Since MobileMe is going to be discontinued, people who use the blogging feature in iWeb with comments enabled will be in big trouble. It is a good idea to salvage your blog and its comments now, rather than wait until the last minute.

With iWeb To WordPress, you can easily make your iWeb blog ready for import into WordPress. WordPress is an ideal blogging platform that will enable you to continue your blog, and will continue to allow your users to leave comments.

WordPress is one of the most used blogging systems available and is very easy to use. The benefit of WordPress over iWeb’s blogging features is mainly that you can post a blog from anywhere. You just log in to your web browser to do so.

Migrate your iWeb blog to WordPress

I know a lot of iWeb users have been having some problems with their iWeb websites looking correct in Internet Explorer. There are a few things you can do to make your iWeb site more compatible with IE. Follow these simple steps in the video, and your site will be a lot more compatible with Internet Explorer.  The application we use is called WebCrusher, which not only allows you to make your site more compatible with IE, but it can also really increase the speed of your website.

Everyone knows how popular Facebook is, which means your business better have a Facebook page. If it doesn’t, boy are you behind the times.

But no need to worry, this video tutorial will show you how you can easily make a Facebook page look similar to your website. This makes it easy to create, as well as giving it that branded feel that your customers will recognize.

The application we use in this tutorial is called MapDesign.

To all the iWeb users out there, here is an important tip I want to share with you. Keeping in touch with website visitors is an extremely important task. Many users visit websites, with the intention of buying, or contacting your company to become a customer/client. Some users are just not ready to whip out their credit cards, but want to stay in touch, and receive that final message that persuades them to buy from you, or use your services.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can add a mailing list signup form to your iWeb site, and keep a solid record of your subscribers. The level of difficulty for this task is low. The application we use in this video is called MailShoot. You can download the Mac Mailing List Manager.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to get rid of the dreaded Softonic Toolbar that plagues many of us when we download something from softonic.com

Firstly, I’m going to download an application from Softonic. The reason I am doing this is because on the Toolbar, there is an option to Uninstall and I want Windows users to see this. I will not go through the steps of doing it on a Windows computer because the instructions are available to you. Users of Mac OS X are not as fortunate.

So I’ll fast forward through this installation process, even this dirty part where they don’t give you the option of not installing the toolbar.

So now that the toolbar is installed, you can see it in Safari, as well as this little Alerts Bell that appears in my Menu Bar.

So if you click on the Softonic Icon and then select Uninstall, here is where the Windows users can get the uninstall instructions from.

If you are using a Mac, follow these simple instructions. First we gotta open the Finder. I think a lot of you make the mistake of selecting your user account to get to your Library. Instead, click on the main Hard Drive. The first thing we are deleting is located in the Applications folder. The folder we are deleting is called Toolbars.

Next, click on Library, and then Application Support, and delete the folder called Conduit or however it is pronounced.

Lastly, click on Library, and then on InputManagers and delete the folder called CTLoader.

Now watch the alerts bell in the menu bar as I quit Safari. See ya!

I’ll re-open Safari to show you that the Toolbar is gone, and everything is back to normal, and I can once again open a link in a new tab.

A favorite icon, also known as a favicon is the small little image you see on many different websites. It is located in the address bar, usually to the left of the website’s URL.

Adding a favicon in Sandvox is relatively simple. First, press the inspector button, and then press the site tab, followed up by the media tab.

You will see the word Favicon in this section. To the right of it, press the browse button, and locate the image that you want to use for your favicon. Select it, and the next time you publish your website, your favicon will appear in the address bar.

Learn how to get your iWeb website to rank high in search engines with the iWeb SEO video tutorial.

If you are receiving an error that reads “no such table”  or another type of message, please do the following;

1)Quit iWeb SEO Tool

2)Delete the file located at username/Library/Application Support/iWeb SEO Tool/

3)Relaunch iWeb SEO Tool.

Many iWeb users face a common problem when trying to verify their site with Google’s Webmaster Tools. When at the Verify ownership stage, after pressing the Verify button, this error you see here is returned.

I am going to show you why this error is occurring, and how you can fix the issue so that your site can be verified with Webmaster Tools.

