iWeb's "Page Title"

Page title and heading are just suggestions for use when you are using a template. They have no real significance. More important is the name of the page in the URL and the key words in your text.
When somebody enters words into a search box and the combination exists on your web page then it will come up in a search.
Your key words have to represent what you are trying to sell and what you think people will enter into a search engine.
As far as Google etc are concerned, you must build your own navigation otherwise you won't be able to create a comprehensive sitemap and the spiders will not be able to crawl your site.

Google and other search engines actually look at page titles as one of the most important factors. In order to determine relevance, they must first try to determine what the page is about and the title is the best indication of what to expect about the content that will be found on the page. Of course, the search engines also utilize URLs (including the domains), but not quite as highly as the page title and headline (the starting text on your page).

The search engines use the titles and headlines to determine what the page should be about, but they don't trust that information. They will read the content of the page to determine the number of times the words that appear in the title, also appear in the content of the page; if they do not find it appearing frequently enough, then the page will not be ranked for those keywords.

Google also looks at word prominence, or which words appear first in the title and the start of the content on the page; for example, "About Me - John Smith" will rank under "about me" whereas, "John Smith - About Me" will rank under "john smith".

Finally, popularity will be the primary decider on how highly you will be ranked for the keywords on that page. You build popularity by increasing the number of links from other websites to yours; links from online directories are a good start. You can exchange links with other websites, but these are not as strong as one-way links -- where your site does not link back to the website that has a link to your site.

Please also take care that you have enough search engine readable content on your page, or the page will not be ranked. If your page does not have enough words, the search engines won't bother to list the page, as it doesn't contain much information to bother with. Also, pages where custom fonts have been used are not machine readable, as they are graphic images of text; these pages will never be listed. If you are unsure if the text is machine readable, you can try to select the text on the page; if you can select it to copy it, then it is machine readable.

Unfortunately, iWeb was not designed with search engines in mind; only to develop cool looking websites. If you do wish to get ranked well, then you do need to have a good page title. The amount of work to promote your site can be extensive, so you may just be better off opening an AdWords account with Google and paying to advertise.

We do have more information on search engines at http://help.meccahosting.com/search_engines/, if you want to learn more.

Cheers,

Pete Howell
Mecca Hosting - Fast, Reliable, Secure Websites

The comma in my sentence was included in the help article link, making it invalid. The link should be as follows:

http://help.meccahosting.com/search_engines/

Thanks for taking the time to explain this and for providing that useful link.
A lot of iWeb users seem to want attention from the search engines.
The application is excellent for creating websites, easily and quickly, with graphic content and colorful, artistic layouts but a lot of people don't seem to understand the importance of text, keywords and links to and from other sites.
There are ways to make an iWeb built site more search engine friendly. I don't think the iWeb design team consider this a priority or they would have made changes to the way the standard navigation is generated as this prevents a comprehensive site map being generated and gives the poor spiders no help at all!