Mac SEO Blog

One of our most popular video tutorials is shortening your iWeb URL. In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to shorten your iWeb URL, but also learn how to get rid of the home page site redirect. For an illustration of this, watch the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to never miss out on an important video.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how you can make your iWeb URL not forward to the site name and first page name.

To illustrate what I mean, here is what a typical iWeb URL looks like after typing in the domain name. Notice how ragesw.net turns into ragesw.net/jeremys_golf_shop/clubs.html

Where do each of these part of this URL come from? This part of the URL, the domain name, is the obvious one, as this is what the user selects and purchases when registering a domain. This second part is the Site Name, and it comes from this section of the iWeb publish page. You will also notice it right above the pages in the column on the left. This part of the domain, is the page name. It comes from the name you give to your page in the menu on the left hand side.

So to just give you a bit of background on the way all of this works, whenever you publish an iWeb site, you will see three things right away. The assets file, the site folder, which will have your site name and contain all of your website’s files, and an index.html file. When these items get published to your server, and you subsequently type in your domain name in your web browser, your server will default to the index.html file, which then has a line of code instructing the browser to forward to the first page of your website. That first page of your website is located within the other folder which is labeled with your site name.

Now that we know how all of it works, let’s change it so that our URLs are shorter, and the browser doesn’t forward when we type our domain name into a web browser. In other words, we’re going to change it so that when you type in your domain name in your web browser, all you will see is the domain. Then, when you click to go to a subsequent page on the site, you will only see the domain and the page name. This is the normal way the most websites operate.

I want to quickly mention that doing this will change the structure of your URL, so if your site ranks in search engines and is giving you traffic, then changing this might hurt those rankings.

The first thing we’re going to do is change the name of the first page of our website to index. Make sure you type it in just like I have done. You will notice how I used only lower case letters, and there are no extra characters or spaces. This is an extremely important step, so make sure you have followed the instructions as I just outlined.

There is one other drawback to this. When we change the page name to index, it will show up in our navigation menus. If you’ve watch some of our other tutorials, you will remember how I recommend users to disable the navigation menu that iWeb makes, and create your own. Once again, I will recommend doing this, but if you don’t want to, just make sure you at least take this main page out of the navigation menu by clicking on the Inspector button, clicking on the Page tab, and then un-tick the Include Page In Navigation Menu option. If you want your home page to still have a link in your menu bar, you can add it via a text link, or via an image linked to the homepage. This part is entirely up to you, but I recommend removing the word index from your navigation menu as it might confuse many of your visitors.

Our next step is to publish the site to a local folder on our hard drive. To make things as easy as possible, let’s publish the site directly to our desktops. When I say directly to the desktop, I don’t mean in a folder on the desktop, but rather directly on the desktop.

When we do this, we’re going to see those three items that I mentioned earlier; the assets file, the site folder, and the index.html file.

All we are going to do, is publish just the contents of the site folder. You can do this by dragging and dropping all of these files into your favourite FTP client.

I will show you how to do this using iWeb SEO Tool since I know a lot of users’ next step would be to load their site in iWeb SEO Tool.

So all I will do is drag and drop this folder onto iWeb SEO Tool’s local sites column. Now you can optimize your site for search engines, or press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button to get your old tags back, and publish your website.

When you are done, type your domain name into your web browser, and you will notice that the URL does not change. It will only change when you click on a link to be taken to a different page on your site.

If you are having problems making this work correctly, the first thing I want you to do is make sure that you have correctly typed in the first page of your site as index. If that was not done correctly then this will not work. Also, unless you publish the site folder contents correctly, this method will not work.

Before assuming that you did it incorrectly, try restarting your computer, and checking again. You can also check the website on your phone to see if it works there. Sometimes it can take several minutes to several hours for some users to see the changes. If you are still having trouble, please send us an email.

For more iWeb tips and tricks, please subscribe.

For those users who are still only now discovering iWeb, below is a quick video introduction to how you can easily build your own website. iWeb is a feature rich desktop application that lets users build a website by just dragging and dropping items on a canvas. If you have any questions about iWeb, be sure to leave a comment below.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can easily build your own website using an application called iWeb.

iWeb comes with 28 built-in templates, each consisting of 8 pages.