The first thing I want you to do, is type your website’s URL in the address field and hit return. When your browser takes you to your website, you will notice how your site is forwarded to a URL that looks like this. This URL has the domain name, followed by the SiteName, followed by the page name. Some URL’s will only have the domain name followed by the page name.  Alternatively, if you do not have a custom domain name and you use MobileMe , you should see web.me.com followed by your username, followed by your sitename, followed by the page name.

Now what I want you to do, is to test that your sitemap has been correctly published. To do this, I want you to delete the page name in the URL, and type in sitemap.xml as I am doing here. An alternative way of seeing if your sitemap has been published correctly is to press the Test Sitemap button in Sitemap Automator.

If you are taken to a page that has the XML Sitemap, then this means you have published it correctly. If you do not see the sitemap, then what I want you to do now, is delete the Sitename as well, so that the URL looks like your domain followed by sitemap.xml

So in my case, I’ve deleted the sitename, and replaced the page name with sitemap.xml. If this works, then you’ve uploaded your sitemap correctly as well. If this doesn’t work, then this means you probably have not published your sitemap, and you should go back into Sitemap Automator and try it again. Remember to view the video tutorial that walks you through this process.

For those of you who can see your XML sitemap, we are ready to move on to the next step. So as a reminder, I will go back to where my sitemap actually was located. So you can see the location of my sitemap is www.anotherbigdeal.com/apptorial/sitemap.xml. I want you to keep this in mind. My sitemap works when it is my domain followed by my sitename followed by the page name which in this case is sitemap.xml. This should be the case for most of you.

First, I am going to explain why our initial attempt at verification failed. This will make it much easier for you to understand how to do the process properly when you attempt it again.

If you take a look at step 3 in the verification method, it will tell you the exact location where Webmaster Tools is looking for your verification file. You will see in my case, it is looking for the file at www.anotherbigdeal.com/ the file name for the verification file. Here is where the mistake usually occurs. We all can see that my sitemap is located at anotherbigdeal.com/apptorial/sitemap.xml. This is most likely the same situation for my verification file. If I wanted to see my verification file, I could just replace sitemap.xml with the verification file name and it would show up in my browser. This page actually shows this. If you look in the URL you will see that the only difference is that sitemap.xml has been replaced by the verification file name.

But if we look back at step 3, notice where Webmaster Tools is trying to find my verification file. Something is missing from this URL. By now you’ve probably figured out that its missing my SiteName, which in this case is apptorial. This is the reason that it was unable to verify my site. The verification file it is looking for is not located in the location where it is trying to find it.

So what I’m going to do is, hit this Back to Home button, and then I will press the Add A Site button. Now, when I type in my site’s URL, I will enter a /apptorial at the end of the URL. Now if we look at step 3, you will notice that the URL now reads the correct URL for where my verification file is actually located. Now all I have to do is click on the Verify button, and my website will be correctly verified.

Is iWeb bad for SEO? What a common questions asked amongst the many iWeb users. Well I am here to answer this question for you. The short answer is ‘no, iWeb is not bad for SEO.’ Allow me to explain.

When iWeb users create and publish their site, there are so many SEO elements that have been ignored, making it almost impossible for anyone to find their site via search engines. This is not the iWeb users fault. Out of the box, yes iWeb is not very helpful for SEO. This is because things such as title tags, header tags, alternative text, and even basic content on a page is not a dominant on an iWeb site as opposed to a site made in a regular HTML editor.

But the problem is easy to fix! But just like you had to learn how to use iWeb, you are going to need to learn a few things about SEO.

First off, let me quickly explain what SEO is for those of you who might not be entirely sure. SEO is basically a process we do, and continue to perform, in order to get our sites ranking higher in search engines. Google has over 2 billion searches performed each day. We all want a piece of that pie.

Continuing with the explanation of what SEO is leads me to explaining the different types of optimizations that people can make to their site. The first optimization is the on-page optimizations. This consists of things we CAN control on our own. These are the actual changes we make to our sites so that our keywords can be better read by search engines, and even our website visitors. The second optimization is off-page optimizations. This consists of the promotion we do for our site in order to attract visitors, and gain reputation for our website. The better our site’s reputations, the higher we’ll be placed in search engines.

