When iWeb users create and publish their site, there are so many SEO elements that have been ignored, making it almost impossible for anyone to find their site via search engines. This is not the iWeb users fault. Out of the box, yes iWeb is not very helpful for SEO. This is because things such as title tags, header tags, alternative text, and even basic content on a page is not a dominant on an iWeb site as opposed to a site made in a regular HTML editor.

But the problem is easy to fix! But just like you had to learn how to use iWeb, you are going to need to learn a few things about SEO.

First off, let me quickly explain what SEO is for those of you who might not be entirely sure. SEO is basically a process we do, and continue to perform, in order to get our sites ranking higher in search engines. Google has over 2 billion searches performed each day. We all want a piece of that pie.

Continuing with the explanation of what SEO is leads me to explaining the different types of optimizations that people can make to their site. The first optimization is the on-page optimizations. This consists of things we CAN control on our own. These are the actual changes we make to our sites so that our keywords can be better read by search engines, and even our website visitors. The second optimization is off-page optimizations. This consists of the promotion we do for our site in order to attract visitors, and gain reputation for our website. The better our site’s reputations, the higher we’ll be placed in search engines.

Now let’s head back to you guys. How can you accomplish this for your iWeb sites. Well, the first thing you need to address is your on-page optimizations. iWeb makes it a bit tricky to optimize a few things, such as title tags, alternative text, and meta information such as keywords, and description (note: meta keywords and description don’t influence our rankings, but are still very important for other reasons.)

Luckily for iWeb users, as most my website visitors already know, you can easily add those optimizations mentioned above via a free third-party tool called iWeb SEO Tool by RAGE Software.  This tool will help you easily implement your title tags, meta tags, alt text, and analytics codes. Be sure to watch my tutorial on how to use iWeb SEO Tool.

There are a few more things you can do to your site in order to make it more search engine friendly. Both on-page and off-page, there are so many things to learn about that can help your rankings. A search on Google will help you find what you are looking for, or if you are the type that prefers to have direct instructions in front of you, then I would suggest watching RAGE’s SEO Video which will show you a couple dozen things you can do to your iWeb sites, on-page and off-page to better help your SEO efforts.

So to sum up, iWeb is not bad for SEO – it’s just a bit trickier. Don’t be discouraged by people who tell you not to bother with iWeb because no one will be able to find your site. All you need is knowledge on the matter and you will see that in no time, your site will start soaring above others.

This tutorial will show you how to properly publish your iWeb site, so that you can avoid having your website URL be longer than necessary.

If you use iWeb, you already know that when you type in your website’s URL, once you are taken to your page, the URL in the address bar will forward to your domain name, followed by the site name that you gave in iWeb while publishing, followed by your page’s file name.  This URL you see here is just an example of what this might look like.

What we are going to be doing in this video, is reduce the length of the URL by getting rid of the site name so that the URL goes from looking like this, to looking like this. I will not be teaching you how to have the domain read just www.yourdomain.com. The reason for this is because the easiest way of actually doing this to an iWeb site would be to turn on what is called domain masking.

I will quickly tell you what domain masking is, and why you don’t want to use it for your website. Domain Masking is basically hiding the name of your site and replacing it with something else. As an example, notice how when I click to various pages on this site, the URL in the address bar stays the same. The reason why domain masking is not recommended, is because it makes other pages on your website unrecognizable by search engines and it makes it impossible for your users to bookmark an individual page on your site.

Now that we have a good understanding of the URL structure with iWeb sites, let’s get right into reducing the length of our URL’s. The first thing I want you to know is that you will be required to have a third-party FTP tool to publish your site. This means that we will no longer be publishing our websites directly from iWeb.

I recommend using Cyberduck or iWeb SEO Tool which are both available for free. Cyberduck is a basic FTP client which allows you to transfer files from your local hard drive to your web-space and vice cersa. iWeb SEO Tool is a great application for iWeb users to optimize their sites for search engines, AND it also includes a built in FTP client.  I’m going to be using iWeb SEO Tool in this demonstration, because I want to show how this method of reducing the length of our URL’s applies to people who use iWeb SEO Tool as well.

So the first thing we are going to do, is publish our website to a local folder in iWeb. It will be easiest for you if you create a new folder and publish your site to this new folder. You will need to remember where you created this new folder on your hard drive. I am going to call my new folder My iWeb SIte. While the site is publishing, I want you to take note of my Site Name, Photos By Matt which can be seen here…and here. Keep this in mind for later in the tutorial.

When our sites have finished publishing, go ahead and open the folder where you just published your site to. You should notice that there are three things inside this folder. There is an index.html file, a file with a long name that has the word ‘assets’ at the front, and finally a folder with your Site Name on it. Inside this folder, is where all of our website files are. The reason we get long URL’s is because we publish all three of these files.

Here is how we will fix this. In iWeb SEO Tool, when I press the Open Website button, I will first locate the folder that I just created. Many people will select this folder and choose to load the entire folder. This is how we end up with those long URLs. Instead, I will select this folder, and then locate the folder inside of it that contains the Site Name for my website, which is Photos By Matt which, we took note of earlier.

When we publish this to our FTP account, our site will now not have the site name in the URL.

If you wanted to publish to an FTP client such as Cyberduck,  make sure that you do not just upload the folder with your Site Name on it, but that you select all of the contents of the folder and upload them directly to your FTP.

Don’t forget to check out the iWeb SEO video walkthrough tutorial to learn how to get your site ranked higher in search engines.

