Mac SEO Blog

This video is an update to an earlier video in which we show you the proper way of loading your site in iWeb SEO Tool. This video is specific to users who publish their sites to MobileMe. There is a recommended method for a MobileMe site and using iWeb SEO Tool and we encourage all MobileMe users to follow along.

Video Transcript:

It is very important to learn about the proper ways of loading your website into iWeb SEO Tool.

If you are watching this video, it means you publish your website to MobileMe. We have specific instructions on how to load your site in iWeb SEO Tool if you publish to MobileMe.

First, you must have iWeb open to the publish page. You can get to the publish page by clicking on the Site Name in the menu here on the left hand side. If you have multiple websites, each of your websites will have its own Site Name. So click on the Site Name to be taken to the publish page. Now, everyone who publishes to MobileMe, will publish their website to MobileMe right from within iWeb. This is the way you normally publish your site, so there is nothing different at this point. Every time you update your website in iWeb, you are going to publish it to MobileMe in iWeb.

Now that our sites have been published to MobileMe, let’s open up iWeb SEO Tool so we can load our site in it.

To load our sites, click on the Load iDisk Sites button. All of your websites will show up on the left hand side. Find the site that you want to optimize and click on the arrow to view the website files.

When you make your optimizations, clicking the Apply, or Apply To Entire Site button, depending on which tab you are on, will publish the changes to your site. This means you do not need to press this Publish button in the top right corner here. The changes will be published automatically when you click the Apply, or Apply To Entire Site buttons. Remember, do not go back into iWeb and publish your site from iWeb after do ing this. This will overwrite everything and you will be left without your optimizations.

The process should just be this

1) Create Site in iWeb
2) Publish site to MobileMe in iWeb
3) Load site in iWeb SEO Tool via Load iDisk Sites button
4) Make optimizations and click Apply or Apply To Entire Site buttons

Now one note I want to make here, is that if you do publish to MobileMe and load your website into iWeb SEO Tool this way, you will not be able to add a favicon to your site.

Lastly, as everyone should be aware by now, MobileMe is being discontinued. This means you will need to find another hosting company. I encourage everyone to sign up to our hosting. We will make sure we do what we can to make your transition easy. You can also take comfort in knowing that we are the only hosting company who can provide support for iWeb users.

You can visit us at ragesw.com/hosting.php or by clicking on Hosting in our navigation menu.

This video is an update to an older video that showed you how to load your site into iWeb SEO Tool. This video should only be watched by users who publish their iWeb sites to FTP and NOT to MobileMe.

Video Transcript:

It is very important to learn about the proper ways of loading your website into iWeb SEO Tool.

If you are watching this video, it means you publish your website to an FTP account. I am going to show you the proper way to load your website in iWeb SEO Tool. We also have another video that demonstrates the proper way to publish your site to FTP. I encourage everyone to take a look at that. You can find these videos on the iWeb SEO Tool page by clicking on the Video Tutorials Tab.

So to load your site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must first publish your site to a local folder. To do so, go to your site’s publish page. You can get to the publish page by clicking on the Site Name in the menu here on the left hand side. If you have multiple websites, each of your websites will have its own Site Name. So click on the Site Name to be taken to the publish page.

Make sure that Publish to Local Folder is selected from the drop down menu. Select a location on your hard drive to publish the folder to. Take note of this location as you will need to know it when loading your folder in iWeb SEO Tool. Also note that I said hard drive and not network drive. It is important that you publish the folder to your hard drive otherwise you will have trouble publishing the site.

Next, click on File in the menu bar, and select Publish Entire Site. This ensures that all of your website files will be publish to your folder.

Now it’s time to load the folder into iWeb SEO Tool. Simply click on the Open Website button and locate the folder that you just published to your hard drive. Select the folder and press the Choose button. Your website is now loaded in iWeb SEO Tool.

Some of you are going to try to load a file with a .html extension for example, or a file that has a .sites extension. You will notice that these files are greyed out and you cannot select them. That is because you must load your website folder into iWeb SEO Tool and not any other file.

There are two different ways to load your website in iWeb SEO Tool. If you publish your site to MobileMe, we recommend first publishing the site to MobileMe in iWeb, and then opening it up in iWeb SEO Tool via the Load iDisk Sites button. If you publish your site to FTP, you will need to publish the site to a local folder in iWeb, and then open it up in iWeb SEO Tool using the Open Website button. Both of these processes are demonstrated in the following video tutorials. Remember to view our iWeb SEO Video Course to learn how to optimize your website for search engines.