Let’s click on the first template, which is called White, and select the first page which is the Welcome page.

As you can see the page shows up on the left hand side. This page’s name is Welcome. Right above welcome, you will see another name, usually Site. This is the entire website’s name. So just to recap, you have the site name here, and the page name here. As we add more pages to the site, more page names will appear in this list. These page names can be changed to be whatever you want them to be.

Now if we take a look at the middle section where we will edit our sites, you will see that the template is pretty plain and standard. This is just meant to give the user an idea of what they can do with their sites. So let’s say you wanted to change the heading that reads Welcome to My Site, you can just double click on the text, and delete what is currently there, and type in whatever you want. You can also drag this heading around to wherever you want it to be placed on the site.

Let’s take a quick look at this image we have here. You can add or remove images from your site as you want. You can also resize the image to be whatever size you want. And of course you can drag the image around and move it wherever you want it to be.

If you ever want to add new text to your site, just click on the Text Box button, and begin typing.

You can also add shapes to your site, and change their sizes and colours as you please.

Adding a new page is as easy as clicking the Add Page button, selecting the page you want, and clicking on the Choose button. As mentioned earlier, the new page shows up in the column on the left.

These are the basic items you need to know in order to easily create a simple website. As you get more and more comfortable using iWeb, you will be able to create much more advanced and professional looking websites.

If you take a look at the icons on the right hand side, these will allow you to add items to your website such as a YouTube video, or almost any type of item that requires some sort of code or script.

To see more helpful videos about iWeb, be sure to subscribe. If you have any iWeb related question, feel free to interact with us and let us know.

If you want to speed up your publish time when uploading through iWeb SEO Tool, you can publish only your modified files in iWeb. The tutorial below will illustrate exactly what you need to do;

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

If you use iWeb 09, here is how you can publish only your modified files using iWeb SEO Tool.

First, when you make a change to one of your pages in iWeb, you will notice how the page icon turns from blue to red. Red indicates that a change has been made and that this page and all of its files must be republished. When you are finished making changes, make sure that you are publishing to a local folder on your hard drive, and then click on this Publish Site button in the lower left corner of the application. This will only publish the pages and files associated with those red icons.

Next, load the site in iWeb SEO Tool. Click on the Re-Apply Saved tags button. Make any changes you want if any, and then click on the Publish button. On this publish window, ensure that the option for Publish Entire Site is not checked. You can now upload only your changes. This will be the fastest way to publish your site through iWeb SEO Tool. If you were to publish your entire site each time, if would take longer to complete.

Remember, only use this method when you have made changes to your site. If this is your first time publishing with iWeb SEO Tool, you will want to make sure that the entire site is being published. After that initial publish, you can begin using this method.

More and more users accessing the internet via their mobile devices. As a result it is important for the user experience that the webpages they browse look good on their hand-held devices. The video tutorial below will show you how you can create a mobile friendly version of your iWeb website. Users visiting your website on an iPhone or Android device will automatically be redirected to the mobile version of your website. Be sure to use the sample code for setting up the redirect:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can create a mobile version of your iWeb website, so that users visiting your site on an iPhone or Android will be directed to your mobile friendly website.

In order to follow this tutorial completely, you must have a RAGE Web Hosting account. You can sign up for a hosting account ragesw.com/hosting

You will also need iWeb SEO Tool, or SEIntelligence, which are two applications offered by RAGE Software that allow you to add search engine optimization features to your website.

Our first step in the process will be to setup the address for the mobile site. If you have paid attention in the past to the addresses of websites you have visited on your phone, you may have noticed that typing in facebook.com for example, will turn into m.facebook.com – In this case, M represents mobile.

Now we must set it up so that your address will turn into something similar. The first thing you need to do is login to cPanel. Your cPanel login information was sent to you in your RAGE Web Hosting: New Account Information email. When you are logged in click on the icon that reads Subdomains.

In the Subdomain text field, type in mobile just like you see here. You will notice that your mobile URL will now be the combination of this subdomain plus your domain. So in my case, it will be mobile.ragesw.net. Just a quick note, if you have multiple domains on your account, you can click this drop down menu to select the domain you want to use for the mobile site. You will notice that the Document Root field will automatically be filled with www/mobile. Take note of that because we will be using it later on in the video.

