watchesandreviews.com to watchesandreviews.com/Watches_And_Reviews/Blog/Blog/.html. Currently I know of no way to change the html on iWeb (using ‘09 version) to eliminate the redirect. Does this really matter???
To comment on the above metatags, I simply go to my host open the html file and past in the metatags there since I can’t do it in the iWeb application. A drag right now because I just launched my site and I am not searchable yet, but once the site only needs the monthly update I can live with the cut and paste….Currently only on home page coded this way.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Wow, I’m reading everything above and I’m amazed at what’s happened to my website. If you google search ethnic talent agency my company which I run off of iWeb is #1. Know how I did this? I bought the domain ethnictalentagency.com and forwarded and masked my iWeb site. How much did it cost me? $9.99 for the domain name, and no time at all. How’s that for your search engine optimization? Wanna see more iWebsites that I built? Check out NicholasSegura.com. It’ll give you some great ideas on how to be creative with iWeb.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Nico, Congratulations, you pulled the easiest party trick in the house. Your own site doesnt even come up top (#1) in Google for the search term “Nicholas Segura” and that’s with the phrase in your domain. How about actually getting a domain top for results that have no match with anything in the URL? Requires more than just 9.99 and a slap happy approach.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for this great site. I’m building a web site in iWeb and using the Rage SEO tool right now. Things are going well, except, most of my images are not showing up in the meta data editor. Any thoughts?
Thanks, Carey
June 24th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
OK I need in on all of this, reading this thread. I am such a newbie with a site that is only 2 weeks old. Can you take a look at my site and let me know what I need and simultaneously I will investigate the Rage SEO tool. I am like the first commentator who has a go daddy domain name but built my site on iweb using mobile me and mac.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:09 am
Valarie =
Happy to work with you and give you tips, will email directly.
Best, Vincent =
June 29th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Hi, Vincent
I am helping someone with their campaign (pro bono) and build this website. Everything there is an image. And I sort of have to keep it that way. What can I do to SEO it? I have another site http://www.salsasocialny.com that’s taken off just fine, but that’s because it’s mostly text.
Help!
Lana
September 4th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I am a real newbie at building my website and just launched it this week using machighway b/c they only work with macs. All went well with the launching but not with the seo search. I am trying to use iweb seo tool but can’t get any html codes to come up when I open up the site on their tool. I am a therapist and would like people to search for me by name and also by different types of therapy I offer as well as the town I am in. Given I am not a techie but am handy, does anyone have any ideas for me?
http://www.loragriff.com
thanks,
Lora
September 6th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Lora -
Not exactly sure why the iweb seo tool doesn’t quite work, but in short, I would advice yu to try and ditch the redirect from the domain to the home page, which is a default action introduced by iweb … it sucks, and who knows why.
I would ensure your home page has a title and make sure you have the meta keywords and description setup. Beyond that make sure all the words you want to be found for are scatterred across the various relevant pages.
Thats the sweet and the short.
Best, Vincent -
October 9th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
I built a iweb, web site used SEO tool, forwarded my domain to mobile me.
Im NO1 even above youtube and yahoo, on google.
I think its because I have links also from other sites with same contents to mine, I created blogs and linked them to my site with same content.
But I did notice that google reads the text and my free domain email name link from godaddy on my first page and it seems to like that content.
so make sure thats on the first page, adding meta tags does help as I took them off just to see and I dropped out of the first 2 pages on google.
Make sure you have a text box on the first page too “do not put text in shapes” just text alone and make sure it has all the content of your site described in the text box,
The most important part is click the text BOX and click ” bring to front” before publishing.
Google will read the text first and index it.
hope it helps
angus cooney
October 15th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Can you outline exactly how to do the meta tags. I had difficulty getting my html code up to paste onto iweb seo. I really am a newbie…. trained clinical social worker and not a techie!
thanks,
Lora
October 15th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Lora,
Will see about getting this done for you. and will email you with details if thats ok after they have been posted here! Thanks for the post.
Best, Vincent =
October 16th, 2009 at 6:01 am
Lora in the mean time you might like to check out these videos on the iWeb SEO Tool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgcPIz96Igg&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_omzKR2a8&feature=player_embedded
Best, Vincent -
October 18th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Hey there. Love the article. Was wondering if maybe you had some pointers for my site. Our restaurant had a site designed by someone who used the worst website builder in the world… We then decided to try ourselves. Since I do not know much about building a site from the ground up, I decided to take the iWeb approach. The site looks about 1000x better then it did before. We have still never been able to get the ranking on google we want. The site is http://www.dicanns.com or http://www.dicanns.ca which I have on godaddy and hosted on godaddy. If you google Dic Ann’s, you will see that the new site is hardly ranked. There are still dead links from our old site which remain in the list of sites.