Video Transcript

To open up your website in iWeb SEO Tool, open up the Publish page in iWeb by selecting the Site Title on the left hand side of the application. In case you are unclear about what the Site Title is, this here is the site title called Jeremy’s Golf Shop. Everything underneath it are just the individual pages that are associated with this one web site.

If you publish your site to MobileMe, select MobileMe from the Publish To: dropdown menu. Make sure you fill in your information, just as you normally would, and then publish your site.

If you publish your site to FTP, you will need to select Local folder from the drop down menu. Go down to the Folder Location option, and press the Choose button. Select a location on your hard drive where you want to save your site. I have a folder on my Desktop called My Website. This is where I am going to save this site to.

Once our sites have been published, either to MobileMe, or to a local folder on our hard drives, we’re going to open up iWeb SEO Tool, and load our sites.

If you publish to MobileMe, all you need to do is press the Load iDisk Sites button, and select the your site.

If you publish to FTP and you just published your site to a local folder in iWeb, you are going to press the Open Website button. Next, you will find your website folder, highlight it, and press choose.

Your site will now be open in iWeb SEO Tool, and you will be able to make your optimizations.

There is one very important tip that I want to share with everyone. Anytime you go back into iWeb and make updates to your website, you will need to follow this process again. Once you have your site loaded in iWeb SEO Tool, you will need to press this Re-Apply Saved Tags button.

The reason we do this is because the updates we make to our site in iWeb will overwrite the optimizations made here in iWeb SEO Tool. All this means is that to get the optimizations back, we must just follow this simple process again, and then press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button.

In our effort to make things as easy as possible for our software users, we have created this quick tutorial that will demonstrate how a user should properly publish their iWeb website to FTP using iWeb SEO Tool. The tutorial will identify common mistakes users make, and how to determine if your FTP login information has been entered correctly. To learn how to make your iWeb site rank higher in search engines, be sure to check out the iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video.

Video Transcript

There were many people asking me publishing related questions with iWeb SEO Tool. This tutorial is going to strictly cover publishing a website to FTP using iWeb SEO Tool. We will cover all of the main points involved with publishing, and then we will discuss the biggest issue users have when publishing their website. That issue is the directory path.

The first thing you will need to do is press the publish button, and then make sure Publish to FTP is selected and then press the next button.

In the FTP field, here is where you will put your server address. Sometimes the server address may look like the one I have here (an IP address,) but more often than not, it will just be your domain. So if my domain were publishingtoiweb.com then that is what I would put in this field.

Do not include http, www, or ftp in this field. Just put your domain.com or .net or whatever the extension may be.

Your username and password must be accurate otherwise logging in will not work, and you will not be able to publish.

To check to see if you have all of your FTP login details entered in correctly, press the Browse button. If you are able to see files and folders like we see here, then you have logged in correctly. If you get an error similar to this, then your FTP information is incorrect. You must get the correct FTP information before proceeding to the next step.

I’m now going to discuss the Directory Path field. This is the area where most users experience the most difficulty. Chances are, if you are watching this video, you need to enter something in this field.

We are going to focus on one method for finding out what the directory path should be. I think this will be the easiest way for you to do it, and it will work out well for most people.

If you use RAGE hosting, you should type in /public_html. For everyone else, please refer to the following method;

What you want to do is open up iWeb, and go to the publish page of the website you want to publish in iWeb SEO Tool. The first thing I want you to do is have a look at the current FTP information you already have. In the directory/path field, there may or may not be some text. If there is some text, I want you to copy it. If there is no text in there, don’t worry, just bear with me for a moment.

Go back to iWeb SEO Tool, and in the directory path field, paste the text you just copied. Make sure there is a forward slash at the beginning of this text.

Your site should publish properly now.

I want to make a note that this method should work for 95-99% of users. Since there are so many variations when it comes to publishing, some users may not achieve success using this method. If you are in that 5%, submit a support ticket at ragesw..com/support and we will be happy to assist you.

Reports of a new version of iLife have been circulating for a few months now. It was first speculated that iLife ’11 would be released in August, then September and now November with a book listing on Amazon.com according to 9to5mac.com.