The next thing we are going to do is prepare our mobile sites in iWeb. What we will do is create a new site by going to File and selecting New Site. Since we want our mobile site to be mobile friendly, our best option is to choose the blank page. Now, I’m just going to get rid of this text box, and then disable the navigation menu. This is done by clicking on Inspector, and clicking on the Page tab, and unchecking the options to Include this page in the navigation menu, and DIsplay navigation menu. The reason we do this is because since we want to ensure mobile friendliness, we basically want a blank page and none of the page defaults from iWeb.

With the inspector window still opened to the Page tab, click on the Layout button, and change content width to 300 pixels. This is going to create a mobile size canvas for us to create our mobile sites on. Repeat this for all of the mobile pages you are going to make.

Now you can design a more mobile friendly version of your website. This can include images that are smaller in file size, and larger more compact text. It might be a good idea to visit some mobile friendly websites on your phone so you can get a better idea of how to design your mobile site. One tip is to always include a link to view your full site. A way to do this is to just create a text box that says View Full Site, highlight the text, open the Inspector window, go to the hyperlink tab, click to enable as hyperlink, and type in the non-mobile link for this respective page.

When you are done creating your Mobile friendly site, you will need to publish it. The important thing here is to publish the mobile site to that new subdomain that we just created.

So if you are using iWeb 09, you will go to the publish page by clicking on the site name, and select Publish to FTP server from the drop down menu. Customize the site name and contact email to your liking.

Input your server address, username, and password. In the Directory/Path field, type in the location of your subdomain, which if you remember from earlier, was www/mobile.

In the website URL field, make sure you type in your URL as http://mobile.yourdomain.com. In my case, I will type it in as http://mobile.ragesw.net

When you are all ready, click the Publish Site button to publish the site.

If you are using an older version of iWeb, publish this new mobile site like you would publish your regular site. The most important thing to remember is that you need to publish the site by putting www/mobile in the Directory Path field. If you forget to do this, it will not work, and you risk overwriting your original website, so do not forget about this step.

When the site has been published, you can visit it on your phone by going to mobile.yourdomain.com to make sure everything looks the way you want it to. If not, go back to iWeb and make your changes and then publish the site once again.

Once you are satisfied with the mobile version of your site, there is one last thing that needs to be done in order to make the phone know to send the user to the mobile version of your site.

Go to ragesw.com/blog. In the search field, type in web hosting tutorials, and select the result that reads RAGE Web Hosting Video Tutorials. The direct link to that page is this. On this page, locate and click on the link that reads Setting Up A Mobile Friendly iWeb Site.

On this page, you will see this link that reads “Be sure to use the sample code for setting up the redirect” Click on this link and copy the code that will appear on the page that follows.

Now, before we paste this code somewhere, I want you to first publish your main website from iWeb to a local folder on your hard drive. Then load that local folder into iWeb SEO Tool, or SEIntelligence, whichever program you use. In this example, I am using iWeb SEO Tool, but the same principle applies to SEIntelligence.

With your website loaded in the tool, paste the code that we just copied in the head code section of the Site Settings tab. Replace the URL which reads mobile.ragesw.net to your mobile URL. If you are using SEIntelligence, open the Site Settings tab, and paste the code in the Header Code/Google Analytics box. Also replace the mobile.ragesw.net URL with your mobile URL.

If you have another code in this box, such as Google Analytics, just paste this code above it. Then click on the Apply To Entire Site button.

Those of you who have a Google Map on your website might have noticed that after MobileMe was discontinued, your map no longer worked. The video below will show you what to do if you are one of the many users in this situation.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Now that MobileMe has been discontinued, you might have noticed that the Google Maps widget that is included in iWeb will no longer display correctly. Instead, you might see just a piece of that MobileMe is closed sign.

To correct this problem, first what you’ll need to do is remove the Google Maps widget from your iWeb site. You can do this by simply clicking on the widget and hitting the delete key on your keyboard.

Next, go to maps.google.com, and in the search bar, type in the address for your business and hit return to perform the search. Next, click on the icon with the chain link and copy the code under Paste HTML to embed in website.