I will be trying that SEO tool at some point today to see if there is a difference but I just want to be able to make all those junk links go away and have a normal site rank. Any suggestions? Do I just have to go through my iWeb and add tags and more keywords? What do you suggest for getting rid of all the junk on there?
October 18th, 2009 at 9:52 am
I would suggest signing up to Google’s webmaster tools and setting up a sitemap file on the web server telling Google what pages make up your site. I would also redirect the from one domain to the other to promote a specific domain to reduce the amount of replicated content. Givent hat you are a CA business i would choose the .ca domain over the .com In the webmaster tools define your domain as a CA focused business too. You can also use redirects to turn the dead links into links that redirect to the most correct current and relevant info.
These are just a few points, but hopefully useful.
October 19th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Oh my Goodness am I glad to find you! My business partner and I have been working on trying to get our website to show up in various search engines. It was built in iWeb and we used the iWeb SEO Tool, as well as the Rage Sitemap Automator. The site now shows up in Yahoo if you type in the company name. We are awaiting the beta version of the Sitemap software to publish a verification file to Google which will contain what they are looking for as far as content (since the recent change). If you think this sounds confusing you can only imagine how we feel since we really are new at this. The main issue we are wanting to resolve is that when you type in our keywords (in Yahoo), we don’t show up. Any suggestions?
October 19th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Merritt,
You seem to have done a great job so far, one of the best I have seen yet! With Yahoo explicitly you may want to register for FREE with the Yahoo Web Site Explorer and think about their site marketing options.
Beyond this, I wouldn’t wait for Google Sitemap generators, just manually create your own. It isn’t difficult and submit it on Google’s Webmaster Tools. Also, sign up for the Google Business Directory and get listed in the Yellow Pages etc with links back.
Best, Vincent =
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:43 am
After submitting the site to Submit Express it pointed out that search engines don’t index pages with a redirect. My site url http://www.finecabinetmaker.co.uk redirects to http://www.finecabinetmaker.co.uk/Welcome.html. Is this a function of iWeb? Is the comment regarding redirection valid and if so how can I avoid the redirect? Many thanks.
November 3rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
I would try setting up your homepage as “index” though this may conflict with the HTML that iWeb generates. Even if you delete the redirect and change the name fo the file, the menu links will then be broken and require changing. Give my first proposition a roll and let me know what comes up. Best, Vincent =
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:55 am
I found that iWeb creates a very tiny index.html file that redirects immediately to what is effectively my home page – ie Welcome.html. I made a copy of Welcome.html and replaced index.html with it. The other pages still link back to the original Welcome.html which I don’t see as a problem until I come to edit the page in which case I need to remember to edit both. If this does improve my ranking (ie Google can actually find me!) then I’ll look into making a single Welcome.html and fiddle around as necessary.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Much cleaner solution … though then it duplicates the content across a couple of pages, but can’t imagine the benefits of losing the redirect don’t outweigh the duplication of content. Best, Vincent =
November 11th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Been trying to get SEO working on this site for several months now. Did the site map and submitted to Google. And did the Rage SEO Tool recently, but the changes did not show up in the source code and I’ve been unable to figure out why. Any ideas on that would be great!
The site map doesn’t seem to be helping much either.
The site has a lot of content and it’s text that’s brought to front – so I can’t figure out why that’s not being spidered either.
I’ve done a lot of sites but this is first one on iWeb and they really ought to post a warning on it!
Any help would be much appreciated!
November 15th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Ok, all this talk of SEO etc.. etc., has me wondering …. Even if I type my own domain name http://www.plungercove.com my iweb site doesn’t come up at all, I redirected my domain name a few weeks ago, was working fine, I googled it this morning and I’m not there anymore. Do these rage sites work? Is this worth the hassle,? my free trial on mobile me is going to expire and I’m wondering if I should go else where ??
November 21st, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Hey Vincent, you must be applauded for helping all these people! I made this site in iWeb for my friend to advertise his various bands http://www.jasonhensonguitar.com I used iWeb SEO to generate tags and meta tags, however when I used freewebsubmission the result said there were no tags or meta tags. Not sure what to do now. Also I have my own site http://www.eventmusic.org.uk which redirects to mobile me, this one comes out well on google local business, however it doesn’t appear in regular search results. Any tips? Do redirects ever get noticed? Perhaps I should just host it at 1and1.co.uk. Cheers.
