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.

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.

A common error that users are experiencing when publishing from iWeb is the error communication with the FTP server. Typically, this error stems from a file on your site having an incorrect file name. This is a bug in iWeb that causes the error to appear and the site to not fully publish. This tutorial below will address this issue, and show you an alternative for publishing the entire site.

Video Transcript

If you publish your site from iWeb, and receive an error message that says “There was an error communicating with the FTP server. Try again later, or check with your service provider”, you most likely have a file on your site that does not contain a proper file name, and is giving iWeb a hard time with publishing. This is a bug in iWeb, and because of this, you will not be able to publish your site through iWeb and many other FTP clients.

Unfortunately, we are not told which file or files are causing this, so locating the issue to remove it can be difficult.

Luckily, iWeb SEO Tool is able to handle this issue and can publish the site as is. I will show this by publishing this exact same website that gave me this error.

First, I will publish the site to a local folder.

Now I will launch iWeb SEO Tool, and load the folder that I just published from iWeb.

Next, I will click on the Publish button and enter my FTP details. I keep my FTP details bookmarked in iWeb SEO Tool, so all I need to do is click on the FTP account and all my information will appear. You can do this also by first filling out your FTP information and then clicking this plus sign down here.

So now I will click on the Upload button and publish my site. I will fast forward through the publish so that you can see at the end, my site has been published successfully, and I received no error message like I received in iWeb.

I just want to remind everyone that iWeb SEO Tool is free for any RAGE Web Hosting user who is signed up for at least one year, so if you are looking to use iWeb SEO Tool to help publish your site, I highly encourage taking advantage of the free iWeb SEO Tool promotion as well.

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.

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.

Adding header tags to an iWeb site has never been easier. Follow the instructions carefully in this video tutorial to learn how you can properly add header tags to your iWeb website.

Video Transcript:

Being introduced for the first time ever, iWeb users will now be able to add header tags to their websites, without having to hand code it in the HTML. Header tags are another way for you to demonstrate to search engines which keywords are important on your page.

So what is a header tag, and how do we make one?

Basically, a header tag is a block of text that can be compared to a title, or a headline for a larger body of text. Think of a newspaper article. There is a headline which indicates what the entire article is about. Then there is a subheading which gives a bit more insight into the article.

Our websites are similar to the structure of a newspaper article. A headline can contain our primary key term for each page, and an optional subheading can contain our secondary key term for each page.

In HTML, there are six headers that you can use. Those headers are h1 through h6. I am only going to demonstrate adding an h1 header since that is what most of you will be doing. If you want to add an h2 as well, then feel free to do so. h1 and h2 are the most popular headers, so use those if you have room on your site. Trying to add all headers to your site is not generally a good idea, unless your site is structured in a way that makes sense to do so. Also, the rule of thumb is to only have one h1 per page.

So to do this in iWeb, simply click on the Text Box button, and type in this code you see here.

The area where I wrote ‘This is my header tag’ is where you should type in your header tag. The HTML here should look identical to mine. But the text part should contain your header tag which could be anything you want it to be. I recommend putting the main key-term you are targeting for this specific page.

Before we move on to the next step, I want to point out that you can also change the font of this text like you normally would with any text, by highlighting the text and clicking on the Fonts button.

Now when you publish your site to a local folder, and load the site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must check the box to Convert header tags in text boxes to HTML code, and then press the Apply To Entire Site button. What this will do is strip the HTML code from the site, so that only the actual text is being shown. Remember, your header tag should be visible on your site. If you can’t see it, or if you still see the HTML code, it means you did not do this process correctly, and you will need to try again.

Some of you can expect to run into some issues when adding header tags. For example, you will notice that the header tag does not always end up in the same place online as it did in iWeb. This is normal. You may need to play around with it a bit until you find the right spot. To make things easier on yourself, try not to place the header too close other items on your page. This will leave you with a bit of a buffer for when the header ends up in a slightly different location.

Also, if your site has a black background, you most likely won’t be able to see your header. If that is the case, just send us an e-mail read this knowledgebase article on how to alter the font color.

READ THIS FIRST

The videos listed below give you detailed instructions on how to use iWeb SEO Tool the proper way. It is very important to follow these instructions in order to limit errors. The videos are in order and should be watched that way.

While these videos are very helpful in teaching you the proper ways of using iWeb SEO Tool, they cannot substitute the content that is in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial. That walkthrough video tutorial goes beyond the basics of using iWeb SEO Tool and can help you dramatically improve your website’s rankings in all major search engines. Your business is definitely worth it, so we highly recommend checking out that walkthrough video tutorial. It will also save you a lot of time and heartache in the future.