Now, back in iWeb, drag an HTML snippet onto your page, and paste the code. Your map should appear. If you want the map on multiple pages on your site, click the respective page, drag and drop the HTML Snippet, and once again paste the code.

As MobileMe is being discontinued in less than 2 weeks, many users are discovering that publishing their website to an FTP server sometimes produces cryptic errors that prevent your website from being published.

This is actually a bug in iWeb, and in most FTP publishing tools. Fortunately we have fixed this publishing bug and included it in our newest release of iWeb SEO Tool.

Now you can make sure your website lives on once MobileMe goes away on June 30th.

Plus, iWeb SEO Tool is free for users who have signed up to our iWeb Web Hosting for a year or more. Make sure your iWeb sites work perfectly with our iWeb Web Hosting and iWeb SEO Tool.

As users continue to migrate from MobileMe to iCloud, there is still the question of what services will be lost.

As we can see from this image which comes from Apple’s MobileMe transition page, the three items that are not available in iCloud are iWeb publishing, Galleries, and iDisk.

By utilizing RAGE Web Hosting, you can actually continue with these three features. Let’s discuss each of these features, and how you can continue to utilize them.

 iWeb Publishing

A common mistake made by many iWeb users is thinking that because MobileMe is being discontinued, it means they can no longer use iWeb. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You will still be able to use iWeb to build your website for the foreseeable future. As a matter of fact, it is recommended that you continue to do so. There is no reason right now for there to be any panic about not being able to use iWeb.

So what do you need to do in order to continue using iWeb? Well, since MobileMe took care of your publishing before, all you need to do now is find a new place to publish your website to. What this entails is signing up for hosting with a web host such as RAGE Web Hosting.

After you have signed up for your account, all you need to do is copy and paste your FTP login details. So instead of publishing to MobileMe from iWeb, you will simply publish to FTP instead, and the information you will use to publish to FTP will be given to you in an email that you will be able to just copy and paste. This only needs to be done once. After the first time, you will be able to click the Publish button like you normally would when updating your site on a frequent basis.

Galleries

MobileMe users who use the gallery feature can still have galleries by following these steps:

First, use iPhoto to create a photo album. When the album is complete,  it will show up in the media section of iWeb. Then create an albums page, and simply drag and drop the photo album from the media section over to the albums page in iWeb.

 iDisk

When you sign up for web hosting, you are also given web space to store files of your choice. In order to do this, you can use a free FTP client such as CyberDuck which will allow you to easily drag and drop items from your hard drive onto your server in the cloud.

Another important thing to note is that MobileMe users who were using the password protection feature for their site’s will no longer have this option once MobileMe is discontinued. As a RAGE Web Hosting user, you will be able to password protect your iWeb website by following the easy steps in this tutorial.

To summarize, iWeb users can continue using iWeb as they did in the past. Sign up for RAGE Web Hosting today and let us help you with the transfer from MobileMe to our hosting.

After switching from MobileMe to a real web hosting service many users are finding that their web.me.com website is still appearing in Google, and often higher than their new website.

This happens because your web.me.com website has been around longer and your new website has the exact same content. Google is not likely to show two websites with the exact same content so you need to make sure you do this as quickly as possible once you move to a real web hosting service.

1) The first thing you are going to want to do is create an XML Sitemap for your new website. You can do this very easily with Sitemap Automator. Follow the instructions for publishing and verifying your website with Google Webmaster Tools (Hint: We have video tutorials on the above page that explains how to do this step by step.)

2) Delete the content from your web.me.com website. You can do this by mounting your iDisk in the Finder (or longing in to your iDisk at http://www.me.com) and going to the Web/Sites/ directory. Delete the contents in this directory.

2a) Advanced: Instead of deleting your content in step 2, you can also use a meta refresh with a refresh rate of 0 to redirect traffic from your web.me.com website to your new website. If you have set up your new website with our Web Hosting services we can help you with this. Otherwise you will need to contact your web hosting company.

3) The changes will not be reflected immediately. If you did step 2 above and you do a search for your website the web.me.com address will still appear in search results for about a week but will go to a non-existing page. If you did step 2a above your web.me.com page will still appear in search engines but will redirect to your new website. Eventually your new site will start to rank higher than your web.me.com page and your web.me.com page will be removed from Google’s search results.