November 21st, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Dan on jasonhensonguitar.com I see no meta tags ie.keyword or description. If you go to ‘View’ > ‘Source’ and do a search for ‘keyword’ it finds nothing. And on the eventmusic.org.uk it is in an frame so its the worst possible end as far as SEO is concerned :( Regarding iWeb SEO have you watched the videos on how-to? If you like contact me direct and we can figure it out.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:23 am
Vincent, I would also like to compliment you on the help you are providing. Very much appreciated and very insightful.
I came across your site by way of searching to see how many YouTube videos I can place on a single iWeb page before things head south. I have quite a few videos on the monocycle page and I don’t want to add more if I learn that there is a best practice that I should follow.
I have the iWeb SEO Tool, Rage Sitemap Automator and Rage SE Keyword software programs, which I will be going through in detail and filling in all of the blanks once I am done adding content.
I do have a several questions re my website http://www.mcleanmonocycle.com
1). All of my photos which are part of the sideshows do not show up (at all) within iWeb SEO Tool? Does iWeb convert these images to some other format? The only photos that show up are the stills at the top of each page.
2) I am using my .Mac account to host this site for my friend and I have 600GB per month transfer capacity available, if I upload a 100MB video clip to my Mac Account and put it on the website through iWeb, will that bandwidth be eaten up a 100MB per viewing of that video? The one video related to this website is on YouTube and has over 800,000 hits and climbing, and I anticipate that traffic will spill over to this iWeb site so I am somewhat concerned with adding videos directly to the site as compared to connecting to them through YouTube. Your thoughts?
3). When I began reading through iWeb SEO Tool, they suggest that I publish my site to a folder. I am a little confused by this and my confusion is compounded by the fact that I have MobileMe configured to host my domain (and that is working fine… ie; CNAME being used). I am currently publishing the website to the root folder on .Mac (Home>Web>Sites>KMM) and I have Rage Sitemap Automator publishing the sitemap and google verification file to the root folder ‘Sites’. When I am ready to use iWeb SEO Tool, should my procedure be to publish my website to a local folder first, then upload that folder to my iDisk via the iWeb SEO Tool? If so, my site will be one folder deeper than it was, will I leave my sitemap and google verification file where they currently are in the root folder ‘Sites’?
Thanks for any suggestions you may have.
-Patrick
November 26th, 2009 at 4:58 am
Patrick -
To answer your points in reverse order:
3) Basically you need to export the site to folder on your desktop. This is so that the files can be accessed and edited by iWeb SEO. These would then be uploaded to your MobileMe web folder. Configuring it to upload directly to MobileMe basically cuts out this step.
2) Any video content you can host elsewhere, be it YouTube, Vimeo or anywhere else is a good thing. If the videos are as popular as you suggest it will eat through the bandwidth allowance in no time at all.
1) You will have to explain a bit further, but the slideshow is in a pop up, maybe this is being blocked, but i see plenty of thumbnails.
Thanks, I hope this helps.. Best, Vincent -
November 27th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Vincent-
Thank you!
Just a little followup…
3). So the website will reside here Home>Web>Sites>iWeb>KMM and the Google file and sitemap will remain in the ‘Sites’ folder?
2). Any limit on how many YouTuube videos per page?
1). In iWeb SEO the sideshow images all show up individually as empty folders.
November 27th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Vincent-
I’m good with #1 and #2 above. Thank you again for all your help!
December 11th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Hi, I have found a lot of help on this forum but I still can’t figure out how to make my website stop forwarding from http://www.cleanworks.org to http://www.cleanworks.org/Cleanworks/Home.html. We have two websites in iweb and only this one does it. Is there a way around it? Thank you!
December 13th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Jesse -
Rather than having an initial page of HOME, try calling it INDEX.
Best, V =
January 2nd, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Hey Vincent – what a great site!
Really, this site is “gold dust” to all those people that don’t understand the complicated stuff, and have bought iWeb thinking that it’s the complete answer for creating a web site. My site is work-in-progress after a recent re-design, which is why there are inconsistencies at the moment.
The main thing is… what do I do to improve the SEO of my site?
I’ve been struggling with this for over a year. I’ve downloaded iWeb SEO today, but haven’t used it yet. I’m hoping it’s easy to use and has good clear instructions. Some of these additional programmes, from what I’ve read, don’t always do what it says on the tin which is a worry.
Anyway, I must stop rambling … can you give me a few ideas and suggestions that I can act on, and that will be easy to follow.
As I can’t upgrade from OS 10.4.11 on my PowerPC G4, I’m having to slum it on iWeb ‘08 (2.0.4).