This video is for those of you who publish your iWeb site using MobileMe, have a blog on your site, and want to optimize your site using iWeb SEO Tool. I will repeat that once more… if you publish your iWeb site to MobileMe, have a blog, and wish to use iWeb SEO Tool,  you must follow these simples instructions so that the commenting feature on your blog does not become disabled.

The first thing you must remember to do, is publish your site to your iDisk directly from iWeb.

Once your site is published, you are ready to begin your optimization using iWeb SEO Tool.

Make sure you load your site using the Load iDisk Sites button.

The preferences in iWeb SEO Tool are set to not allow a page file that contains the word ‘blog’ to be optimized. The reason for this is that if a file of this kind is optimized, it will compromise the file and cause the blog commenting feature to not function. In some cases, the blog files may not contain the word ‘blog’ in them. This would be due to the user naming these files something different. If that is the case, you can change the preferences so that the tool does not optimize the files for your blog. So let’s say for example that you change the name of this file here from Blog to Journal. When optimizing your site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must change the preferences so that the tool is set to not optimize files that contain the word Journal.

Once you have optimized all of your pages, you do not need to publish your site to your MobileMe account within the tool. Since you are logged in, and have loaded your site directly from your iDisk, the changes you make in iWeb SEO Tool will be reflected immediately after you press the apply button.

In this video, I’m going to give an important tip to iWeb users who use RAGE Software’s iWeb SEO tool. If you are unfamiliar with the tool, there is also a video available explaining what it does and how to use it.

After using iWeb SEO Tool and Publishing your changes for the first time, you are not completely done with the tool, unless you never update your site.

If you do, however, update your site, as many users do on a frequent basis, it is important to know that the changes you made to your Title Tags, meta tags and alternative text, will be overwritten when you update your site, and republish it in iWeb.  Here, I will show you how to fix this problem.

So let’s say for example, I have already updated my site and saved it. I will now  publish these saved changes to a folder.

Now I can open up iWeb SEO Tool, and load my published site which is also saved on my hard drive.

The title tags that you currently see, are the title tags that I put in previously, the last time I used iWeb SEO Tool. The tool actually remembers what I had type in, even though iWeb has written over the files when I made my update to my website.

The important thing that I must do, is press on the Re-Apply Saved Tags button. What this does, is it now saves all of these tags to the newly updated site. If I forgot to press this button, and then tried publishing from this tool, the my title tags and everything else would not be the custom tags that I initially put into iWeb SEO Tool, but they would be the default tags that iWeb had created for me when I created the site.

Since I did press the Re-Apply saved tags button, I can now publish my site, and my custom tags will appear as they were before.

iWeb SEO Tool is the only tool available that actually saves our old meta data so it really comes in handy when we make updates to our sites.

Learn how to make your iWeb site rank higher in search engines with the iWeb SEO video tutorial.

In this video I’m going to show you how to add a statcounter.com code, as well as a Google Analytics code to your iWeb site using RAGE Software’s iWeb SEO tool, which is a free tool available at ragesw.com

The first thing I’m going to do is load up my website. You can either open your website that you have published to a folder, or load your idisk sites.

Now that I have my site loaded, I’m going press the Site Settings tab. The field box that says Analytics code is where I want to put my codes from the third-party sites. The first thing I want to show you is how to add the statcounter.com code. In my browser, my code is already there for me to copy. Going back to iWeb SEO Tool, I select one of the HTML files and simply paste the code into the Analytics code field box. Click on the Apply to Entire Site button, and now the statcounter tracking code is placed on all of my pages within the site.

The same method applies to the Google Analytics code. In my browser, the code is already ready for me to copy. Back in iWeb SEO Tool, once again, I simply paste the copied code and click on the Apply to Entire Site Button.

And thats how easy it is to add statcounter.com or Google analytics using this tool.

Now, I just want to quickly show you how to use the remainder of this tool. The other options we have to use are Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Images. The Custom Meta Tags are for more advanced users so don’t worry about them right now.

If I want to change one of my title tags, I click on the Title Tag tab, and then click on the page that I want to change.  Then I type in my new title tag, and then hit the apply button. Repeat this process for all of the titles that you want to change.

Same thing goes for the meta tags. Click on the Meta Tags tab, type in your website description, and then type in the keywords that are relevant to your site, and hit the apply button.  If you are unsure what keywords to use, you can use another free product by RAGE Software called SEKeyword, or you can use an online keyword checker such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

For your images, click on the Images tab, and then double click on the Alternative text that you want to change. Type in your new alternative text. Repeat the process for as many images as you want. Then hit the apply button. Remember to be descriptive with your alternative text. Avoid using image titles such as picture 21, or img03.

Once you are done, you can publish your website directly from this tool.

More videos explaining some of the items mentioned in this video can be viewed at www.apptorial.com

This video shows you a very quick and simple way to password protect your entire iWeb web site.

This video shows you how to wrap text around an image using iWeb. It goes over a very common mistake that people make which does not allow them to check the box “object causes wrap.” It then shows the proper way of inserting your image so that you can click on the object causes wrap checkbox and successfully wrap text around an image.

In this video, I show you each step needed to place a youtube video on your iWeb web site. The process is very simple, but can seem advanced for a new user.

This video shows how to link an image in iWeb. The first thing you do, is click on the image that you want to link. Then click on the inspector button, and then find the tab that has a blue circle with an arrow in it. In iWeb ’08, it is the second last tab. Then, make sure you are on the Hyperlink tab, and that the “Enable as hyperlink” checkbox is checked.

Next, if you want to link your image externally, make sure that you tell iWeb to link to an external page. Then type in the URL you wish to link to. If you want to link to another page within your website, you can also let iWeb know by linking to an internal page.