Are You Making The Biggest Search Engine Blunder with iWeb?
September 13th, 2010When 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 🙂 )
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July 25th, 2011 at 7:25 am
THANK YOU!!!! This was SO helpful!!!! I think I love you guys.
August 3rd, 2011 at 8:27 am
Great help as always. I’ve noticed a few thing I’d like to share and also have a question or two.
1. I noticed that regarding a text box you can make either the font a hyperlink and/or the the actual box itself. When you make the box a hyperlink it seems to automatically make that box an image regardless of the type of font. When you make the actual text the link then it does become an image unless you use a non-web font.
2. A question – is helvetica or helvetica neue a web safe font? My font is helvetica neue. It’s very close to Arial. I’ve got iWeb 3.0.3. It does not list Helvetica as a web safe font. However, when I right click on the font on my website it does not register as an image. Can I use them or one of them?
Thanks,
Tom
August 10th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Hello & thank you for the input, very informative.
I am new to your service and I have done very little so far but intend to pursue it.
One ? that is I don’t have the option for web safe font, perhaps because I have iweb 08.
Would it be helpful to update this? I will say that it appears that I have a safe font, (ariel regular & bold)?
Thanks again.
August 11th, 2011 at 9:40 am
You can use either Web Safe Mac/Win or just Web Safe, whichever you have (arial works).
August 17th, 2011 at 12:38 am
when i go to “fonts” I do not have web or web safe as options…how do I get that? I am using iWeb v.3.0.4
April 16th, 2012 at 8:40 am
Thank you to the crew at Rage. Hope apple wakes up & continues iWeb.
April 10th, 2013 at 9:16 am
Thank you very much for your very usefull information. I’m starting with Mac and there are so many shortcuts that I dont know, but thank you for your help I’m understanding more about Mac, thanks again.
Kind regards from Mexico