For those of you that have purchased the iWeb SEO video from Rage Software (you can still get 15% off the purchase price with All About iWeb) this iWeb tutorial may not come as much of a surprise to you, however if you haven’t (why not? it’s full of useful iWeb SEO tips and tricks) you may want to pay attention. Regular readers of this blog may also remember my previous tutorial explaining how to get ‘header’ tags into your iWeb site, but it involved a bit of faffing about.

All that has changed with the release a few weeks ago of version 1.7.1 of the iWeb SEO Tool from Rage. Now adding ‘header’ tags to your iWeb site is as easy as putting a tick in a box!!

Why do you want header tags in your iWeb site?

Quite simply they help with your iWeb site’s SEO rankings. A search engine bot (or spider) will crawl your iWeb site looking at all of the text. It will read what keywords you put between your header tags and judge them to be more important than other keywords on your site, and because you have taken the time to put <h1> before your headers they must be really important.

The trick is not to abuse the header tag though. Do that at your peril. Each page should only have one <h1> tag and you should on no account stuff the tags with keywords. That will get you dropped like a sack of spuds.

So how do you add the tags to your iWeb site?

Open iWeb and go to the page you want to add the tags to.

Scroll up to the title of your page and, before the title add <h1>.

After the title add </h1>.

You can see in the image below that the title of this site is ‘Artist | Designer | Photographer’ and I have added the header tags around my title.

Repeat this for all your pages, save your iWeb site and then you can either publish to a folder (if you are uploading to your own host) or MobileMe.

Download and install version 1.7.1 of the iWeb SEO Tool. Once that is done open the application and open your iWeb site within it by selecting the correct method from the top left corner.

On the left hand side should appear a list of the pages within your site. You now have to simply click on the relevant pages one by one and then tick the box that tells the application to ‘Convert Header Tags in Textboxes to HTML Code’.

Don’t forget to apply the changes to each page as you go. Once done you can either upload via the built in ftp to the host of your choice, or if you elected to open an iWeb site from your iDisk you have finished.

You now have header tags in your iWeb site. Your site won’t look any different of course, but you can check by loading it a browser then right-clicking (CTRL-click) your mouse and selecting ‘view source’ form the drop-down menu. Scroll down a bit and you should see your title surrounded by the tags.

Of course if you wanted you could add a sub-title to your main title with more keywords in it only use <h2> rather than <h1> at the beginning and end of the sentence.

Have you added title tags to your iWeb site? How easy did you find this method? Leave a comment and let us know.