MacMate (www.macmate.me) says it's solved the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) problem "for the hundreds of thousands of iWeb sites out there.

SEO, at the fundamental level, requires three things for search engines like Google and Bing to rank a website: a page title, a description and some keywords. The search engines then compare these to the content, titles, site links and external backlinks of a website in order to get a feel for what the site is about and how to rank it for various keywords and phrases.

The problem with iWeb is actually getting the SEO building blocks in place. "One of the reasons for this, apart from Apple just leaving it out, is that iWeb has a very clever, but complicated way of coding up pages," says MacMate. "Of course this is completely invisible to the user when a host-ready website is churned out and published."



The web hosting/cloud storage/email company says it's overcome this problem with some software dubbed SEO Injectors at the server level of their MacMate service. The meta-tags (title, description and keywords) for every page can be set once, then injected into the page on every visit. That means no more publishing to the desktop using tools like iWeb SEO, then uploading the site via FTP.

"We've been improving MacMate on a weekly basis since we launched in April and are readying a brand new version for release in a couple of weeks," says Gary Hall, CEO of MacMate. "It'll feature a new interface, new gallery themes, iOS app and will come in three flavors."

SEO Injectors are included as a free service with MacMate's cloud solution that combines a 10GB cloud disk, galleries, Web hosting and email in one US$99-per-year service.