iWeb For Business: A Quick Start Guide
August 2nd, 2011As most of us know, iWeb was intended for personal use, but its extremely friendly user interface and vast template selection has led many small-medium businesses to use it as their in-house solution for web design.
In this quick start guide, I am going to give users some great suggestions on the best ways to use iWeb for business purposes, and how our products and services can help you.
1) First and foremost, having a professional business domain name with a professional hosting company is a must. We still see many iWeb business sites have a me.com address. While this may be good for a personal website, it can be a big mistake for a business site. Visit our hosting page and see how we can assist users with iWeb web hosting.
2) Getting listed in search engines often troubles many iWeb users. If you have an iWeb business site, this is certainly not going to help you get any new customers. The best way to get your site indexed in search engines is by creating an XML Sitemap. Think of an XML Sitemap as a blueprint of your website, designed specifically for search engines. It will list all of the pages on your site in an XML file. You can then publish this file and notify search engines of its existence. Some users have reported being indexed in search results within 24 hours of submitting their Sitemap. Sitemap Automator will allow you to quickly and easily do this. There is also an easy video tutorial to follow along with.
3) As mentioned earlier, iWeb was designed for personal use. So when using iWeb for business purposes, there are a few obstacles that we must overcome. One of which is the website’s search engine friendliness. This obstacle is pretty simple to overcome with our tool called iWeb SEO Tool. This tool will allow you to add many important items to your site, such as Title Tags, Page Descriptions, Alt Text for images, and analytical codes.
4) The speed at which your site loads can have an impact on where you rank in search results, as well as if your website visitors decide to hit the back button or not. If you notice that your site is loading at a slow rate, try out WebCrusher and see if it helps speed up your site. The simple drag and drop method will cut out the fat and make your site load much faster in user’s browsers.
5) Some users who visit a website buy a product or contact the business owner to conduct business. Some do, but most don’t. Stay in touch with the ones who don’t make a purchase by having a newsletter signup form on your site. You can build up your list and send out e-mails about new product launches, or sales, or whatever you want. MailShoot will allow you to easily embed a signup form by simply copying and pasting some code.
6) Using PayPal to sell your products is an easy way to launch your site quickly. You can follow this popular tutorial to see a step-by-step method for adding PayPal to an iWeb business site.
7) Everyone using iWeb for business purposes should do a complete search engine optimization makeover to their site. This includes everything from making the navigation menu search engine friendly, to creating great content, to adding headers and titles. You can learn everything you need to know about SEO For an iWeb site from the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial.
February 16th, 2012 at 9:27 am
Excellent and helpful article! I built my site on iWeb and have known that it was invisible to SE but thought I would have it re-built professionally to be SE friendly.