‘Best
Danny
January 17th, 2010 at 1:48 am
I have a couple of questions that i hope you can help me with:
1) Where do you create ALT tags I have used Rage SEO and it doesn’t list all of the photos
2) If I delete the index page will my domain go to my home.html page automatically
3) When I add h1 tags it enlarges the text on my site so I just take them out – Why is this
If you get a chance please visit my web site http://www.siphomeconstruction.com and let me know what you think.
Thanks
January 17th, 2010 at 4:31 am
Cory =
1) ALT is an attribute of the IMG tag. It is possible that not all the pictures on a page are being displayed as images, but rather as a background to some other element and therefore cannot have an ALT atribute applied. If there is a limite on the number of images, you can add alt=”" to an IMG tag
2) if you delete the index.html your host may or may not recognise the home.html, it depends on their set up. You can always test by renaming index.html. An alternative would be to rename home.html to index.html and applying the change to all hyperlinks, such as in the menu. Or by renaming the page in iweb to index perhaps.
3) H1 has a predefined size, the only way to change this would be in CSS. If you add a style attribute (style=”") to the h1 tag you are adding and size it down as follows: style=”font-size: 12px;” and set the number to whatever size you would like.
4) looks like some of your setup has already had a positive impact, with a front page result for structural insulation and geo specific names: 1st page for hometown and 2nd page for CA. So onwards and upwards from there!
January 28th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
seo tool really helped my site. so did the seo video which i would recommend to people. rage tool now even has something that makes it really easy to add the h1 tag (i had to learn about that from the video)
i’ve never had a problem with pictures not showing up. that seems strange. did u make sure u checked every html file in the tool to see if u missed something?
here is a video that shows people how to use the seo tool. it’s not a complicated app, but it was still nice to see someone else show me how to do it instead of figuring it out on my own. :http://apptorial.com/how-to-use-rage-softwares-iweb-seo-tool/
here is the link to the seo video (it’s $69 dollars which I thought may be a bit high, but it was well worth it to me. much cheaper than hiring guys who were asking me for 800 a month lol): http://www.ragesw.com/educate.php
January 29th, 2010 at 9:48 am
Hi Vincent, we chatted a couple of times, I think my emails may have landed in your junk folder. It would be great to pick up the thread again, if you have the time and the inclination. Cheers!
February 20th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Vincent,
I hope this finds you well. I am having difficulty dealing with the redirect. I have the RAGE SEO tool and have gone through all the steps. I still have to go in and add Header tags. I tried to do that and the font came back screwy. Tips? Last but not least is that I desperately need to change the color of my links! They just blend in! It’s the #1 complaint so far. Help please. Thanks!
Michael
February 20th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
I notice you seem to have managed to get the head tags in etc and things look good. In terms of the links you will need to directly edit the CSS file in index_files and change the #999999 hex code to another color. For further help you might like to read a couple of articles I recently wrote “Quick SEO Success, Is It Possible?” and “Search Engines Love Qype“. Hope this helps, Vincent =
February 28th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Hi Vincent,
The Rage software and video have been great but the main reason that I got it was to learn how to do the h1 tags but it doesn’t work. When you put it in the text is is just this large black type. I just edited the html but I am not really sure if I did it correctly, if you could take a look at http://www.westernsips.com and give me any tips they would be appreciated.
Thanks
March 1st, 2010 at 10:49 pm
my wife has a dog walking business in brooklyn and New York City called http://www.furrypoppins.com how can I add these key words – in iweb?? dog walking, pet sitting, cat sitting, puppy training, dog sitting etc….
please advise
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:58 am
Joe – Check out Rage Software’s iWeb SEO Tools
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:59 am
Cory – You will want to apply some CSS to the <h1> as <h1 style=”font-size: 12px; color: white;”> etc.
April 5th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Hi there! I’ve just downloaded RAGE iWeb SEO tool and filled in all the title and meta tags etc. However, when I try and publish it to my FTP site, it just sits there, the ‘upload’ button greyed out but nothing happening, so it never gets published! What’s happneing and do you know how to fix it?
Thanks!
May 5th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
hi there,
when I try to add alt text to the images on my website using iweb seo tool, there are no images displayed. There are lines of text, but no image shows up below to let me know what image it is. any input as to why I can’t see the images in seo tool?
thank you kindly.
May 12th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Dear Vincent,
Just wanted to express my gratitude for all the time you spend helping others. I was very frustrated that my iWeb site, http://www.mcwriting.com , which I think is full of helpful content, was almost absent from a Google search. I had used iWeb SEO but not to its fullest. Your info helped me to dig deeper and take advantage of Google Webmaster tools. Wish me luck.
