Mac SEO Blog

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 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.

We have a few important updates currently being beta tested. First and foremost, Macintosh Explorer, our file browser for Mac OS X has some new features including a new tabbed interface, support for Quick Look on Leopard and a few more enhancements.

We also have an update to iWeb SEO Tool which improves on some long standing issues. You can now properly use iWeb SEO Tool when you have MobileMe syncing enabled. You can also now optimize blog pages for search engines.

You can download both beta versions from;

http://www.trybeta.com/

Just create a free beta testers account at the above site and you will see both products listed. Try them out and please submit your feedback and any problems you encounter so we can fix them ASAP.

Google recently updated their analytics code for a number of reasons. The most important reason is so that the code can run asynchronously while your website loads. This means your website load time should be faster and tracking should be more reliable.

In order to take advantage of the new Google Analytics code, we have added the ability to enter code into the head section of your website in iWeb SEO Tool. This means in addition to adding Google Analytics you can add custom javascript, favicons, meta tags or just about anything else you need to enter within theandtags.

To take advantage of this feature, open your iWeb site in iWeb SEO Tool. Your existing Google Analytics code will be in the ‘Footer Code’ field. Remove that code and login to your Google Analytics to get the new code snippet. Copy and paste this snippet into the ‘Head Code’ field. The following video tutorial explains how to add Google Analytics to your iWeb site with iWeb SEO Tool.

This new update also lets you quickly open the modified website folder when pressing the Export button. You have a third option to show your website folder in addition to publishing to your MobileMe or FTP server. Now if you have to you can use a third party FTP client to publish your site or use another tool such as WebCrusher to optimize your iWeb site for faster loading times.

You can download iWeb SEO Tool and use it on your iWeb site today.

Video Transcript:

Once you’ve loaded your website in iWeb SEO Tool, you will be able to see files and folders on the left hand side. Just a quick note for those who watched the tutorial on how to load a site in iWeb SEO Tool properly, you might have seen some text in these two fields here. Normally, these fields would be empty, but I had already added the text into those fields previously, so that is why there was text there. We’re going to talk about what to put in those fields later in this video.

The first thing you need to do is select one of your website files with a .html extension. You will all see an index.html file in your website folder. Do not optimize this page. The index.html page is just for redirect purposes, so whatever you do, do not optimize the index.html file.

So now you can begin adding your title tags, meta tags, and alt text to your site. I’m not going to explain what these items are, or the best way to create them because I want to keep this tutorial short. If you need to learn more about these items, I highly recommend purchasing the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial. It’s only $29.95 and what you will learn in that course is worth much much more than this small price tag.

On the Site Settings tab, there are two fields. One is for the Head code and one is for the footer code.  What you should put in the Head code section is the code for Google Analytics. You can obtain this code by signing up for an account with Google Analytics, and registering to get the code. You can do all of this at google.com/analytics.

What you should put in the Footer code section is the code for Statcounter.com You can obtain this code by signing up for an account at statcounter.com and registering your website to get the code.

Both of these codes will allow you to receive information about your website visitors such as the number of unique visits, and how these people found your site. You don’t need to add both codes, but it is entirely up to you.

There is also a video in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial that will show you exactly how to obtain both of these codes.

Remember to click on the Apply button, or Apply To Entire Site button on the Site Settings tab to apply the changes to your site.

If you are using header tags on your site, make sure you select the option to Convert header tags and then press the Apply To Entire Site button. This will just strip the code from your site. It will not make the text in your header invisible. We never want to hide any text, so keep that in mind when creating your header tags. There is more information on header tags in the video course I mentioned earlier as well.

One last note, the Custom Meta Tags section is for advanced users, a large majority of you will never use it, so don’t worry about putting anything in there.

When you are done, you can publish your site by clicking on the Publish button. You can also find more video tutorials that will help you publish your website.

Over the past few years, iWeb users have used our software to help with their search engine rankings. iWeb SEO Tool has been extremely popular with iWeb users since it lets you easily optimize your iWeb site for search engines.

Over the years we have had numerous requests to provide a more step by step approach to the entire SEO approach. A lot of things about search engine optimization can be overwhelming for people just starting out.

So today we are happy to announce the iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial. This step by step video will explain everything you need to know about search engines and iWeb. It will walk you through the entire process making sure you understand what is happening and exactly what needs to be done to get more visitors to your site through search engines.

The iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial costs just $69.95 and can be purchased safely and securely through our online store.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. If you have any additional questions, please let us know. We are always looking for feedback on improving the video.

We are getting ready to release the much anticipated SEO for iWeb Video Tutorial Walk Through. Our intentions for this video is to provide a step-by-step walk through of how to properly optimize an iWeb website for search engines.

The iWeb video tutorial will cover the basics including how to create proper title tags, meta tags and website content. We even show you the secret to including Header tags in iWeb, something never before possible without a lot of additional work.Throughout this entire process we give you insider tips that have been shown to greatly affect how a website ranks in all major search engines.

We even go into more advanced topics including new trends in search rankings recently announced by Google and we delve into local search optimizations to help you get your site in front of your local audience.

The SEO for iWeb walk through video will show you how to implement SEO strategies and why they are important so you can understand how your changes will effect your search engine rankings. This video tutorial will be the first full length tutorial that covers everything you need to know. With over 60 minutes of SEO content, a step by step checklist and an abundance of external resources, every question you had about search engines will be answered.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter to be the first to be notified of the video release and get access to early bird discounts.

Your meta description tag is a short description used to describe each page on your website. Although most major search engines do not use it to determine where your website ranks in their search results, they do use it in their search results to give searchers an idea of what your page is all about.

A good meta description tag can entice searchers to visit your website, over some of the other listed results. Basically it’s used to quickly grab the attention of a searcher so that they click your link in the search results.

For years, if you left out a meta description tag, or your meta description tag did not properly describe your page, Google would attempt to find more relevant snippets in your webpage content. of course, this caused a problem because now you have no control over what’s displayed in Google’s search results. Leaving it up to a computer (Google’s indexing software), means you never know whether or not it will entice people to click your link, or even if it would make sense.

Recently, Google has started doing the same thing with Title tags. Title tags are what you see at the very top of your web browser when you visit a webpage. They are probably the most important on-page optimization you can make on each of your webpages. If you leave your title tag out, or if you do not have a title tag that accurately describes your webpage, Google will attempt to change it to something more relevant. Of course, this causes the same issue with the meta description tag.

A good title tag has the following characteristics;

• It accurately describes what is one the corresponding webpage
• It is between 60 and 120 characters long
• It includes 2-3 keywords or keyword phrases that you want to rank well for
• It’s different for every one of your pages

You can watch Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, talk about this change below.

With a free Google Webmaster Tools account and XML Sitemap, Google will give you advice and feedback on all your title and meta tags. Just check your Google Webmaster Tools account and click the Diagnostics tab and then the HTML Suggestions tab on the left hand side.

For iWeb users, make sure you use iWeb SEO Tool to add unique title tags and meta tags to each of your pages to properly follow Google’s guidelines.