Google and iWeb

IMPORTANT: If you have not read my Basic HTML Editing Instructions, do that first!

Here are some more details on how to get your site listed more/better/faster:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and submit your URL.

Submit both yourdomain.com (if you have one) and http://web.mac.com/yourusername

FYI, if you use forwarding on yourdomain.com, Google will be happier/more likely to index your mac.com addresses, since that is where your actual pages and content reside. No way around this.

2. Submit your site (either URL) to http://www.iwebusersites.com

I recommend giving Will your mac.com URL - I have found through some personal research that this is THE KEY to getting iWeb/.Mac sites indexed! I have checked google stats on my many sites created in iWeb and hosted on Mac.com. The ones that I submitted as http://web.mac.com/varkgirl are indexed thoroughly, others (for example, one of my recent creations, http://www.affordabledigitalphotography.com) which I gave to Will in the format of mydomain.com instead are NOT indexed!!! (YET)

3. Get other people you know to post links to your site, and you should include your url when you post in bulletin boards/forums, etc.

The more places your links are, the more likely Google is to find you.

Again, I believe the Mac.com URL is the way to go. Again, from my Google index stats, pages on my http://www.aardvarkland.com site which I frequently post on the Apple Discussions iWeb board (specific iWeb tip pages for example) where I (or others) post the exact URL rather than my aardvarkland.com URL are indexed, other pages that have not been posted there are not.

4. Add Meta tags to your pages.

Get MassReplaceIt

http://www.hexmonkeysoftware.com

Here's a page on how to use it:

http://web.mac.com/will.englefield/iWeb/WillG4PB/MRI.html

Tell it to search for

</head>

Replace with

You can also give your pages more descriptive titles by changing what it says between <title> and </title>

5. This is a big one: Check the text on your page - perhaps it is being converted to images.

Make sure you use a web safe font, put text in text boxes, not shape boxes, and don't add effects (shadows, etc) to the text or text boxes. This way Google has something to search on your pages.

6. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

in conjunction with this

http://www.sitemapdoc.com/Default.aspx

There are instructions for doing this all over the forum if you do a search for "google sitemap" or something like that.

7. Wait patiently. It takes time!

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Please, leave a comment in my GuestBook if you are confused and need clarification, or just to let me know this has been helpful!

Or, maybe you are feeling really grateful and generous... care to buy me something off my Amazon Wishlist? Just about everything on there is intended for my classroom, so you would be making a great donation!

Go back to the main iWeb page...

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

•iWebSites - for managing multiple Domain.sites files
•MassReplaceIt - for quickly adding code post-publishing
•TextWrangler - for adding code by hand
•WebExport - export cool slideshows from iPhoto
•Statcounter - web site visitor stats
•Haloscan - blog commenting