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A Quick & Dirty Review of SEO Methods for iWeb and .Mac

When trying to publish your web site online with Apple's iWeb website design software and .Mac their online website host offering, you are already fighting an uphill struggle to get your web site into search engines like Google. That being said many people still make iWeb and .Mac their software and host of choice and for that reason alone its worth looking at the prospect of trying to make such web sites visible.

What's The Evidence?

To kick things off lets actually look at what is currently in the Google index. By performing a search on the term "site:homepage.mac.com" you are able to bring up the entire list of web pages that are currently indexed and available therein. Doing this seach returns some 160,000 hits. And so you ask yourself, what are the chances this is actually representative of the number of web pages that currently exist on the mac.com servers?

Also, you do a comparative search with those pages hosted at web.mac.com which are ostensibly created using the newer and flashier iWeb '08, and you find that Google returns only 78,000 hits. I suppose that also reveals something pretty interesting. That iWeb templates, although pretty, are perhaps becoming incremently less search engine friendly!

So we have a list of the top ten site listed by Google for .Mac. Now we just need to figure out what are the underlying features that each and every one of them has. What is it that they are doing right that you need to emulate to attain SEO success with iWeb and .Mac?

What Are People Doing? What Seems to Work?

Worthwhile Page Titles and Site Names

One thing I have noticed with the top results in Google that are hosted either at homepage.mac.com or web.mac.com is that they are using elongated page names. This might not be practical in the page/site menu of iWeb but it has its clear benefits for SEO. Keyword density throughout the structure and content of your page is an important aspect of search engine optimisation, and sliding in keywords at every opportunity, however impractical, is definitely the best plan of attack!

Third Party Templates

In addition, web pages are built using third party templates. I personally have looked at creating my own brand of templates for iWeb but it requires a lot of time and patience, and probably explains why many iWeb template developers are taking so long to upgrade their brace of templates for iWeb '08 . That being said, there is a clear advantage to using third party templates. For one, the proper layout and availability of META tags within the template without the need to add them one's self , as well as their explicit creation for such roles as eCommerce. iWeb itself might not have the wherewithall to be able to go in and edit or add META tags directly or easily, but having the necessary bits in the code that can then be amended externally after the site has been built and published to a folder has to be a good thing.

Content, Content, Content!

One can presume that the pages that turn up top for a search of the .Mac specific index in Google, come up top because Google ranks them highest based on a slew of reasons. They rank high because Google spiders can actually make head or tail of the context of the pages. This is in part because many of the pages actually contain a fair amount of indexable content, namely TEXT! There is no substitute for actually putting content on your site's web pages, indexable content at that!

People often ask me why their expensive flash-only sites don't turn up in Google, and the simple response is that they have nothing that the Google Spiders are actually able to index and use to produce hits and match relevance with a search term.

Using Personal Domains: Yay or Nay?

For a long time, users have been able to register their own domain at namecheap, godaddy or elsewhere and point it at their mac.com related web space. More recently Apple set up .Mac so that users could in fact use a single domain explicitly with their dot mac account. And so, in the past where a user would have had to use a frame redirect or just a plain redirect, where now they can just specify the domain and this will load the content exactly as he or she has uploaded it onto the dotmac servers.

From what I understand, dotmac domain usage only works with the top level host for the domain, i.e. domain.com and won't work with hostnames such as www.domain.com. In order to circumvent this you need to set up a redirect for www.domain.com and then just set up domain.com to use the dotmac web servers. For SEO purposes the benefit of having keywords in your domain name is lost on the redirect and in fact if your domain is never explicity associated with the content the advantage of raising your keyword density by having associated words present in your domain is lost.

Using multiple domains in this manner is probably out of the question. In fact, if you are getting to the point where you are considering multiple domains for a single site, you definitely want to start considering proper hosting and a professional SEO strategy.

Other Things to Consider for SEO with iWeb & .Mac

Taking Care of Your META Data

As already discussed and contrary to some very bad advice I have seen offered to people on the Apple support forums for iWeb and META tags, it is critical to ensure that your web pages contain as much meta data as possible. Not just in the head of the HTML for your pages but also in relation to the links and the images contained within the site. Skipping anything is almost criminal if your final goal is to optimize the site for search engine visibility.

Per se there is no way to access the HTML of your pages from within iWeb. Perhaps understandably so, given that the application is designed for more for personal use and for beginners, but then this leaves a gaping hole and major issue for some, one that neither allows the iWeb user to edit the HTML directly nor actually provide tools from within iWeb to add, edit and remove meta data on a page-by-page or site-wide basis.

The only way around this is by using 3rd party html editors or search engine optimisation tools. That being said a swift search of versiontracker.com for SEO tools turns up nothing of worth. The idea of putting meta tags in the body of the HTML document is not altogether stupid, and can be done with code snippets, but is counter-inutitive and may be worthless as any META tags outside the HEAD might well be ignored altogether by search engine spiders.

Create that Google Sitemap

Another aspect of making sure all the points on your SEO checklist are hit is that you need to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and set yourself up a sitemap. This can be as simple as creating a plain text file with the URL to each page listed on a new line. The instructions for validating your site and uploading and getting the sitemap submitted to Google are clear on the Google site, so I shalln't go into any more detail on this score. Telling Google what pages exist and making life easier for their spiders is a definite PLUS.

Relevant and Useful Content That People Want To Link To

In building your site, whether it be for personal or business use, you need to ensure that the content on the site is relevant and useful. That it is content other sites may want to link to, be they bloggers, web directories, association web sites or otherwise. Getting your site linked to is also an import aspect of being well ranked in Google, and having the kind of site and content that is relevant is the key to that equation. The process of getting links from other sites to yours is referred to as back linking in SEO circles and can be acheived without having to pay for links. In fact I would go so far as to tell you to avoid paid for links and liink farms because ultimately this will only come back to bite you in the arse! Getting back links is hard work but it is worth every effort.

Conclusion: One Part of the Jigsaw

Everything described in this brief review is of worth, but you have to remember that it is only one part of a much bigger jigsaw. Needless to say SEO isn't a dark art or black magic it is about simple and honest workmanship, a topic which is extensive and which would take an entire book to cover properly.

SEO is a considered and calculated push to use the right content on your site to draw in the kind of visitors and potential customers that (A) you are looking for and (B) are actually going to use your services or buy your products. There is no substitute for spending time and giving every aspect of your site and pages the attention to detail they demand and require. This is certainly why it is always worth considering the option to pay a professional to look at every detail of your pages and to do the job of implementing your keywords and phrases properly.

Remember that every page is your home page and that you need to market to your potential clients as hard on the home page of your site as you do on any other.

Delamain IT offers its own range of iWeb specific SEO services. To find out more information please visit our Search Engine Optimisation services page.