Whether or not iLife ’11 gets released next month with a new version of iWeb is yet to be known. What we do know is that all of our software will be 100% compatible with the new version of iWeb. The only product that may need an update is our free iWeb SEO Tool, but it is very unlikely that the new version of iWeb will cause conflicts with it. All of our other software will be fully functional in their current versions when iWeb ’11 is eventually released.

Our speculation for what will come with iWeb ’11 is new templates, twitter integration, updated blogging features and possibly some creative HTML 5 only features. 64-bit versions of all applications is also very likely. An iOS version is also very possible.

Have you ever wanted to use your iWeb site to sell products or services? Maybe you want to start your own business and don’t know how to get started selling products online.

It’s actually very easy to set up an e-commerce store with iWeb and Paypal. The benefit of using Paypal is that you don’t need to worry about having a secure server, setting up a merchant account, fraud, chargebacks and everything else that comes along with accepting payments online.

Even if your customers don’t have paypal accounts, although many do, they can still use their credit cards to make a purchase online. You are notified instantly once the payment is added to your account.

We have posted a step by step video explaining how to add Paypal to your iWeb site so you can start selling online.

Building Trust Online

There are still many people who are nervous to purchase something online. Another benefit of using Paypal is people know they can trust them. But how can you let them know that they can trust you? Here are some tips for building trust online;

• Have a real domain name and avoid using your web.mac.com name if you are using MobileMe. Domain names are cheap, they only cost a few dollars a year, and they show you are serious about your online business. You can get a business domain name here.
• If you are using MobileMe to host your website, be aware that it is not meant for business websites, just personal sites. Consider a real web host for faster servers, the ability to handle an increasing number of visitors and more options with what you can do with your website (see for example our URL shortening video for iWeb sites.
• Include a privacy policy so your customers know what information you collect from them and how you use their information.
• Include your address and an easy way for customers to contact you.
• If possible, provide some kind of money back guarantee. If your products are good, you shouldn’t expect many people to want a refund.
• Remember that search engines are always the best way to at attract new and targeted customers to your website. Check out our step by step SEO for iWeb instructional course which provides a complete walkthrough on how to optimize your website.

We just published an update to iWeb SEO Tool. It fixes a problem with case sensitive volumes. If you were getting an error when launching prior versions of iWeb SEO Tool, please download this update. It also fixes some other minor bugs and improves MobileMe publishing.

Download iWeb SEO Tool 1.9.1 here

When Apple created iWeb they intended it to be used for personal websites. The idea that you can create something on your Mac and make it look exactly the same online, on all different browsers and operating systems was not the goal. The goal was to be able to easily create a website to share with friends and family.

Of course, you are using iWeb beyond what it is intended for, and by doing that you need to be aware of a very important fact about the web.

Since you never know who will be visiting your website, you can’t predict what web browser they are using, what operating system they have or, most importantly what fonts your visitor has installed. This means you can never be sure how your website may look to any of your visitors.

That is why a set of standards was developed to help ensure websites looked relatively the same, no matter what the visitor’s system configuration is. One of these standards is which fonts to use on your site that will always be available and show correctly for all users. iWeb turns non-standard fonts into images which can hurt your search engine rankings since search engines cannot “read” images. And since text content is so important for your search engine rankings, this is definitely not a good thing.

This quick video tutorial explains how to avoid this common problem;

Remember, the web is not print! You want to make your website accessible to the most amount of people while still making it look appealing. Good luck!

Are you ready for better search engine rankings? We have a full, step by step training course for iWeb users and how to properly optimize an iWeb site for search engines>. (If you aren’t ready for better rankings, don’t click that link )

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. It will look something like this;

http://www.mydomain.com/long-site-name/page-name.html

What we will show you in this tutorial is how to shorten the URL so it only looks like this;

http://www.mydomain.com/page-name.html

The steps to do this are actually quite simple and if you are already using iWeb SEO Tool there really isn’t much more to it. It does require that you have a real web host with an FTP server, but if you are serious at all about your website, you should have one already.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them below. This video has also been added to the iWeb SEO Video Walkthrough Tutorial

iWeb SEO Tool the free search engine optimization tool for iWeb based sites, has been updated to version 1.9 and adds the two most request features.

It will now work properly with iWeb blogs that use commenting and with iDisk Syncing enabled. Loading a website from your iDisk will also work much faster than before.

This update is of course free and can be download from the iWeb SEO Tool download page.