How To Create Visitor Friendly Short URLs with iWeb

August 24th, 2010

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Hosting, iweb and seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

paul Says:
November 2nd, 2011 at 1:30 am

You are just opening your exported website in iWeb SEO Tool. So wherever you saved your local site in iWeb too (for example on your desktop, maybe), you would then open that in iWeb SEO Tool.

Then you publish with iWeb SEO Tool.

Tamsin Says:
December 15th, 2011 at 6:57 pm

Hi Paul

I have read this thread and watched the video about ten times to see if there is something I am missing but still my iweb site hosted by mobileme has the ‘sitename’ in the address.

Please take a look http://www.tamsinmae.com my url becomes http://www.tamsinmae.com/TM/homepage.html. As my iweb sitename in iweb is ‘TM’. I publish it to a local folder on my hard drive to folder tamsinmaewebsite, and within that are the 3 items you show assets, index & the folder TM with the site in it, open iwebseo, select open website (the little folder top left) go to the hd, open folder tamsinmaewebsite and then the folder ‘TM’, load it in iwebseo and do my seo then got to Publish – to mobileme. It’s a big site so takes a while but still all of the pages have the long url – http://www.tamsinmae.com/TM/pagename. Am I missing a step somewhere? I did think that maybe I needed to highlight the items ‘within’ the sitename folder but iwebseo doesn’t allow you to do that.

Also I am updating my site often as I have a blog, is there a way to update changed files only?

I will of course be looking for alternative hosting in the NEAR future and like the Rage products but really need to keep the work flow and upload times down to a minimum so I am testing out most of your software for that purpose.

I hope you can help. Many thanks in advance – Tamsin

Ellen Says:
December 29th, 2011 at 11:48 am

I have followed all the instructions. I have iWeb SEO 2.2, Lion, and am hosted by RageSW. I still get the long title.
Is there something to do once you have chosen the folder inside the folder with iWeb SEO?
Thanks.

paul Says:
January 9th, 2012 at 4:07 pm

Publish your entire site site by going to the File menu in iWeb and selecting ‘Publish Entire Site’. Open your site in iWeb SEO Tool and then publish again. It should work now.

Mike V Says:
February 1st, 2012 at 12:44 am

done it! i think they need to empty the cache first. i tried on my Chrome browser its the same but tried it on my Safari and now it has a shorter URL. Thanks for this tutorial 🙂

Luk Says:
February 6th, 2012 at 7:24 am

I did this a few weeks ago and it worked, but now I changed the lay out of my site a I tried it again but I always see my old version and not the new one. How can I solve this problem?

Jeremy Says:
February 6th, 2012 at 11:59 am

The next time you publish your site in iWeb, try to go to File and select Publish Entire Site. Then load the site in iWeb SEO Tool (short URL way) and publish.

Georgi Says:
March 30th, 2012 at 2:46 pm

Hi Paul,
I fallow the video step by step but when i open SEO and load my site nothing happen. No text no nothing in Head Code or Footer Code. On your video they come soon you upload the site from the local folder. Do i need to type my self anything or i do something wrong.
Hope you can help.

paul Says:
April 1st, 2012 at 2:33 pm

Those fields are to enter your Google Analytics or other website visitor tracking code. You don’t need them for short URLs but if you want to learn how to use them you can check out or SEO for iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial: http://www.ragesw.com/videos/iweb-seo-video-tutorial.html

Georgi Says:
April 1st, 2012 at 4:44 pm

THANK YOU PAUL, I’LL TRY IN NEXT FEW DAYS.

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