Now let’s head back to you guys. How can you accomplish this for your iWeb sites. Well, the first thing you need to address is your on-page optimizations. iWeb makes it a bit tricky to optimize a few things, such as title tags, alternative text, and meta information such as keywords, and description (note: meta keywords and description don’t influence our rankings, but are still very important for other reasons.)

Luckily for iWeb users, as most my website visitors already know, you can easily add those optimizations mentioned above via a free third-party tool called iWeb SEO Tool by RAGE Software.  This tool will help you easily implement your title tags, meta tags, alt text, and analytics codes. Be sure to watch my tutorial on how to use iWeb SEO Tool.

There are a few more things you can do to your site in order to make it more search engine friendly. Both on-page and off-page, there are so many things to learn about that can help your rankings. A search on Google will help you find what you are looking for, or if you are the type that prefers to have direct instructions in front of you, then I would suggest watching RAGE’s SEO Video which will show you a couple dozen things you can do to your iWeb sites, on-page and off-page to better help your SEO efforts.

So to sum up, iWeb is not bad for SEO – it’s just a bit trickier. Don’t be discouraged by people who tell you not to bother with iWeb because no one will be able to find your site. All you need is knowledge on the matter and you will see that in no time, your site will start soaring above others.

This tutorial will show you how to properly publish your iWeb site, so that you can avoid having your website URL be longer than necessary.

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.  This URL you see here is just an example of what this might look like.

What we are going to be doing in this video, is reduce the length of the URL by getting rid of the site name so that the URL goes from looking like this, to looking like this. I will not be teaching you how to have the domain read just www.yourdomain.com. The reason for this is because the easiest way of actually doing this to an iWeb site would be to turn on what is called domain masking.

I will quickly tell you what domain masking is, and why you don’t want to use it for your website. Domain Masking is basically hiding the name of your site and replacing it with something else. As an example, notice how when I click to various pages on this site, the URL in the address bar stays the same. The reason why domain masking is not recommended, is because it makes other pages on your website unrecognizable by search engines and it makes it impossible for your users to bookmark an individual page on your site.

Now that we have a good understanding of the URL structure with iWeb sites, let’s get right into reducing the length of our URL’s. The first thing I want you to know is that you will be required to have a third-party FTP tool to publish your site. This means that we will no longer be publishing our websites directly from iWeb.

I recommend using Cyberduck or iWeb SEO Tool which are both available for free. Cyberduck is a basic FTP client which allows you to transfer files from your local hard drive to your web-space and vice cersa. iWeb SEO Tool is a great application for iWeb users to optimize their sites for search engines, AND it also includes a built in FTP client.  I’m going to be using iWeb SEO Tool in this demonstration, because I want to show how this method of reducing the length of our URL’s applies to people who use iWeb SEO Tool as well.

So the first thing we are going to do, is publish our website to a local folder in iWeb. It will be easiest for you if you create a new folder and publish your site to this new folder. You will need to remember where you created this new folder on your hard drive. I am going to call my new folder My iWeb SIte. While the site is publishing, I want you to take note of my Site Name, Photos By Matt which can be seen here…and here. Keep this in mind for later in the tutorial.

When our sites have finished publishing, go ahead and open the folder where you just published your site to. You should notice that there are three things inside this folder. There is an index.html file, a file with a long name that has the word ‘assets’ at the front, and finally a folder with your Site Name on it. Inside this folder, is where all of our website files are. The reason we get long URL’s is because we publish all three of these files.

Here is how we will fix this. In iWeb SEO Tool, when I press the Open Website button, I will first locate the folder that I just created. Many people will select this folder and choose to load the entire folder. This is how we end up with those long URLs. Instead, I will select this folder, and then locate the folder inside of it that contains the Site Name for my website, which is Photos By Matt which, we took note of earlier.

When we publish this to our FTP account, our site will now not have the site name in the URL.

If you wanted to publish to an FTP client such as Cyberduck,  make sure that you do not just upload the folder with your Site Name on it, but that you select all of the contents of the folder and upload them directly to your FTP.