One reminder to users of iWeb SEO: when you publish any changes from iWeb, you lose your SEO additions because the files are overwritten. Remember to re-run iWeb SEO after any changes to your original content.
June 27th, 2010 at 11:20 am
Hi,
I’ve reading this through and it seems like the redirect that iweb does is a problem for search engines, which would defeat the purpose of all the other iweb seo actions. There are several suggestions on how to deal with this problem but no definitive answers on how best to deal with the redirect. So which way actually works? Renaming the home page to ‘index’ within iweb? Renaming the resultant html files?
June 27th, 2010 at 11:53 am
The sweet and the short is to take the page that is redirected to, and name it index.html also move all the files that iweb puts into a folder, in the top level directory.. take any of the files that link to whatever you changed index.html from and rename the links so they are not broken. On top of that make sure your home page is optimized properly.
June 27th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Thanks for the advice Vincent. This seems like a lot of manual work every time you upload any changes to the website. Can you achieve the same result by calling your home page “index” within iweb or will that cause problems? iweb creates folders of files for each page, do you suggest moving the contents of all these folders or just the folder of the home page. also, could you point to any info on optimizing the home page.
June 27th, 2010 at 11:57 pm
Calling it index will not fix it, and you will need to run changes still using rage software’s SEO tool or do your own changes for that manually too. I suppose moving the files is less important, but making sure they all link up properly is of course very important. There is no easy path using iweb.
July 7th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Hi all
the answer to the redirect problem is simple, so I have found, and would like to share.
All you have to do is DUPLICATE or copy the page that the redirect command takes you to and save it as index.html.
Let me explain a bit further, I am not a Mac person, I am helping out a mate who is using Iweb to make his website, the domain name is with godady, the external hosting is with 3ix.
our home page is very simple and has one link to enter the site, most sites dont do this, and may be the key to why this works.
I got rid of the index.html file that Iweb makes. (that contains the redirect)
I opened the page that the redirect command takes you to (lets call it “home.htm) in a webpage editor,
and then saved it as index.html
Now the new index.html page is where you put all the titles, metatags and discriptions and google should now be happy with your index page
I have tested our site with 3 different browsers and all seems to function ok, did I explain this OK ?
July 8th, 2010 at 1:45 am
Makes sense :) Just means duplicated files, but in this instance, that’s the least of your worries :) simple fix for a horrid problem. Thanks for sharing Bruce!
July 15th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Hi Vincent,
Another web newbie here who knows very little about html. I’m working in iWeb and love it since I’m a print designer by trade. I’ve created our third site and this one needs to be “searchable”. I used the Rage iWeb SEO Tool but not sure I did so correctly. Also, my domain is forwarded/masked at GoDaddy. I would greatly appreciate any advice.
July 25th, 2010 at 3:17 am
My iWeb-made site is not showing up in Google. I attempted to edit meta tag and title tag (”description” & “keywords”) using iWeb seo tool. To date I get no response from Google even when I enter very specific search terms. please help me. thx
August 12th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
1. 3 months into my iweb created website, http://cogentadvocate.com, it shows up with a URL of http://cogentadvocate.com/COGENTAdvocate/ca (something like that), the point is that I want it to show up as cogentadvocate.com/ca (or home) instead of repeating itself. GoDaddy told me the problem is that iWeb is publishing a directory. He told me to find out how to publish directly to the root, without the director (I’m nearly blind/numb from a couple hours on the phone with him trying to help me, but he’s not a Mac man and I can’t find anything about “directory” on iweb.
2. to pass time while on hold, I clicked the tiny HTML link on the mostly blank GoDaddy Hosting Control Center: File Manager page, and a little window HTML Source Editor opened. Is this where I need to post some kind of tags?
3. when I purchased GoDaddy search engine visibility I thought GoDaddy was going to perform some actions to increase traffic to my site – duh! am I every learning a lot. I’ve never felt more dumb.
I am a visual artist, really intuitive, and do have iWeb SEO Tool, but by the time I get going on it I’m usually dizzy from everything that isn’t working. Thanks for anything!
August 19th, 2010 at 1:33 am
Leslie – To Answer your points:
(1) You need to publish the site to a folder,overwrite the contentsof the index.html file with that of the home.html file and then upload the contents of that folder via FTP.
(2) You could use the source editor to add tags, though using something like the SEO tool is supposed to make life easier.
(3) I know nothing about search engine visibility from GoDaddy, but apparently it ain’t worth diddly squat :(
(4) The construction of your site is already heading in the write dirction, you just need to jump these last few hurdles.
Best, Vincent -