1. How to open your site in iWeb SEO Tool

2. How to optimize your site in iWeb SEO Tool

3. How to publish your site to FTP in iWeb SEO Tool

4. Updating your iWeb website and using iWeb SEO Tool

5. How to make sure you published your site correctly from iWeb SEO Tool

6. How to back up your data stored in iWeb SEO Tool

7a. How to have a shortened iWeb URL by using iWeb SEO Tool

7b. How to get rid of the site redirect AND shorten the iWeb URL

8. How to use the Favicon feature in iWeb SEO Tool

9. How to publish only changes with iWeb SEO Tool

10. Setting up a Mobile friendly iWeb site

We are extremely happy to announce the release of iWeb SEO Tool 2.0. iWeb SEO Tool is our popular SEO tool that allows iWeb users to easily add SEO elements to their websites such as title tags, alternative text, header tags and more.

After many of you sent in some of your suggestions, we have decided to release this version with a very popular request. Users can now easily add a favicon to their websites with a simple click of a button.

To learn how to add your favicon using iWeb SEO Tool 2.0 (and what a favicon is for that matter) you can view this video tutorial.

Don’t forget to check out the iWeb SEO Walkthrough Video Tutorial to learn how to make a more search engine friendly iWeb website.

Earlier in 2011, we made a post/video about publishing a website to FTP in iWeb SEO Tool. We have recently updated that video to clear up some confusion that some users were having. The updated video is listed below for your viewing pleasure.

Video Transcript

This tutorial is going to strictly cover publishing a website to FTP using iWeb SEO Tool. We will cover all of the main points involved with publishing, and then we will discuss the biggest issue users have when publishing their website. That issue is the directory path.

I also want to quickly mention that there is a video tutorial that shows you how to check to see if your site has been published correctly using iWeb SEO Tool. This video can be found on our website, or our YouTube account.

So the first thing you will need to do is press the publish button, and then make sure Publish to FTP is selected, and then press the next button.

In the FTP field, here is where you will put your server address. Sometimes the server address may look like the one I have here, but more often than not, it will just be your domain. So if my domain were publishingtoiweb.com then that is what I would put in this field.

Do not include http, www, or ftp in this field. Just put your domain.com or .net or whatever the extension may be.

Your username and password must be accurate otherwise logging in will not work, and you will not be able to publish.

Next, I want everyone to check to see if you have all of your FTP login details entered in correctly. To do so, press the Browse button. If you are able to see files and folders like we see here, then you have logged in correctly. If you get an error similar to this, then your FTP information is incorrect. You must get the correct FTP information before proceeding to the next step.

Now we’re going to discuss the Directory Path field. This is the area where most users experience the most difficulty. Chances are, if you are watching this video, you need to enter something in this field.

Firstly, If you use RAGE Web Hosting, you should type in /public_html. For everyone else, please refer to the following method;

The first thing I want you to try to do, is publish your site in from iWeb SEO Tool by typing a forward slash in the Directory Path field. If that still doesn’t publish your site, refer to the next step.

What you want to do is open up iWeb, and go to the publish page of the website you want to publish in iWeb SEO Tool. Take a look at the current FTP information you already have. In the directory/path field, there may or may not be some text. If there is some text, I want you to copy it. If there is no text in there, don’t worry, just bear with me for a moment.

Go back to iWeb SEO Tool, and in the directory path field, paste the text you just copied. Make sure there is a forward slash at the beginning of this text.

This next step applies to everyone, even the users who did not have anything typed into the Directory Path field. Go back to the Publish page, and now copy the text that is in the Site Name field. Then go back to iWeb SEO Tool and paste this text beside the text we pasted earlier. If you didn’t paste any text earlier, then this will be the first time you are pasting anything into the Directory Path field. If you have multiple words in your site name, you will need to add underscores to separate each word. Underscores are the default word separator that iWeb adds to your site name.

Your site should publish properly now.

I want to make a note that this method should work for 95-99% of users. Since there are so many variations when it comes to publishing, some users may not achieve success using this method. For example, if you host multiple domains on one hosting account, or if you use our method for shortening your iWeb URL, this method might not work for you.

If this method does not work for you, submit a support ticket at ragesw.com/support and we will be happy to assist you. Be sure to include your FTP login details which includes your server address, username, and password, to help speed up the process.

You can check to see if you published your website correctly from iWeb SEO Tool by visiting your website in your web browser, and going to View in the menu bar, and then selecting view source.

Then press Command and F to bring up the search feature, and type in the following:

head_code_set

If you see this code here, then it means you have published your site correctly from iWeb SEO Tool and all of your optimizations should be present.

If you do not see that code, then I want you to quit your browser, and re-launch it and visit your site and follow the previous steps again. If you still do not see that code, it means your site was not properly published from iWeb SEO Tool and you must try it again.