4) Bonus: If you want to completely remove your web.me.com website from Google and other search engines as quickly as possible you need to create a robots.txt files that disallows search engines from indexing your website. To do this create a plain text file called robots.txt and enter the following code exactly as shown below in it;


User-agent: *
Disallow: /


Then put this robots.txt file on your iDisk in the Web/Sites/ directory. Again, if you are using our web hosting services we can do this for you. Otherwise you will need to contact your current web hosting provider.

That’s it for moving your iWeb website from MobileMe to a real web hosting service. Don’t worry, even though Apple has discontinued MobileMe, iWeb will continue to work for a long time as long as you have it installed on your computer. If you are looking to optimize your iWeb site for Google and other search engines, take a look at our iWeb search engine optimization training courses.

SEIntelligence, our powerful all-in-one search engine optimization application is much more powerful than iWeb SEO Tool, and can be the difference maker for a user trying to rank higher in search engines. With direct instructions on how to optimize your website, SEIntelligence makes it easy for any user to optimize their website. In the tutorial below, we will give you a quick tour of SEIntelligence and show you how it works and how it can help you. As noted in the video, SEIntelligence would replace iWeb SEO Tool, so you would not need to use both iWeb SEO Tool and SEIntelligence, just SEIntelligence.

Video Transcript:

A lot of you are using iWeb SEO Tool to optimize your iWeb site for search engines, but I wanted to show you our newest and most powerful way of optimizing an iWeb site. Some of you have probably already heard of it, but for those who haven’t, SEIntelligence is our latest SEO application, that is much more powerful than iWeb SEO Tool and works great with iWeb sites.

So for this video I just wanted to give you a quick tour of SEIntelligence and show you what you can expect to do with this powerful application.

SEIntelligence will allow me to load my website into the application. In this case, I already have a site loaded in, so I will just click on this existing profile and my iWeb site will load here in SEIntelligence.

You will notice that as I click on one of my website pages with a .html extension, the meta keywords will show up right here. These meta keywords are the keywords that I choose to target for my website. Based on these keywords, I am going to perform a competitive analysis, which will show me the top 10 ranking websites for a particular keyword that I am choosing. So in this case, I am going to search for Men’s Drivers in Google.

When the results appear, I will see the top 10 ranking websites, along with a lot of information about those websites.

What SEIntelligence is now doing, is analyzing my website, and comparing it to these top 10 websites, and providing me with feedback based on this analysis.

For example, if we click on the Title tab, we can see the suggestions SEIntelligence is giving me for my title based on what I currently have, and what the top 10 ranking websites are doing. Now I can change my title tag and when I click the Apply button, these suggestions will change based on what I just typed in.

You can repeat this for all of the tabs at the top. Then you can publish your website straight from SEIntelligence to your server.

So that is my quick introduction to SEIntelligence. It’s an extremely powerful SEO application and many users are extremely pleased with the results they have achieved by utilizing it. SEIntelligence would replace iWeb SEO Tool, so you would only need to optimize your site in SEIntelligence and not both iWeb SEO Tool and SEIntelligence.

SEIntelligence also comes with free video tutorials to teach you how to use the application properly so I encourage everyone to take advantage of them.

If you use both iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher, you might wonder what the preferred method of using both of these applications is. While there is no correct answer, we suggest that users optimize their site with iWeb SEO Tool, and then publish the site to a local folder and then optimize with WebCrusher. You would then publish your website to your server from WebCrusher’s built-in FTP client.

Here is a visualization of our recommended method for using both iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher.

Video Transcript:

If you use iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher, here is our recommended method for using both of these products.

First, load your website in iWeb SEO Tool, and make any necessary chances, or press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button. Then publish the site to a local folder on your hard drive by clicking on the publish button, followed by selecting the Publish to Folder tab. When you click on the Next button, the Finder window should appear with your website folder highlighted.

Drag and drop that Folder onto WebCrusher’s canvas. Click the Go button to optimize the site, and when the optimization is complete, click on the Export button, and publish the site to your server via WebCrusher’s built-in FTP client.